While nearly every year brings a nominally Shakespearean teen comedy to suburban multiplexes, the influence of Milton's works on popular culture is far less obvious; indeed, even most Miltonists would be hard-pressed to come up with more than a couple of examples of recent Miltonic adaptations. As Laura Lunger Knoppers and Gregory M. Colón Semenza's Milton in Popular Culture shows, however, Milton's creations—especially Paradise Lost and even more especially Milton's Satan—have a surprising hold on the popular imagination.

With seventeen essays that consider the influence of Milton's works in some unexpected places, the editors and contributors have produced a remarkably wide-ranging collection. The volume is organized according to the genre, media, or social context of the works considered. Five essays are devoted to Milton's influence on fantasy or science-fiction literature (Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials, C. S. Lewis's Perelandra, Steven Brust's To Reign in Hell, and Margaret Hodges's picture book Comus); three on horror films (Something Wicked This Way Comes, The Devil's Advocate, and The Bride of Frankenstein); four on comedic film (The Lady Eve, Sabrina, and National Lampoon's Animal House); three on Milton and social justice (references to Milton in post-9/11 political commentary, Milton's influence on Helen Keller's social activism, and Malcolm X's reading of Paradise Lost); and a final two essays on Milton and new technologies (Simon Bigg's digital video Pandaemonium and Thomas Luxon's online Milton Reading Room). An afterword by Stanley Fish rounds out the volume.

While all of the essays present the reader with interesting new contexts in which to consider Milton's works, the quality of the contributions is decidedly uneven, and not all of the essays succeed in proving that a Miltonic allusion is actually present or intended in the pop cultural work being examined (a moment that a contributor identifies as a reworking of Paradise Lost, for example, may only be a reworking of Genesis—and surely not all references to or depictions of hell on the screen and the page are indebted to Milton in any meaningful way); in other cases, the Miltonic influence is clear, but relatively minimal, and the essay's author fails to mount a strong argument for its importance.

Other essays, however, acknowledge the sometimes problematic relationship between a given pop cultural work and the Miltonic original, and these make for some of the collection's most rewarding reading. Knoppers's “Miltonic Loneliness and Monstrous Desire from Paradise Lost to Bride of Frankenstein” argues that, while James Whale's 1935 film in some ways “seems a parody of all things Miltonic” (100), in its emphasis on the Creature's loneliness, desire for a mate, and final refusal to live without that mate, the movie is, in at least one important sense, “distinctively Miltonic” (101, 108). Another excellent essay on Milton and horror film is Ryan Netzley's examination of Taylor Hackford's The Devil's Advocate, which features Al Pacino as Satan incarnated as a lawyer named John Milton—but which otherwise contains only a single, unattributed quotation from Paradise Lost (115); with such limited, but seemingly important allusions, what does it mean to regard this film as an adaptation or interpretation of Paradise Lost?

Semenza's “Adapating Milton for Children” also does a fine job of considering the problems of adapting Milton—not merely for children, but for any popular audience. In examining Margaret Hodges's picture book Comus, and especially its curious claim that the major source for Milton's Masque was the medieval ballad Childe Rowland, Semenza argues that dehistoricizing Milton (as Hodges does by minimizing Milton's role and inventing a mythological, fairy-tale past for the story of Comus) is perhaps the only way to make his works accessible to a wider audience (80–81). Other pleasures in the collection include the differing interpretations of Milton's Masque that Catherine Gimelli Martin and Julie H. Kim trace through Samuel Taylor's play, Sabrina Fair; Billy Wilder's film adaptation, Sabrina; and Sydney Pollack's later remake; as well as Luxon's considerations of what it means to read Milton in an online rather than a print edition. Although Luxon does not believe that the experience of reading a hyperlinked edition of Paradise Lost is fundamentally different from reading a printed text, he makes a compelling case for the ways in which an online edition can make Milton's works more accessible to students and better introduce them to “research in the service of reading and interpretation” (225).

Although one could wish that the collection as a whole were as good as its best parts, there is still plenty here to inspire scholars and teachers. This book may be the first, but it seems unlikely to be the last to consider Milton's place in popular culture—and for starting that conversation, its editors and all its contributors deserve our thanks.