The present study examines the relationship of Milton's Adam and Eve, their different identities, and their different roles, and explicates the link between the nature of their relationship and the dramatic developments of the biblical story. The story is considered in the light of Milton's ethics as explicated and implicated in Paradise Lost, which are crucially different from the present-day ethics which we naturally tend to superimpose or take for granted. He makes use of two particular means of investigation. Firstly, the author provides a technical analysis of Milton's style, with an emphasis on verbal (often latinate) ambiguity and on a feature hitherto hardly described in Milton criticism, namely syntactical ambiguity, all yielding extra information. Secondly, on the basis of newly found verbal parallels between Milton's Christian epic and Vergil's Roman epic the Aeneid the author provides an analysis of the intended contrast between Milton's Adam and Eve and Vergil's Dido and Aeneas; on Milton's request, so to speak, the romance of Adam and Eve is put in the epic and Vergilian context. The author's observations on Milton's strategic use of the Aeneid as an antithetic frame of reference for his own Paradise Lost also leads to an investigation into a poem which in its turn uses Milton's Paradise Lost as an antithetic frame of reference, namely Wordsworth's Prelude.

Milton criticism often treats the poet as if he were the last of the Renaissance poets or a visionary prophet who remained misunderstood until he was read by the Romantics. At the same time, literary histories of the period often invoke a Long Eighteenth Century that reaches its climax with the French Revolution or the Reform Bill of 1832. What gets overlooked in such accounts is the rich story of Milton's relationship to his contemporaries and early eighteenth-century heirs. The essays in this collection demonstrate that some of Milton's earliest readers were more perceptive than Romantic and twentieth-century interpreters. The translations, editions, and commentaries produced by early eighteenth century men of letters emerge as the seedbed of modern criticism and the term 'neoclassical' is itself unmasked as an inadequate characterization of the literary criticism and poetry of the period—a period that could brilliantly define a Miltonic sublime, even as it supported and described all the varieties of parody and domestication found in the mock epic and the novel. These essays, which are written by a team of leading Miltonists and scholars of the Restoration and eighteenth century, cover a range of topics—from Milton's early editors and translators to his first theatrical producers; from Miltonic similes in Pope's Iliad to Miltonic echoes in Austen's Pride and Prejudice; from marriage, to slavery, to republicanism, to the heresy of Arianism. What they share in common is a conviction that the early eighteenth century understood Milton and that the Long Restoration cannot be understood without him.