What We Can Learn from Milton's Spelling

Abstract

H-iE INTRICACIES of spelling can not be unraveled in a short paper land lists of spellings can be very dull; but my study of this subject in relation to Milton has turned up most significant information. I hope here to suggest how the study of Milton's orthography corrects certain assumptions and how it tells us important things about his life and his works. When we think of Milton's spelling, we think of the raging arguments for or against reformed texts like Darbishire's or Wright's.' Since neither of these editors has undertaken a full study of the spelling, their published conclusions leave us with many orthographic problems in the offered texts. For example, we find batt'ning in Lycidas, 1. 29, with two t's and an apostrophe, which is the spelling of its i638 compositor repeated in the editions of I645 and I673, although Milton himself wrote the word with one t and no apostrophe. Milton's consistent therfore' found in the holograph Sonnet 9, line i i, for example, was generally spelled as today in I645 and thus in 1673, as well as in Darbishire and in Wright. Milton spelled most words like pierce with 'ei (none with ie''), and we find this in the manuscript of Upon the Circumcision, 1. 28, twice. But the present-day spelling is that of I 645, I 67 3, Darbishire, and Wright. Certainly the double g's of cloggs' doggs' froggs' and hoggs' in I Did but Prompt the Age were not Milton's, nor even his incompetent scribe's. But Darbishire and Wright uncritically give the I673 readings. The complete study of Milton's orthography prevents such errors as the preceding from finding their way into a reformed text, and indicates our first correction of assumptions underlying textual matters: that is, it shows us that a text published during Milton's lifetime does not necessarily represent Milton's practice. However, examples like these do not influence the oral reading of the text, and so we do not seem to learn very much from them. Yet

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