The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

Even within the context of Blake's canon, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell stands out for its combination of genres (e.g., poetry and prose, Menippean satire and cultural history) and its heterodox perspectives. Through the voice of the "Devil," Blake parodies and attacks the theology of Emanuel Swedenborg, the cosmology and ethics of Milton's Paradise Lost, and biblical history and morality as constructed by the "Angels" of the established church and state. Energy and passion are positively valorized; reason and temperance are characterized as restraints on spiritual insight and self-expression. The concluding three plates (25-27), "A Song of Liberty," announce the coming revolution.

Blake etched in relief, with a few touches of white-line work, the twenty-seven plates of The Marriage in 1790. The printing of the same year included three copies in black ink (K, plates 21-24 only, and copies L and M, plates 25-27 only). The complete copies from the first printing are A-C, H. Copies E and F were printed in 1794; large-paper copy D was produced in 1795. Only two later copies are known: G (c. 1818) and I (1827). Copies K, L, and M may have been printed as separate pamphlets. Copy G has a variant arrangement of the plates: 1-11, 15, 14, 12-13, 16-27.