Poems of Mr. John Milton, Both English and Latin, Compos'd at Several Times. Printed by his true Copies. London: Printed by Ruth Raworth for Humphrey Moseley, and are to be sold at the signe of the
Princes Arms in Paul's Churchyard, 1645.
Humphrey Moseley's royalist politics are trumpeted on the title page of the first published collection of poems by the most republican of English men of letters. That curious dynamic is but one aspect of the complicated politics of the frontispiece and title page. The portrait, the inscriptions, the provenance, and the authorization to print all make competing claims about the nature and source of political authority.
For more information, see Gary Spear, "Reading Before the Lines: Typography, Iconography, and the Author in Milton's 1645 Frontispiece," New Ways of Looking at Old Texts: Papers of the Renaissance English Text Society 1985-1991, ed. by W. Speed Hill (Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1993).
Folger Call No. M2160, copy 1. Frontispiece and title page.
