Tobias Gabel’s Paradise Reframed stakes out a vast terrain, from the negotiations and machinations surrounding restored monarchy to the religious politics of James, the Duke of York’s Catholic marriage, and the Exclusion Crisis. The book takes specific aim at John Dryden’s opera, The State of Innocence and Fall of Man (composed in 1674, first published in 1677) and its adaptations of scenes and characters from John Milton’s Paradise Lost. Dryden reframes Milton’s epic by subverting its encoded republicanism—as, for example, in the “heroic council” of Paradise Lost, book 2, which Dryden recasts as a “Parliament in Hell.” As Gabel writes, “Republicanism … is the real target of Dryden’s infernal invective…. In the ‘Senate’ of Dryden’s humanist devils, allusions to their form of political organization are tantamount to their depravity” (183).

Students of Dryden will be aware of the popularity his libretto enjoyed in the 1670s and subsequent decades, when The State of Innocence considerably outsold Paradise Lost. Concomitantly, students of Milton will know (or should learn) how Dryden’s Restoration aesthetic responded to the Miltonic blank verse, scriptural subject matter, and claims of private inspiration. The Restoration Milton is well represented here. At the least, Gabel reminds us that Milton and Dryden carved their readerships out of the same politico-religious culture and that the interpretive history of their respective works—Milton’s epic vis-à-vis Dryden’s opera—proceeded within a richly contextualized literary-cultural dialogue.

Of course, Dryden draws on more contexts than Paradise Lost. “I have concluded,” writes Gabel, “that the libretto was almost certainly written for the wedding of Mary of Modena to the Duke of York; and that its 1677 publication must be understood in the context of late-1670s parliamentary politics, whose main points of contention had in fact grown out of the ‘Modenese marriage’ project” (188). Further, the libretto came “as a ‘move’ in the heated disputes surrounding the Earl of Shaftesbury which, ultimately, resulted in the Exclusion crisis of 1678/79,” at which time Dryden “was operating in a cultural environment shaped not only by theatrical and literary trends, by the demands of the box office and the book market, but fashioned, in equal measure, by party politics as well as religious and patronal allegiances” (188). These, in nuce, are Gabel’s conclusions; how he arrives at them remains to be weighed, since the book’s claim to originality rests less in its conclusions than in its method.

Thorough in scholarship, Gabel gives full credit to those preceding him in reading Milton, the Restoration, and Dryden: in effect, he deepens and strengthens (and occasionally corrects) current criticism of Dryden’s opera and its literary-political contexts. Since Gabel grounds his historical-contextualist method in reception theory, it should not surprise that his book poses its own challenges in reading. A sampling of chapter subheadings: “A Prologue in the Puppet Theatre,” “The State of Innocence in Literary History,” “Literature and Historiography,” “Context as Method and Hypothesis,” “Restoration as Process, 1658–1679,” “The Dissolution of the Protectorate,” “The Return of Charles II,” “Religion Restored,” “War, Plague, Fire, Fear,” “The ‘Absolutism’ of King Charles II,” “England, France, and the Third Anglo-Dutch War,” “The ‘Modenese Marriage,’” “Toward Exclusion: Shaftesbury’s Fall from Grace,” “Restoration of the Theatre,” “Who Were the Readers?,” “Political Typology and Literary Royalism,” “Titles,” “Printers and Booksellers,” “Milton’s Inspired Authority,” “Dryden’s Ideal Audience,” “Milton’s Real Readers,” “Contemporary Reactions to The State of Innocence,” “Dryden’s Parliament of Hell,” “Shaftesburian Characters,” etc. These suggest an encyclopedic attempt at Dryden’s literary and politico-religious culture. No book—certainly not one of 190 pages (sans bibliography)—can cover so many topics in equal depth. The historical surveys in chapters 1–3 fall under this critique.

Still, I trust the author’s decision in incorporating these surveys and would encourage readers to read Gabel’s book in the manner of an ekphrasis: one follows the individual lines and brush strokes, moving from section to section—after which, with the last stroke applied, one steps back to view the canvas as a whole. For there is some satisfaction in viewing the complex whole, particularly as presented in Gabel’s last three chapters (6–8): giving detail to Dryden’s reframing of Milton, these are the pay-off.