ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that fundamental contradictions testify to John Milton’s desire both to repudiate and to embrace a discourse of power associated with a principle of authorial autonomy. Milton transgresses against the regulations which circumscribed polemic’s relation to prescriptive authority. Centrally concerned with prescription, Areopagitica presents for analysis various images of an author who would reform authority but who inevitably ends up partially reconstituted by it. Milton published Areopagitica in November of 1644, after a three-year period from 1641 to 1643 when Parliament’s lack of a system for control of printing effectively sanctioned unlimited publishing. Although the tract’s selective presentation and omission of licensing ordinances thus seems to argue that an author is centrally responsible for a work, other statements in Areopagitica make the extent of authorial control a much more ambiguous matter. Milton was by no means alone in his concern with public and private authority; a number of tracts precede Areopagitica in calling for the removal of licensing.
