This book-length study of Milton as a dramatist fills a longstanding gap in Milton scholarship. Combining author-contextual criticism, historicized reader-response theory, and new historicism, Timothy Burbery begins by answering common objections to the claim that the poet is a dramatist, including the putatively static natures of Comus andSamson Agonistes, Milton's egoism, and his Puritanism. Further, Burbery asserts, recent biographical evidence of Milton's consumption of drama, such as his father's trusteeship of the Blackfriars Theater, suggests that the future poet viewed commercial...