446 MODERN PHILOLOGY and erotic interpretive relativism. In an otherwise exemplary book, this makes for something of a blind spot: as long as one focuses on “representing Elizabeth,” interpretive autonomy and the power to discover ambivalence and contradiction at every turn will be taken for granted and exploited accordingly. Of course, anyone with a low threshold for contradiction should steer clear anyway of the almost pathologically oppositional and self-subverting literature of the seventeenth century. Its students have always faced the challenge of moving beyond mere description of the interminable conflict that rages within and between texts of the period, even as they have had to prove that their chosen point of controversy is much different from any of the others (Christ, Charles I, country houses, the river Thames) up for grabs under the Stuarts. More emphasis on “reading Elizabeth”—on the persistent role of certain monolithic traditions of reception—might produce less circular categories of analysis. Yet, as Watkins himself laments, these other reading traditions are next to impossible to recover, and Watkins does manage a fascinating comparative study of French and English reception. Considered, then, as a study mainly of what people wrote, Representing Elizabeth is lively, layered, and very learned, as intensely engaged with current discussions about Stuart sexual politics and theories of nostalgia as with period debates about the prerogatives of kings. And, in a crowning irony, this almost compulsively evenhanded book ultimately lists to the right. One of Watkins’s aims, he confesses late in the game, is to answer “the Humean question of why one particular autocrat, Elizabeth I, still fascinates a society committed to liberal ideas of individual rights and freedoms” (p. 183). Whether in response to prevailing scholarly winds or due to his faith in the coercive power of form, or simply because this is what she was, Watkins finally subjects himself more willingly to Elizabeth the absolutist than to Elizabeth the champion of liberal virtue. On the other hand, if the result is a study this revelatory . . . long may she live. Jayne Elizabeth Lewis University of California, Los Angeles Imperfect Sense: The Predicament of Milton’s Irony. Victoria Silver. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001. Pp. xiv+ 409. Reflecting in 1986 on the then contemporary currents in Milton studies, Stanley Fish observed a shift in the sociology of the academy— Book Reviews 447 particularly, the presence of increasing numbers of “minorities for whom the patterns of Christian thought are potentially as aesthetic as any other pattern.” 1 Fish’s academic sociology, in which Miltonists achieve a scholarly distance from the doctrinal and theological demands imposed by Milton’s thought, may indeed account for trends in Milton studies before as well as after 1986: specifically, the turn toward historiography and reception history, as well as an increasing interest in providing discursive archaeologies of Milton’s political and theological registers. When seen from this perspective, Victoria Silver’s Imperfect Sense emerges not only as a massively innovative species of Milton criticism, but as a radically personal appropriation of scholarly form as well. When Silver acknowledges in her preface that her book is “more essay than work of scholarship,” she implies an association with Michel de Montaigne (p. ix): indeed, if the figure of Raymond Sebond served as a pretext for Montaigne’s philosophical and theological meditations, then Milton, for Silver, following this precedent (or the more recent one of Walter Benjamin on Charles Baudelaire), provides the occasion for the elaboration of what she calls “a certain morality of knowledge” (p. xi). What distinguishes Silver’s work, then, from almost all of its recent predecessors is that Imperfect Sense does not merely anatomize Miltonic engagements but, rather, provides a fully engaged reading of Milton’s texts themselves, on the terms—moral, political, and theological—that, according to Silver, they themselves demand. Which is to say, just as Milton would, in Silver’s reading, avidly experiment with “set forms” as a means of reorienting the “presumptive meanings” of generic precedents (p. 201), so Imperfect Sense emerges as a highly personal scholarly appropriation—as much a work of faith (and there is no escaping this fact) as a work of literary criticism. To elaborate what is termed in the book’s subtitle “the predicament of Milton’s irony,” Silver, who fashions herself “a historian of a kind,” turns to the articulation of Milton’s cultural and intellectual contexts (p. ix). Silver’s historicism, in practice, entails a turn to reformed theology, but more particularly and primarily, to Martin Luther. In some sense, it is Luther himself, not Milton, who provides the intellectual and theological anchor of the book. Silver presents her Luther, a purveyor of what she calls early modern “Grand Theory,” through the lens of a set of critical theorists and philosophers: Ludwig Wittgenstein, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and Stanley Cavell. This approach 1. Stanley Fish, “Transmuting the Lump: Paradise Lost, 1942–1982,” in Literature and History: Theoretical Problems and Russian Case Studies, ed. Gary Saul Morson (Stanford University Press, 1986), pp. 33–56, quote on p. 55. 448 MODERN PHILOLOGY serves the more general end of Silver’s “essay,” which is not simply to outline a literary sensibility but, rather, to elaborate the contours of a contemporary theological sensibility and to prove, in what might serve as the governing motto of Imperfect Sense, that “to think religiously is to think complexly” (p. 96). For Silver, then, the stakes are not merely literary critical, or even theoretical, but soteriological. Her work, accordingly, not only describes but enacts a version of reformed theology for the postmodern academy. The central insights of Imperfect Sense all emerge from the conviction that Miltonic hermeneutics—whether displayed in theological, political, or poetic contexts—are informed by the Lutheran belief in the absolute and insurmountable incommensurability between the creator and the creature. While critics of the last decade have been emphasizing a Milton who both participates in and informs a vitalist and monist tradition, Silver’s Milton is unapologetically and decisively dualist. Indeed, Silver’s Milton is far more like Hobbes than the philosophical vitalists and monists of John Rogers’s recent study (The Matter of Revolution: Science, Poetry, and Politics in the Age of Milton [Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996]), or even their more ambiguously situated contemporaries, the Cambridge Platonists. Because creation, according to Silver, does not descend from deity in the manner of an emanation scheme and is made by “divine fiat, not metaphysical or material engendering,” there can be no claim of “continuity” with “the hidden God” (p. 232). Silver does not miss any opportunity of repeating this point throughout Imperfect Sense: for Milton, she claims, the image of the deity in this world will always “remain an incongruity that confounds both metaphysical and skeptical expectation” (p. 29). Here, for Silver, lies the centrality of Luther, whose “historic break” is with “a certain interpretive egotism and conceptual infatuation which dismiss, as an abuse of meaning, whatever does not fit its preferred model” (p. 23). Lutheran—and for Silver, Miltonic—theological knowledge forsakes the sphere of metaphysics and provides not an “axiomatic” but rather a “circumstantial account” of the “forever vexed relations with the absolute” (p. 206). Accordingly, for Silver, any claim to elicit webs of correspondences, trains of analogy, or monistic inferences represents a “failure to respect the reservedness of deity and its reflexes” and amounts, accordingly, to nothing less than a form of idolatry (pp. 41, 59). Silver’s arguments for the dualist Milton would have been far more compelling, however, had she engaged with avatars of the monistic Milton and their proof texts in the actual body of the argument, and not as she has done, in extended footnotes, which seem to have only been added by way of afterthought. One Line Short Book Reviews 449 Against the monistic assumption of identity, associated for Silver with what she calls the “accommodation of law,” lies the “accommodation of the gospel” and the “work of faith” (pp. 258, 53). Such work entails acknowledging but not overcoming the contingent expressions of knowledge, courting what Adorno calls the state of “vertigiousness” in which “the whole fabric of our assumptions can seem to fall away in the face of the absolute” (p. 98). For Silver, it is precisely by means of Adorno’s sense of vertigiousness (one of the primary ways that she glosses Miltonic irony) that habitual modes of thought are provoked into acknowledging new meanings and “innovative coherences” that complicate “our ideas of the way things are” (p. 191). The hermeneutics of De Doctrina (a text that, in Silver’s reading, is of undoubted Miltonic provenance) acknowledges the inaccessibility of what Luther called “res non apparantes” and thus entails a form of knowledge—not to mention ethics—that foregrounds “the provisionality of our inferences,” no longer “held captive to our own inflated demands for significance” (pp. 119, 24). Silver teases out the complexities of her theological hermeneutic, not only in the first two chapters of her work (on “Milton’s God” and “Milton’s Text” respectively), but in the latter chapters as well—devoted as they are to more focused readings of Milton’s works. Even in these chapters, she refines, qualifies, and complicates Lutheran and Miltonic conceptions of (among other things) Christian faith, affliction, and justice, as she works through readings of (among other texts) Job, Aeschylus, Paul, and Jeremiah. To claim that the readings of Milton are in some sense merely a by-product of her theological engagements is not to diminish her work as a literary critic but to emphasize the extent to which Silver, paradoxically, with this work on Milton establishes her credentials as a contemporary theologian of enormous authority and insight. Even the scope of Silver’s more conventionally directed literary scholarship defies any attempt at summation: though her readings of Miltonic self-representation in the Second Defense (1654) and of Miltonic representations of gender in the divorce tracts deserve mention, her reading of Paradise Lost will command the most interest among contemporary Miltonists. For not since Fish’s Surprised by Sin (London: Macmillan, 1967) has a work of Milton criticism appeared that so fundamentally changes our sense of what reading Paradise Lost actually entails. Given Silver’s emphatically dualist convictions about Milton, and her corollary insistence that religious accommodation provides only a necessary “fiction of parity,” she warns against approaching Paradise Lost as if we were somehow “in the presence of a philosophical 450 MODERN PHILOLOGY proposition—a truth claim” (pp. 49, 5). Fish, who had also assumed Miltonic dualism, also foregrounds the experience of reading Paradise Lost. Yet where for Fish human sin can be overcome as the reader’s identification with satanic values yields to a knowledge of transcendent truth, for Silver the very unknowability of the absolute leads inevitably to irony and a turn back toward the contingent. God, as Silver puts it, cannot “be found by crossing over to the other side of the distinction” (p. 206). Silver’s Cavellian celebration of the contingent and the ordinary, however, emerges in consonance with a conception of Miltonic temptation that overgoes even that elaborated by Fish. Where for the latter, the reader is simply tempted by the various manifestations of satanic sin, in Silver’s reading it is figuration itself that provides the temptation. The attribution of causes, the assertion of narrative coherence, and, of course, the presumption about the nature of metaphysical realities are themselves symptomatic of a fallen and satanic nature projecting an analogy between the creature and the creator. The very processes of theodicy themselves enact the arrogance of what Silver refers to as the “mentality of the law” that “assumes correspondences” between “seen and unseen” (p. 221). In this reading, it is not Milton, but rather the speaker of Paradise Lost, who enacts the processes of theodicy, and in eliciting such a response Milton himself criticizes “those assumptions of meaning and value” that “collapse the human with the divine” and “the evident with the real” (p. 200). Just as George Herbert’s lyrics may be said to diagnose the egotism of the speaker through dramatizing it, Milton’s epic speaker—especially in the invocatory proems of Paradise Lost—enacts the hubris of theodicy, or the desire to attribute causes where none may, in fact, be attributed. Milton’s own poem—and the Milton of Silver’s book is a poet who emphatically does not nod—is not an “exercise in religiosity,” but rather “a challenge to that very mentality” (p. 211). Silver’s readers of Milton are thus not surprised by sin, but rather surprised by the arrogance of their attributions, and their continued immersion in that “mentality of the law” that produces the “idolatrous assumptions” that the “poem is equivalent to what it appears to say” (p. 223). In her reading, the ostensible embarrassments or so-called bad poetry of Paradise Lost are in fact employed by Milton as a means to elicit but eventually frustrate our own habits of analogical and attributive thinking, to undermine “our familiar assumptions of meaning” (p. 53). The “figural vagaries, the dramatic inconsequence, the exposed artifice” of Paradise Lost do not demonstrate a “lack of skill or consciousness on the author’s part”; rather, through the “disruption of One Line Short Book Reviews 451 religious myth and literate mimesis,” Milton forces his readers back to “the criteria of meaningfulness that faith in the hidden God entails” (p. 225). The allegorical figuration of Sin and Death, as well as the notorious persona of Milton’s God in book 3, are then not species of Miltonic lapses (as Dr. Johnson and William Empson, respectively, would have them), but rather the poet’s means of forcing the reader into a repudiation of the psychological and cognitive “practices of the law” for the consciousness assumed with the acceptance of the gospel. Thus, for Silver’s reader of Paradise Lost, the “psychological and religious enslavement of the law’s magical mentality” (p. 217) will yield to the spirit of the gospel, what Silver describes, in more specifically literary terms, as the predicament imposed by Miltonic irony. That Silver’s readings of Milton are informed by what she terms the “idolatrous propensity of the law” and the virtual “paganism” of “the Jewish party” (pp. 214, 216) reveals that her violation of conventional scholarly form not only provides opportunities but entails certain risks as well. Of course, Silver bears no obligation, as a scholar of Milton, to point to the vitriolic and vulgar antisemitism of Martin Luther: only a fussy and narcissistic anachronism would insist as much. But in Imperfect Sense Silver occupies the position of much more than a literary critic: she not only elaborates Milton’s version of reformed theology but articulates and advocates a normative version of a contemporary Christianity. Her—that is Luther’s—distinction between law and gospel does much more than provide an interpretive gloss on Milton’s poetry. That is, the author who consistently invokes the deity of “the Christ” also warns against “the law’s pervasive, deleterious assumption of meaning and value” and its “atavistic, seemingly incorrigible, hold over the human mind” (p. 214). Similarly, the author, who addresses her readership in the third-person plural as a community of “believers,” also cites the Lutheran notion that “the law by its physicalism does not just invite actual violence against the site of its religion and political institution” but also reveals its “conceptual devastation” as the “Mosaic covenant is abrogated by the gospel” (pp. 139, 214). Further, Silver, who openly advocates the “evangelical” position of Lutheran theology, which “enfranchises us,” as she says, “to emulate Christ,” also elaborates (following Paul) on how Israel is “obliged by interpretation to view its own devastation and Diaspora” and to understand that the law, in fact, “comes to humiliate and condemn humanity, not redeem it” (pp. 218, 156). In Silver’s defense, such reductions about the nature of the “Jewish party” are almost always employed as a means of explaining Pauline, Lutheran, or Miltonic arguments against Jewish law; she herself praises 452 MODERN PHILOLOGY the perspective implicit in what she calls, following Gerhard von Rad, “Judaic Wisdom literature” (pp. 279–80, 326). Which is to say, Silver may avoid the impression that she advocates such unsavory—and discredited—conceptions about the nature of Jewish law and theology. In a work, however, that openly transgresses the distinction between literary criticism and theological argument, and where the energies of academic and religious engagement are mutually sustaining, her silence and apparent acceptance of Luther’s distortions about Jewish law and theology prove disappointing. For the nuance of Silver’s theological insights and the force of her reading of Milton surely attest to the success of her model of engaged scholarship, perhaps in some sense demonstrating the very limits of the ideal of scholarly objectivity (not merely by means of theoretical affirmation, but rather actual critical practice). Yet with her invocation of both the “Jewish party” and Luther’s manifold attacks on the law—and the inevitable, though probably unintended, associations with Luther’s The Jews and their Lies (1543)—the perils of her approach are revealed as well. Imperfect Sense remains nonetheless a radical innovation in scholarly form, and, as a consequence, the most significant contribution to Milton scholarship in a generation. William Kolbrener Bar Ilan University John Dryden: A Tercentenary Miscellany. Edited by Susan Green and Steven N. Zwicker. San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 2001. Pp. viii+255. This is the third collection of essays to be published marking the tercentenary of the death of John Dryden in 1700, and two more collections are at press. The present book (also published as vol. 63, nos. 1 and 2 of the Huntington Library Quarterly) is avowedly a miscellany and does not claim to provide an overview of the current state of Dryden studies or a comprehensive account of his oeuvre. There is nothing on his religious writing or his translations from Latin, and only an oblique approach to his political poetry. Surprisingly, the volume opens with four essays on his plays, perhaps reflecting the thriving state of studies of Restoration drama rather than any feeling that this is where Dryden’s central achievement lies. A rather slight piece from Gavin Foster reads the Dryden-Davenant Tempest (1670) in relation to contemporary court politics and to Samuel Pepys’s playgoing habits.