Carey’s The Essential ‘Paradise Lost’ straddles the line between adaptation and translation. To make Paradise Lost accessible to a new generation of readers who find it far too long, Carey edits the poem to about one-third the original length and inserts summaries. His project is thus analogous to adapting Shakespeare for children, which assumes that, while younger readers are incapable of understanding the complexities of Shakespeare’s language, plots, and themes, if we give them a taste, they will want to read the original later in life. But editing decisions are neither random nor neutral. As this chapter demonstrates, one of the essences of Paradise Lost is its presentation of interpretative uncertainties, but the result for much of what Carey considers ‘essential’ is to preserve the paradigm of Milton as a poet of certainty.