Four hundred years after John Milton’s birth, biographer and Oxford lecturer Beer (Bess: The Life of Lady Ralegh, Wife to Sir Walter
) presents a loving tribute, a portrait of the poet in all his humanity. Drawing on newly available archives, Beer elegantly chronicles Milton’s life from his precocious childhood (he read Greek and Latin when he was five) to his embattled support of Cromwell and his mature religious and political writings. Beer points out that Milton wasn’t a one-note writer, but excelled in producing religious pamphlets (The Reason of Church Government
), treatises on education and divorce (Areopagitica
and The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce
) and epic poetry (Paradise Lost
). Although the specifics of Milton’s three marriages are well known, Beer reveals the details of a little-discussed aspect of the poet’s life: his passionate, and perhaps homoerotic, friendship with Charles Diodati. Planting Milton firmly in his time, one of political and religious upheaval, Beer’s splendid biography portrays Milton (d. 1674) as “both a radical and a traditionalist” who drew on classical and Christian sources to contend again and again for freedom from tyranny and oppression. B&w illus. (Aug.)
