Introduction. Milton wrote Sonnets 11 and 12, probably early in 1646, as satirical responses to the widely negative reception enjoyed by his divorce tracts, The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, Tetrachordon and The Judgement of Martin Bucer. In what scans like a Petrarchan love sonnet, Milton responds with ridicule and acid sarcasm to those who attacked his treatises from the pulpit. He pokes fun at the ignorance of those who cannot even pronounce the title, let alone follow the arguments. Colasterion responds in satiric prose in much the same vein.
Milton's petty-sounding slur on Scottish names was probably meant as an insult to the Glasgow preacher, Robert Baillie, who thought Milton a worse heretic than the Brownists: "Concerning Divorces, some of them goe farre beyond any of the Brownists, not to speak of Mr Milton, who in a large Treatise hath pleaded for a full liberty for any man to put away his wife, when ever hee pleaseth, without any fault in her at all, but for any dislike or dyspathy of humour" (A Dissuasive from the Errours of the Time [London 1645]). Baillie and other Presbyterians associate Milton with radical heretics of the day. Milton's references to Sir John Cheke (1514-1557) and King Edward VI allude to what he regards as England's now lost golden age of Greek learning.
These satires, however bitter in tone, give voice to some of Milton's most cherished republican values even as it appears to despair of them every being realized in an England so full of corruption and ignorance.
Both sonnets were numbered "12" on the same sheet in the Trinity MS. Sonnet 12 ("I did but prompt the age ...") came first on this sheet of the TMS, with the following heading:
these sonnets follow ye 10. in ye printed booke
On the detraccon which followed upon my writeng certaine treatises
1 vid. ante 12
Tetrachordon. Literally, a scale of four notes; Milton used the word to title his 1645 work Tetrachordon, referrring to the four places in scripture relevant to the question of divorce (Genesis 1: 27-28, 2: 18, 23-4; Deuteronomy 24: 1-2; Matthew 5: 31-2, 19: 3-11; I Corinthians 7: 10-16).
Town. London.
Numbring good intellects. Effectively a test of a prospective reader's learning, the title will separate readers who know Greek from those who don't. This is similar to Milton's specific address to the "elegant & learned reader" in The Reason of Church-Government 2, or the "fit audience, . . . though few" of Paradise Lost 7.31.
spelling fals. Misreading or misunderstanding.
Mile-End Green. The first mile-stone on the Roman road from London beginning at Aldgate so that the phrase means "while one might walk to the town's end" (Variorum 2.2:390)
it. The word "it" has been supplied from the list of errors (Errata) published with the 1673 collection.
Gordon, Colkitto, or Macdonnel, or Galasp. Rough Scottish names that Milton uses as an allusion to the recent assimilation of the Scots in England following the ascension of the Stuarts to the throne, and the increased presence of Scottish Presbyterians. "Colkitto" appears as "Coliktto" in 1673 and has been corrected from the Errata.
Sonnet 11, line 10. The Trinty MS has "barbarous" later replaced with "rough hewn." See Fletcher, 452.
Quintilian. The followers of Quintilian believed that the introduction of foreign words into any national language was a threat to the purity of that language. His Institutiones Oratoricae is one of the foremost Latin works discussing oratory and rhetoric.
Sir John Cheek. Sir John Cheke (1514-1557) was the first professor of Greek at Cambridge and later tutored King Edward VI. In Tetrachordon, Milton writes that "Sir John Cheeke the Kings Tutor, [was] a Man at that time counted the learnedest of Englishmen."
King Edward. Milton is lamenting over the loss of understanding Greek language during King Edward VI's golden age of kingship in Britain (Flannagan 251).