ABSTRACT
One particularly avid reader of Addison's Spectator essays upon Paradise Lost was Richard Bentley, the controversial Master of Trinity College, Cambridge. In a decision that has been long debated and was much ridiculed at the time, Bentley chose to emend Paradise Lost as he did ancient texts. This approach rested on philological and “judicious” emendations made by an informed editor faced with texts corrupted by centuries of transmission. It is fitting then that one of Bentley's primary sources for his approach to an English vernacular poem was Alexander Pope's 1725–7 edition of Shakespeare, where Pope had confronted the instability of Shakespeare's textual corpus. Armed with Pope's model and Addison's Spectator essays, Bentley set out to correct Milton's poem. This chapter shows that Bentley and his editorial excesses were a natural telos of the work of Milton's earlier readers and commentators as he attempted to turn the poem into the one suggested by its earliest readers as they grappled with the political anxiety Milton and his epic provoked.
