‘Ha, ha, ha’.

More than any other line that Milton published, this burst of mocking laughter, targeting a respected Anglican bishop, in the Animadversions upon the Remonstrants Defence against Smectymnuus (1641), would make any pious Miltonist wince. As unwieldy as its title, Animadversions is not Milton's finest work. Editors have found it so insignificant and offputting that it does not appear in any collection of the selected prose. Of course, paradigm shifts can illumine value long obscured. For instance, the brutal and jagged Titus Andronicus was so reviled by critics that many assumed that Shakespeare could not have had a hand in it. (It is broadly accepted that George Peele wrote at least the first act.) Not until Eugene Waith's illuminations on the play's Ovidian poetics of trauma was its status in the Shakespeare canon confirmed. What had seemed blemishes were now part of a sophisticated, however uncouth, artistic vision. Animadversions is, as it were, Milton's Titus. Yet if we examine it within the contexts of Milton's theatricality and the theatricality of mid-seventeenth-century polemical culture, we will see that it is one of the most significant texts in his development as an author.

Animadversions is one of Milton's first prose tracts. Milton published Of Reformation in May 1641 and followed quickly with Of Prelaticall Episcopacy in June or July. Later in July, he published Animadversions, which, like his previous tracts, was printed anonymously. Likely, Milton had also written the postscript to the first publication by Smectymnuus in March. ‘Smectymnuus’ was a corporate pseudonym composed of the initials of five Presbyterian divines: Stephen Marshall, Edmund Calamy, Thomas Young, Matthew Newcomen and William Spurstow. These responded to Bishop Joseph Hall's An Humble Remonstrance to the High Court of Parliament, published in January 1641, with An Answer to a Book, Entituled An Humble Remonstrance, in March. In April, this tract was followed by Hall's Defence of the Humble Remonstrance, which, in June, was answered by the Smectymnuans in their Vindication of the Answer, shortly before the appearance of Animadversions. Milton appears to have radicalised, at least to some extent, in the late 1630s, around the time that he penned ‘Lycidas’, and he appears to have been meeting with Smectymnuans by 1640.