THE PRIVATE TUTORS and St Paul’s all led to one place: the University of Cambridge. John was admitted to Christ’s College at the age of sixteen early in 1625 and matriculated into the University on 9 April. Despite the narrowness and conservatism of the curriculum, which stood in sharp contrast to the cutting-edge approach to study at St Paul’s, Cambridge was a stimulating place to live and work in the mid-1620s.
The city and the University represented a microcosm of the simmering religious, political and philosophical conflicts of the time. Most notably, within and between the colleges, competing religious factions sought to establish their vision of the Church of England. Protestants who wanted simpler religious practices and more preaching zeal lined up in opposition to those who supported ritual and tradition. One of the tutors at Milton’s college, Joseph Mede, epitomised the former group. Mede was a firebrand preacher eager to apply his religious beliefs to current events, always willing to argue just how close the Second Coming of Christ was, just how active God was in the world.
There was little chance for a student at Cambridge to live the life of the recluse. Indeed there was an active blending of the worlds of University, church and town. Dons met to dispute in pubs (most famously in the sixteenth century, when Protestant reformers met in the White Horse), and shops were built right up against the church of Great St Mary’s, so that the west windows were ‘half-blinded up’ by a cobbler’s and bookbinder’s.
Alongside the intellectual disputes, Cambridge (and indeed Oxford) were renowned for a different kind of conflict, the rivalry between ‘town and gown’, between city and University. This conflict had been exacerbated by the rapid growth of Cambridge, whose population had trebled between 1560 and 1620. At the same time, the quality of housing deteriorated, and acute poverty and overcrowding ensued. Arriving in 1625, John saw a city of building work, with colleges, old and new, expanding where they could, while the poor were crowded into older houses subdivided into tenements, ‘their rudeness and straitness being only fit to harbour the poorest sort’, as one contemporary put it.1 Although the city authorities did their best, disease was rife, with a major outbreak of plague in 1625 and then again six years later. Overall, disorder and unrest were common, part of a culture of routine violent exchange, where men on both sides were quickly mobilised when group pride or boundaries of status or territory were threatened. Yet, the most serious incidents of group violence were not between ‘town and gown’ but internal to the University, students attacking fellow-students.2
Cambridge – edgy, overcrowded, full of young men ready to use fists, cudgels and swords to settle their differences – offered something special and quite different to John Milton. The University offered him a stage on which to perform – in Latin. University life was dominated by Latin, an indication not of conservatism but of the importance of the language to society at home and abroad. When John went up in 1625, Latin already dominated large areas of his life. Across Europe and into the Americas, Latin enabled international exchange, both intellectual and diplomatic. In England at large it provided the agreed language of memorial and conferred intellectual credibility on many a public occasion. Even at the end of the seventeenth century, thousands would come to hear Latin disputations in the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford, where official University ceremonies such as student graduations are still conducted in Latin to this day, and for similar reasons. Any human endeavour with an international dimension, and some without, were conducted in Latin. So argues John Hale, the scholar who has done most to bring Milton’s Latin to life, concluding that the language informed ‘history, philosophy, logic, international law, science, medicine, all the most vigorous disciplines of early-modern intellectual culture’.3 Above all, however, the experience of Latin at Cambridge was rooted in performance. The University curriculum itself may have been tedious and traditionalist in the extreme, but its mode of delivery, both in terms of the language used and the emphasis on debate, offered a superb introduction to an international world of religious, political and intellectual exchange.
At school, John had learned to read verses aloud, to recite themes, to link his learning of Latin with his mastery of rhetoric. At Cambridge this oral, performance-based education continued, if anything becoming even more central. The University’s ‘exercises’ were debates and disputations conducted in Latin. Participants had to engage in cross-examinations and thesis defences in Latin, in public and impromptu. In a move that would become typical, John used these very exercises to criticise both the system and his fellow-students. He attacks those who only seek to provoke animosity, those who are reliant on phrases from new-fangled authors, those who insist he engage in boring tasks. Yet, equally characteristically, alongside these attacks are some grand aims. Eloquent speech and noble action, argues John the proud Englishman, are the two things that ‘most enrich and adorn our country’, and so he sets out a plan of study that will enable such speech and action. Young men will consider the ancient heroes, ‘the customs of mankind’, ‘the nature of all living creatures’, ‘the secret virtues of stones and herbs’, and gaze upon the clouds, the snow, ‘the source of dew in the morning’. Above all, the mind will ‘know itself’. It is all very splendid, if slightly redolent of the kinds of clichés Shakespeare’s Polonius had doled out to his son a generation earlier.4
In these academic exercises, as throughout his schooling, John would have been judged by the quality of his Latin expression. And the fact is that John Milton was superb at Latin. His talent opened up new worlds of knowledge, and offered a connection with a wide and diverse community. European Protestants, divided by their vernacular languages, could communicate about their cause in Latin (even as they rejected it as the language of religious observance).
Mastery of the language also enabled John to write poetry. His early poems were invariably occasional – that is, composed for particular occasions; they were often Ovidian – that is, heavily influenced by the Roman erotic poet Ovid; and they were, at times, millenarian – that is, conscious of the imminence of the Apocalypse. John’s Cambridge poetry, at least at first, offers a strange and heady mixture of opportunism, urbane classicism and fervent religious zeal. His Elegia Tertia: In Obitum Praesulis Wintoniensis (Elegy III, On the Death of the Bishop of Winchester) takes one of Ovid’s erotic dream-visions of his mistress and transforms it into an ecstatic dream-vision of the recently deceased bishop:5
Ipse racemiferis dum densas vitibus umbras
Et pellucentes miror ubique locos,
Ecce mihi subito praesul Wintonius astat,
Sydereum nitido fulsit in ore iubar;
Vestis ad auratos defluxit candida talos,
Infula divinum cinxerat alba caput.
(ll. 51–6)
As I gaze all around me in wonder at the shining spaces and the thick shadows under the clustering vines, suddenly the Bishop of Winchester appears, close by me. A star-like radiance shone from his bright face, a white robe flowed down to his golden feet and his god-like head was encircled by a white band.
John’s religious zeal was of a conventional kind, an expression of a common fear that English Protestantism was dangerously threatened by a resurgent Catholic Church. In June 1625 Protestant forces had been defeated by Spanish forces at Breda in the Netherlands, another sign that reformed religion was in perilous danger. John was still in contact, through letters (in prose and in verse), with Thomas Young, ministering to his Protestant congregation in Hamburg, and, in his Elegia Quarta ad Thomam Iunium (Elegy IV to Thomas Young), imagines his verse letter making haste across the ocean to the beleaguered Young, who is surrounded by battles, blood ‘soaking into ground sown with human flesh’. John promises Young that he will ‘be kept safe beneath God’s gleaming shield’. Should this be read as a hawkish expression of solidarity between radical Protestants or a dove-like hope that Young will survive the horrific violence? What is certain is that the poem vividly invokes the conflicts raging beyond the English Channel. Moreover, this concern is present even in Elegy III, which mourns not only the Bishop of Winchester but also the Protestant soldiers killed at Breda.
Closer to home, the threat to English Protestantism was epitomised for the many by the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. Guy Fawkes’s failed attempt to blow up the Houses of Parliament at Westminster had a similar impact on the national consciousness as the attack on the World Trade Center has had on the modern United States. The anniversary of the Plot was celebrated with passion each year. John’s poems on the subject, again in Latin, link the traitor Fawkes explicitly and predictably with the threat from Catholic Rome. John makes the violent and puerile suggestion that Fawkes should blow up ‘filthy monks’ instead of innocent English Members of Parliament.6 In his longest poem on the Plot, and one which was possibly performed on a Cambridge college feast day, In Quintum Novembris (On the Fifth of November), John describes King James, the good King ruling over a happy and rich England, threatened by a fierce tyrant. With the Plot defeated, the celebrations ensue:
Compita laeta focis genialibus omnia fumant;
Turba choros iuvenilis agit: quintoque Novembris
Nulla dies toto occurrit celebratior anno.
(ll. 224–6)
There is merrymaking at every crossroads and smoke rises from the festive bonfires: the young people dance in crowds: in all the year there is no day more celebrated than the fifth of November.
Those festive bonfires were a feature of English life, and, of course, the celebration of this deliverance continues to this day in England, in a much-diluted version.
These Gunpowder poems were a public declaration of political and religious allegiance, John Milton standing up to be counted as a nationalist Protestant, vehemently opposed to Catholic threats at home and abroad. In literary terms, the longest poem in the group marked his first use (at least in terms of public occasional poetry) of the six-beat hexameter line for an entire poem. Since this was the most prestigious Latin metre, the poem signified something of a literary milestone, at least in the Latin language. These verses represent, however, only a small part of a huge undertaking. Performing in Latin constituted John’s working life for more than five years, as he passed through his late teens.
It is easy to forget how young John was during his time at Cambridge: he was clearly no longer a child, but nor was he yet a man. University life was designed to change that. In intellectual terms it seems clear that he was the equal of any of his contemporaries. But élite universities have never merely been places for intellectual inquiry: they are finishing schools for the ruling classes, and in John’s day, Cambridge was a place where one went to demonstrate, in highly public ways, one’s masculinity, to prove oneself a man. The collegiate system represented this symbolically, making every student the ‘son’ of his college tutor, who was of course his ‘father’. One’s fellow-students, it follows, were one’s ‘brothers’. It was patriarchy in miniature, and highly effective.
There was, in the words of one social historian, ‘considerable peer pressure to appear heterosexually active’. Bragging about sexual activities was deemed a sign of manhood, and students frequented ‘suspicious houses’ after curfew as a normal part of their social round, with one student boasting to a friend that ‘the sweetest sport that ever he had with Bridget Edmunds was in the chair.’7 There were, however, some brothers who did not enjoy the highly charged world, this shared culture of excess, and were thus extremely vulnerable to violent bullying. In 1622, at Trinity College, Cambridge, three men confessed that they had ‘very disorderly and at unseasonable times gone to scholars’ chambers violently to take them out of their lodging and to abuse them in their persons’.8 There are hints that John Milton, ostentatiously devoted to chastity, was one of those bullied by his peers. That there were problems for John at Cambridge, whether intellectual, political, religious or with his ‘brothers’, is revealed by his retreat back to London in the spring of 1627, forced out, ‘rusticated’, by the University authorities.9 He was eighteen, and for the moment his University life was over.
Many biographers of John Milton, whether writing in the seventeenth or the twentieth centuries, present his Cambridge years as another step on his path towards his great poems. His time at University becomes exemplary both of his precocious genius and of his independence of mind. His ‘diligent study’, his vast reading, his phenomenal talent, and ‘his virtuous and sober life’ set him out as special in one way.10 His disappointment with University life merely points up his uniqueness and precocity further. This interpretation is heavily reliant on Milton’s own, much later, assessment. In one of his earliest prose pamphlets, he would offer an angry critique of the English system. Young men were ‘sent to those places, which were intended to be the seed plots of piety and the liberal arts, but were become the nurseries of superstition, and empty speculation’.11 This says more about John Milton than it does about Cambridge University. It conveniently obscures both the huge benefits he accrued from his time there and the personal crises (which had little to do with the intellectual debates around him) that beset him at the time. Another reason for unhappiness was suggested by John’s younger brother, Christopher, who recounted many years later that Chappell, John’s college tutor, whipped him.12
Returning to the City of London and to his family, John re-entered a challenging, yet familiar, world. Ironically, there may well have been as much if not more intellectual life around St Paul’s than there had been in the whole of Cambridge. The churchyard that surrounded the cathedral was the largest open space in all the City. In one corner was Paul’s Cross, for centuries a Londoner’s meeting place, the open-air pulpit used for sermons and other forms of public speaking. In St Paul’s itself, the dean between 1621 and 1631 was none other than John Donne, known in his lifetime more for his profound, dazzling, inspirational sermons than his witty, metaphysical poetry. The hub of the London book trade lay north of old St Paul’s, the streets crammed with stationers and printers. Between Friday Street and Bread Street stood one of the best-known literary pubs in the City, haunt in the previous generation of writers such as Shakespeare, Jonson and Donne – The Mermaid. Moreover, despite the massive influx of poor migrants, urban life in London was slightly more stable than in Cambridge, in part because of the high levels of civic participation.13
The print shops, pubs and civic stability were only part of the picture, however. The City of London was also a place where life was cheap, especially for the poor. The records of one city parish note the deaths of ‘Margaret who died by the town ditch’, ‘Robert a vagrant that died in the street’ and ‘a boy that died in a hayloft at the Red Lion’.14 Everyone, not only the poor, was vulnerable to plague, which returned in 1625, killing 35,000 in London and its suburbs. Five thousand of the victims died in just one week. It was reported that so many people fled that in Westminster the streets were deserted and overgrown with grass. Old women were employed, for a pittance, to visit the houses of the dead and report back on the cause of death: the reports of these ‘searchers’ remain the only historical evidence of how people died.15
Within John’s own family, disease and death continued to cast a shadow, despite the Miltons’ relative prosperity. The early years of the marriage between Anne Milton and Edward Phillips echoed, uncannily and painfully, the experience of Anne’s mother, Sara, and father, John. The lives of John Milton’s mother and sister epitomised the harrowing connections between mortality and sexuality, even within the sanctity of marriage. Both couples endured the births and then the early deaths of their children. Anne would, for example, bury her toddler daughter, her namesake Anne, while six months pregnant with another baby, Elizabeth, who herself would die shortly after her third birthday. During the spring and summer of 1626, while in London, John may well have spent time with a little nephew, his namesake John, at a time when the toddler was learning to walk, perhaps to speak his first few words. This child John would die when he was just four, buried on 15 March 1629. Only in August 1630, seven years into the marriage, did Anne Milton Phillips give birth to a baby boy, Edward, who would survive into adulthood.
A poem – probably from the time of plague in 1625–6, if John Milton’s own dating and an internal reference to the ‘slaughtering pestilence’ is to be relied on – commemorates the death of a child, perhaps one of his sister’s children.16 Although twenty years later Milton would think the poem good enough to go into his collected works, ‘On the Death of a fair Infant dying of a Cough’ is a simplistic response to grief while at the same time standing as the brilliant poem of a highly educated and thoughtful young man, at ease with the tropes of Classical mythology and Christian consolation. The poem also demonstrates John’s fascination with the poet Edmund Spenser, author of the Protestant, nationalist epic The Faerie Queene, written a generation earlier during the 1590s. John’s admiration for the writers of his father’s generation, who of course included Shakespeare, shines through much of his writing in English during this period, and was perhaps fuelled by the presence of other near-contemporary writers such as Sir Philip Sidney on the curriculum at St Paul’s. At this stage of his career, it was the sensuous yet pithy language of Spenser and Shakespeare that inspired John. He relished Spenser’s use of archaism (‘unweeting’ and ‘whilom’ appear in ‘Fair Infant’), while, formally, John adopted a six-beat closing alexandrine line for each stanza, a technique deeply characteristic of Spenser’s poetry. Between them, Shakespeare and Spenser offered him phrases such as ‘thought to kiss / But killed alas’ (echoing Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis), and visions such as the ‘golden-winged host’ (echoing Spenser’s ‘bright Cherubins’ with ‘golden wings’ in his ‘Hymn of Heavenly Beauty’).
Yet for all the beauty of the language, John ended by instructing the mother of the dead child, perhaps his own sister, to ‘cease to lament’ what he called her ‘false imagined loss’:
Then thou the mother of so sweet a child
Her false imagined loss cease to lament,
And wisely learn to curb thy sorrows wild;
Think what a present thou to God has sent,
And render him with patience what he lent;
This if thou do he will an offspring give,
That till the world’s last end shall make thy name to live.
(ll. 71–7)
When John lost those whom he loved in future years, he would find it difficult to carry out these instructions for himself.
A number of other poems from this period consider the subject of death and employ a similar language. Whether commemorating the University beadle or the aforementioned Bishop of Winchester (the illustrious Lancelot Andrewes), John occasionally resorted to a rather stilted emotionalism, writing, scarcely credibly, that on hearing the news of Andrewes’s death, ‘I burst into tears.’17 This level of interest in the dead might seem strange in a young man of seventeen or eighteen but was rooted in the practice of poetry at Cambridge, and indeed in society in general. When important figures died at the University, funeral pieces were pinned on the hearse-cloth of the bier as it lay in the University Church of Great St Mary’s, and then, if the author was lucky, these were collected and circulated in manuscript. Perhaps John, aspiring poet, had this very public venue in mind. John Hale certainly thinks that Milton was making an effort, through his Latin, to get a reputation.18
If Cambridge came to represent, in poetry at least, a nexus of power and death, London came to represent, again in poetry, a very different aspect of John’s life, and one which he claimed to prefer. John chose to write of London in the form of elegy, a particular kind of Latin poem made up of so-called ‘elegiac couplets’, alternating hexameter and pentameter, six- and five-beat, lines. Much used by the Roman poets Ovid and Catullus for witty, even obscene, pieces, elegy did not need, and rarely had, much connection with themes of death or memorial.19 Before considering the delights of London, however, Cambridge needed to be dismissed, as it is in a poem addressed to John’s friend Charles Diodati, which insists that John has ‘no concern’ with, and ‘no nostalgia’ for, Cambridge, no regrets about escaping from the ‘threats of a rough tutor’ and ‘other indignities which my spirit cannot endure’. (The mention of the rough tutor does suggest that there was some truth in Christopher Milton’s account of his brother’s beatings.)
This poem, Elegia Prima ad Carolum Diodatum (Elegy I to Charles Diodati), packed with allusions to Ovid and Catullus, goes on to describe London life: ‘For here I can devote my leisure hours to the mild Muses: here books, which are my life, quite carry me away. When I am tired, the pageantry of the rounded theatre attracts me, and the play’s babbling speeches claim my applause.’ (II. 25–8) London, symbolised by the Thames, and celebrated as the place of John’s birth, is infinitely preferable to Cambridge, with its ‘bare fields which offer no gentle shades’.
This celebration of London living is self-consciously modern on John’s part. He allies himself with new ideas of civilisation, dismissing, implicitly, the traditional ideal of the lord or the country gentleman, and celebrating a new concept of an urban élite. In the country, hospitality was the crucial indicator of gentility. In the city, it was wit, and the recognition of ‘virtue of the mind’.20 To an aspiring middle-class young man such as John Milton, unable to access the traditional privileges of a country estate, there was much to be said for an urban culture that valued wit so highly.
John’s aspirations are hinted at when he represents himself as a ‘worshipper of Phoebus’. Typically, this is a heavily loaded allusion. Phoebus is Apollo, the most popular of all the Greek gods, a god who presided over many aspects of life: prophecy and punishment, music, poetry and dance, pastoral life and archery, to name but a few. Above all, however, Apollo was the patron of poets and leader of the Muses. The poem suggests that it was easier to be a worshipper of all these things, easier to live the complete, active life, in London than in Cambridge.
Above all, though, London was fun and it was sexy, as the numerous invocations of the Roman erotic poet of the city, Ovid, make clear. John not only mentions his visits to the ‘rounded theatre’ (‘Excipit hinc fessum sinuosi pompa theatri’) in Elegy I but takes time to outline some plots from plays he has seen, including that old standby of the young girl coming of (sexual) age: ‘ … often, too, there is a young girl who is surprised by a warmth of feeling she never felt before, and falls in love without knowing what love is.’ In an Ovidian form, the elegy, Milton recaps an Ovidian plot (straight from Ovid’s ‘Salmacis and Hermaph-roditus’ in his Metamorphoses) while casting himself as an Ovid-like figure, suffering exile from Cambridge as Ovid did from Rome under Augustus.
The theme of urban eroticism continues. John says he likes the shady places (not to be found in Cambridge, of course) outside the city walls, because there ‘you can often see parties of young girls walking by – stars which breathe forth seductive flames.’ The climax of all this praise is the explicit connection made between the beauty of ‘British girls’ (as he says, ‘ … be content, foreign woman, to take second place!’) and that of London, ‘a city built by Trojan settlers, a city whose towery head can be seen for miles’.
The poem has a twist, however. John himself, as represented in this verse letter, is not seduced by those beautiful women breathing out seductive fires, and by implication, he is not seduced by London. The threat of the women (and of the city?) is as ever embedded in an arcane Classical reference:
Ast ego, dum pueri sinit indulgentia caeci,
Moenia quam subito linquere fausta paro;
Et vitare procul malefidae infamia Circes
Atria, divini Molyos usus ope.
Stat quoque iuncosas Cami remeare paludes,
Atque iterum raucae murmur adire Scholae.
(ll. 85–90)
For my part I intend to quit this pampered town as quickly as possible, while the blind boy’s indulgence permits, and, with the help of divine moly, to leave far behind the infamous halls of faithless Circe. I am to return again to the Cam’s reedy marshes and face the uproar of the noisy scholars again.21
What was the significance of John’s emphasis on his own restraint, his refusal to be contaminated by the constant availability of sex in the city? In part the answer lies in his age and gender. He was still in the years of dangerous heat, and any young man’s struggle towards manhood was defined by his ability to achieve ‘bodily equilibrium’. Balance was the ideal, a life of ‘discretion, control, and containment’.22 This insistence on balance and control was rooted in ideas about men and women’s bodies. Women and men were viewed as closely related in physiology. Sadly for women, their bodies were imperfect versions of the male, with the genitals inverted inside the woman’s body. This imperfection was exacerbated by the balance of the four humours within male and female bodies. Medical theory held that a woman’s humoural balance was colder and moister than a man’s, and it was this that made women naturally less rational and strong.
Since it was accepted that every person had male and female attributes, it was absolutely imperative to make sure that boys grew into proper men, suppressing or expelling any female attributes in childhood. In John Milton’s case there appears to have been a ruthless determination to keep any female, anywhere, at a distance, rather than merely eradicating any feminine attributes within himself. In doing so, he was only taking his society’s ideas to their logical extreme. Elite education and upbringing were primarily designed to train boys and girls for their future gender roles. For boys, this meant being taken away from effeminising mothers, while school and University imposed a curriculum and regime upon boys that demanded self-control and discipline, and involved a process of physical and emotional hardening. The aim was to produce men with the qualities suited to family and social leadership. The emphasis on performance and public speaking at Cambridge was yet another aspect of the same dynamic. Throughout their education, young men would learn voice production, articulation, vocabulary, forms and formulae of verbal and epistolary deference, and general principles of conversation.23 Writers had stressed, and continued to stress, that speech should be in a ‘voice, not soft, weak, piping, womanish, but audible, strong and manlike’.24 A good style was muscular and manly, not inclined to effeminacy and verbosity.25 Young men learned how to speak in order to be civilised, to contribute to society: women and children learned to be silent. Men also learned languages denied to most women, another fundamental way of patrolling the boundaries between the sexes. In this context, John’s insistence on his own chastity becomes a somewhat paradoxical display of his own adult manhood.
John Milton’s father was, during these years, doing what he could to make his son a man. On top of paying his son’s fees at university (£50 a year), he made sure that young John was initiated into the Milton family business. Documents from the summer of 1627, when John was eighteen, show him signing papers with his father; purchasing a property in St Martin-in-the-Fields with his father; and lending money to a gentleman-farmer in Oxfordshire, one Richard Powell. This last initiative was familiar territory for John Milton Sr, who had built up his business in part through the lending of money. The loan to Richard Powell of £500, with a return of yearly interest of £24, was standard practice, but in this case, the scrivener made over the income from the loan to his son.
At Cambridge, immersed in a culture of Latin performance, John could prove himself in one way. In London, immersed in urban life, whether financial, cultural or intellectual, he could begin to enter adult worlds in his own right. During his late teens, therefore, Cambridge with London made a man of him but perhaps not quite the man that his traditional biographers have represented.
For there was another aspect of John’s life at this time that has not often been fully acknowledged: his intimacy with Charles Diodati. It is to Charles that John writes, in his Latin Elegy I, of his joy that ‘at last, dear friend, your letter has reached me,’ of his happiness that the letter shows ‘a heart that loves me and a head so true’. It is Charles whom he compliments for being ‘a charming companion’.
Once alerted to the strength of John’s feeling for Charles, it is tempting to re-interpret other writings. There are perhaps hints of the intimacy between the two men in the ways in which Elegy I dwells on the erotics of urban living. John may write that he prefers the shady places outside the city walls, because that is where the young girls go, but he then compares the girls’ ‘enticing cheeks’ to the ‘flush of the hyacinth’ and ‘the blushing red of your flower, Adonis’ (‘Pellacesque genas, ad quas hyacinthina sordet / Purpura, et ipse tui floris, Adoni, rubor’ [ll.61–2]). In a poem of heterosexual voyeurism, Milton incorporates an image of beautiful, doomed male youth: Adonis, the same Adonis who rejected the goddess of love, Venus, in Shakespeare’s dramatic poem, Venus and Adonis. The ‘you’ addressed is on the surface at least Adonis, but in a poem addressed overall to Charles Diodati, on one level Adonis becomes Charles. Perhaps the poem’s closing rejection of heterosexual sex in the city can be read as clearing a space for an allusion to love between men.
In one sense this is no surprise. In Milton’s era, it was utterly normal for a man to reject the world of women (those imperfect men) and, instead, celebrate friendships with men. To distance oneself from women, even to be repelled by sexual acts between men and women, was not an expression of what has, since the late nineteenth century, been labelled homosexuality but instead a cornerstone of conventional and all-pervasive patriarchal thinking. Marriage did not represent the primary emotional bond in a man’s life, although it was in slow transition towards such a status. Instead, there were numerous emotional bonds that existed and thrived outside of marriage for men (and indeed for women). Friendships with other men were thus central to men’s emotional lives, and these friendships were often expressed using a language of love.
John’s verse letter to his old tutor, Thomas Young, which describes with such vivid imagination the horrors of war, also, for example, contains expressions of intense feeling. Significantly, perhaps, the verse letter draws attention to the writer’s presence in London (‘in the midst of town distractions’) and his desire to write more freely (John wants to let out ‘an Asiatic exuberance of words’). Thomas is addressed as a father (‘how much as a Father I regard you’), he is imagined as a Socrates to John’s Alcibiades (with connotations of an erotically charged teacher-pupil relationship such as that between the Greek philosopher and his young male pupil) and, more powerfully still, as ‘Dearer to me, that man, than half my soul; / I live bereft of half myself, not whole.’ (ll. 19–20) It is difficult to assess what these expressions of emotion, and in particular love, mean. One man would write that he loved his court patron, another would write that he loved his cousin, yet another would write that he loved his fellow-soldier in arms. Equally, other terms used to describe loved ones are not always transparent in their meaning. The term brother could indicate, for example, a blood relation, a religious affiliation, erotic affection or indeed all three.
The relationship between John and Charles most obviously fell within a special category of friendship between men, referred to in those times as ‘entire’ or ‘perfect’. Based on ‘entire constancy’, truthfulness and loyalty, this relationship stood at the pinnacle of models of friendship. Expressed ‘in terms of love, the commitment and intensity of such friendships was likened to marriage and often compared favourably to it’.26 Indeed, the tension between these friendships and the marital bond was a crucial one at this time, explored by Shakespeare in plays such as The Merchant of Venice, when Antonio and Bassanio’s ‘entire friendship’ is tested almost to destruction by the latter’s wooing of a woman, Portia.
Elegy I, addressed to Charles Diodati and written when John was in his late teens, was only one of the earliest expressions of the special bond between the two men, a bond that continued over the coming years in different forms, and with different levels of enthusiasm. It is possible to glimpse its nature from time to time, but the friendship is shrouded in complicated ways, and often by John. It is when the relationship ends that the shroud lifts for a moment, only to be swiftly replaced by Milton himself.