Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/09/20/scholar-finds-john-miltons-c.html
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The 12 year old boy in me can’t help but giggle at that first line in the photo:
“All the inflections that the Sunne fuckes up”
yes - i know - it’s how they used to write lower case S in the olde days - but still - hee hee
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Milton the second rate among the two? Whoa now.
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Total dick move, John.
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Enough material for a couple dozen lengthy papers for the scholarly journals, no doubt, plus a few more arguing about why all the other ones are wrong. And of course it’s a convenient excuse to re-stage everything with posters emblazoned with “Milton’s Shakespeare”.
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“Scott-Warren, Bourne and experts cautioned against the idea that Milton saw himself as a superior writer entitled to edit Shakespeare.”
Milton definitely saw himself as superior to Shakespeare. I remember listening to my professor lecture on Milton’s elegy for Shakespeare as a subtle takedown of his legacy.
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In every age, every artist and writer follows the ancient rule of intellectual property: if you can file off the serial numbers, it’s yours.
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Whether or not he saw himself as “superior” is irrelevant. He certainly considered himself qualified. But who with a brain doesn’t? Who with a truly functional mind has never read something without thinking there were things the author missed, or could have stated better, or should or shouldn’t have done? The fact he did markups of Shakespeare’s work proves nothing except two facts: he was intelligent and he knew he was intelligent.
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Whatever happened to the theory that Shakespeare was a pseudonym for some other famous writer? Maybe Milton was actually marking up his own earlier manuscript…
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Hey! Whatever makes paeste of your yolkes. 
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This is in my neighborhood. We also have a Lunar Excursion Module.
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One of the best parts about Milton’s notes is that he keeps on suggesting corrections and improvements to Shakespeare.
[we’ll allow it for Milton]
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Milton was also just being hella dorky, as sixteenth- and seventeenth-century readers were wont to be with their books. Look at the illustration, which notes that Shakespeare’s Setebos (the god of Caliban’s mother Sycorax in The Tempest) derives from Purchas’s Pilgrims, which, notwithstanding Milton’s immense erudition, is a pretty damn good catch, notes and other explanatory apparatuses being nonexistent in the period.
An issue of the Transactions of the Bibliographical Society from 1898 notes that this is likely “the earliest experiments in literary illustration of Shakespeare’s work,” i.e., the very first attempt at source-study for the Bard. And Milton nailed it! Pretty cool discovery indeed.
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I’m still freaking out about this news. How many more things like this remain to be discovered? Someone should make a distributed search app, showing people random pairings of handwriting from archives, to see if they look similar.
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Milton was a child when Shakespeare’s early works were published.
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Not sure how thats relevant, but I wish my neighborhood had one too.
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I loved this show. And I thought that Ben Elton and multicams were both things that I’d never enjoy again.
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Is anyone surprised? He rewrote God (Paradise Lost)
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Oh. Well, he was a prodigy, right? 
