Milton, Shakespeare, and Animal House

“He saw Nature, as Dryden expresses it, ‘through the spectacles of books;’ and on most occasions calls learning to his assistance.”
Samuel Johnson, Life of Milton

In a letter to the Princeton Alumni Weekly, Terry Vance ’77 quoted Samuel Johnson twice, once to bury Milton and once to praise Shakespeare, without noticing that the two passages form a single ambush. Johnson borrowed Dryden’s compliment to the Shakespeare who “needed not the spectacles of books,” then turned it against Milton. The bookish poet stands caught in the act. Claire Bourne and Jason Scott-Warren have identified Milton as the annotator of a First Folio at the Free Library of Philadelphia, where he collated Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet against quarto editions and traced the gravedigger’s song to Tottel’s miscellany nearly a century before Lewis Theobald. Johnson grumbled that Shakespeare’s editors had added little to his power of pleasing; among the earliest of them was the very poet Johnson set against Shakespeare, spectacles and all. None of this rescues Paradise Lost from Johnson’s complaint about its want of human interest; it shows only that the two halves of his antithesis were on reading terms. Those who “desert our master, and seek for companions” should know that the master was busy annotating the companion.

Mr. Vance’s source study for Bluto is sound, and the Folio completes it. Milton bracketed passages in the choruses of Henry V, but if his habits in Henry IV are any guide, he left the tavern scenes nearly untouched and the pot of ale to Bluto. Pledges should read on: the Boy who wishes for “a pot of ale and safety” is posted to guard the luggage at Agincourt, where Gower reports “there’s not a boy left alive.” Johnson would call that instruction; Faber College would call it a road trip.

Jeff Nelligan’s mock-scholarly When the Germans Bombed Pearl Harbor: Animal House in Western Intellectual Thought has meanwhile inducted Animal House into the canon. Where popular culture has taken up Milton at all, it has joined the Devil’s party, though Paul Stevens finds much of Shakespeare’s Richard III in Milton’s Satan.

Mr. Vance fears that until Milton is remade in popular culture, he “will not soon regain his popular standing.” I take counsel from Bluto. Was it over when Eve ate the fruit? The archangel Michael spent two books explaining that it was not.

“Don’t write this down, but I find Milton probably as boring as you find Milton. Mrs. Milton found him boring, too.”
Professor Dave Jennings (Donald Sutherland), National Lampoon’s Animal House