A Preface to Paradise Lost

Very good

This is a short review, with a longer technical note, of the Kindle edition of "A Preface to Paradise Lost" published by HarperOne.Unfortunately, "A Preface to Paradise Lost" has not been available in Kindle in a good edition: there have been several scans of dubious legitimacy, and poor quality, made from marked-up copies, instead. The original edition was in rather small print, with narrow page margins, presumably as a result of World War II paper shortages, and direct transfers came out rather messy.I found this very annoying, as "A Preface to Paradise Lost" is my favorite book on Milton as an epic poet, and I no longer have my much-marked-up paperback copy.It is an attempt, which I think is largely successful, to explain to the modern reader what Milton thought he was doing, and why "Paradise Lost" came out the way it is. And not the way it would have been written in the twentieth century, for modern readers. (There are critics who seem to think that it should have been, and disapprove of it, and Milton, accordingly.)If it gets you to read Milton, though, an annotated edition, with glosses on unfamiliar words and meanings, would be a very good idea. It is still a seventeenth-century book in seventeenth-century English: just late enough that Shakespeare was a "classic" for Milton, but in places more similar to his plays than to anything in English from perhaps the mid-eighteenth-century on.Lewis starts with describing for the modern reader Milton's models for a well-conducted epic, mainly Virgil's "Aeneid," which Lewis classifies as "Secondary Epic." It is contrasted with "Primary Epic," represented by the "Iliad" and "Beowulf."The latter is offered as a point of comparison, not influence, as it was completely unknown to Milton, because the unique medieval manuscript had not been discovered and published. (Although Milton actually knew a little Old English prose, he was demonstrably baffled by its verse. He failed to recognize "The Battle of Brunanburh" in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle as a poem, and complained that it didn't make much sense). Lewis evaluates some "modern" schools of criticism (as of about 1940), and their (ir)relevance to understanding Milton, and, with sources of confusion disposed of, gets down to what Milton wrote.For those who want Lewis' enlightening comments on Milton's longer epic (as the title indicates, "Paradise Regained" is not covered), the HarperOne Kindle version is very welcome, although rather expensive for a short book. Production costs may have been higher than normal: but something was skimped in producing the print and Kindle editions, anyway.(What follows is my technical note.)While I haven't seen the print form, the digital version, at least, does have a problem, and maybe more than one. It may be the the result of poor proofreading and copying of an OCR by someone not sufficiently acquainted with the history of English spelling.In Lewis's discussion of what he calls "Primary Epic" a small amount of Old English (Anglo-Saxon) is quoted, all words and phrases actually occurring in "Beowulf."Unfortunately, many of the words contain an obsolete letter, which I'm here describing as well as printing, in case your browser doesn't support the Unicode version. The letter is "thorn," which in print looks rather like lower-case 'b' and 'p' superimposed -- þ -- and represents the sound(s) of "th." It was still in use in late Middle English, and even lasted into the eighteenth century in a form that looks like a superscript 'y,' with which it is often confused by unwary readers and typesetters.(There is another way of writing 'th' in Old English, written with a letter 'd' with a crossmark -- ð -- so it looks something like a cursive small 't' superimposed on a cursive 'd." It is known as 'eth.' Lewis spared the typesetter additional labor by using "thorn" exclusively.)In this Kindle edition, "thorn" þ is uniformly replaced by the letter 'p,' which of course makes nonsense out of every word in which it appears. For example, soþ, the ancestor of "sooth," meaning true, as in soothsayer, appears as "sop." "Guþdeoþ," "battle-death" appears as "gupdeop," and so on. (Confusingly, "deop" is an actual Old English word, meaning "deep," and is actually found in "Beowulf" -- I had to look it up to make sure the second 'p' was really an error.)I probably would have noticed this anyway, but I re-read parts of "Beowulf" in Old English fairly recently, as part of a translation-based group read on Goodreads. and it was immediately evident that something had gone wrong.Fortunately, the problematic letter does not appear in Lewis' quotation from "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" at the head of Chapter Three.I have yet to start on verifying the Latin quoted from the "Aeneid." Nothing leaped out as wrong, but it has been a good many years since I read Virgil in Latin, and I wouldn't expect.And I won't even look closely at the Homeric Greek......Actual old-spelling quotations from Milton seem to have come through without noticeable problems. For example, the verb "beest," in "If thou beest he -- but O how fall'n," is not hyper-corrected to either "best" or "beast," so the reader probably won't have to check a copy of "Paradise Lost" just for the spellings.