Editing Milton: The Case Against Modernisation

Abstract

‘You know my method. It is founded upon the observance of trifles.’ (Sherlock Holmes, ‘The Boscombe Valley Mystery’)1 When Eve in Paradise Lost returns to Adam after eating the forbidden fruit, she tells her first lie, ‘Thee I have misst’ (IX.857).2 In truth, Eve has been too busy thinking about herself to yearn for Adam's company. Having ‘Greedily … ingorg'd without restraint’, she begins to worship the tree—‘Sovran, vertuous, precious’—before her thoughts turn to Adam (IX.791, 795). Then she does not long to be with him but instead worries about revealing her newfound knowledge: ‘Shall I to him make known/As yet my change?’ (IX.817–18). Eve's sibilant response in this passage, ‘Thee I have misst’, momentarily echoes the serpent's seductive hiss and helps to dramatise her fall: just as she begins to act like the serpent, she also begins to sound like him. Readers of both the first and second editions of Paradise Lost might have also noticed that the archaic spelling ‘misst’ enhances this subtle resemblance; it punningly associates Eve with the rank, ‘rising Mist’ that Satan uses to re-enter Paradise (IX.75). While the specific form ‘misst’ could merely reflect the vagaries of seventeenth-century orthography, the past tense of ‘miss’ is spelled ‘miss'd’ (VI.499) and ‘missd’ (XI.15) in all other places in both the first and second editions of the epic, and all the other uses of ‘mist’ in book IX specifically describe Satan: he later appears ‘wrapt in mist’ (158) and resembles a ‘black mist low creeping’ (180).3

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