John Milton lived through one of the most tumultuous periods of English history, a period comprising the Civil War, the trial and execution of Charles I, the constitutional experiments of the Commonwealth and Protectorate, and the eventual Restoration of the monarchy under Charles II. Milton never took up arms in this conflict, but he contributed many pugnacious pamphlets, and he was willing to risk his life when, on the eve of the Restoration in 1660, he dared to speak out in a last desperate plea for the freedom the English people had fought so hard to attain and which they were about to throw away.
Milton had not always held radical views. He was born on 9 December 1608, in London, into a prosperous Puritan family. His father was a scrivener, a profession that combined the functions of moneylender, investment broker and notary. Milton was born in the family home in Bread Street, Cheapside. He was John and Sarah Milton’s eldest son. John Milton senior was a cultured man, a musician and a composer, so Milton the poet grew up in a house that cherished music. The love of music was to stay with him all his life: in old age, when he suffered from gout, he would play the organ and sing to relieve his pain.
The young Milton was provided with the very best education. He was taught by private tutors at home, and at some time between 1615 and 1620 his father sent him to St Paul’s School, one of the best schools in England. It abutted St Paul’s Cathedral, so the boys were likely to have heard the poet John Donne preach there after he was appointed Dean of St Paul’s in 1621. Milton learned Greek, Latin and Hebrew at school, and his private tutors gave him further instruction in these languages, as well as in French and Italian. He was admitted to Christ’s College, Cambridge, in 1625, when he was seventeen, but his university career did not start propitiously. The biographer John Aubrey (1626–97) tells us that Milton fell out with his first tutor, William Chappell, who whipped him, after which he was briefly ‘rusticated’ (suspended) from the university. Readmitted, he was assigned a new tutor, Nathaniel Tovey, and his academic career flourished. While at Cambridge, the young Milton wrote two Latin epitaphs on bishops, those stalwart pillars of the seventeenth-century establishment. Some have inferred from this that he was at home in and with the Church of England. This conclusion is lent some support by the early poem ‘II Penseroso’, which contains a warm description of Anglican worship, and by the fact that Milton, like other graduating students, had to sign a written declaration acknowledging the doctrines of the Church of England and the supremacy of the king. But we should not assume that Milton was untouched by religious or political dissent in these early years. In his Latin poem ‘Elegia Quarta’, written in about 1627 when he was not quite twenty, he sternly criticizes the Anglican Church for driving Puritan ministers into exile.
Milton’s parents had intended him to be a minister in the Anglican Church and his entire education had been a preparation for this. He had shared the same aspiration, but his disillusionment with the Church of England was such that he could not bring himself to take holy orders when he left Cambridge in 1632. Instead, he spent the next six years in scholarly retirement, living off his father, then (still at his father’s expense) he rounded out his education with a Grand Tour of Italy (1638–9). ‘He who would take Orders,’ Milton wrote in The Reason of Church Government (1642), ‘must subscribe slave’.1 Milton had most likely held reservations about the Anglican Church since his early youth, but ecclesiastical controversy had become more heated in the 1630s. Charles I ruled without Parliament between 1629 and 1640, a period that his enemies called the ‘Eleven Year Tyranny’. This was not a safe time in which to voice criticism of the Crown or the Church. William Laud, appointed Archbishop of Canterbury in 1633, introduced innovations that smacked of Catholicism to the resentful Puritans. He also used the hated Court of Star Chamber to enforce conformity. Some outspoken pamphleteers had their ears cut off for speaking ill of bishops. We should remember this when reading the anti-ecclesiastical passages in ‘Lycidas’, which was written just a few weeks after the most notorious of these mutilations – the cropping of the ears of John Bastwick, Henry Burton and William Prynne on 30 June 1637. Laud’s attempts to impose uniformity of worship precipitated the slide into civil war.
Milton had planned to cross to Sicily and Greece after his Italian tour, but the outbreak of hostilities at home caused him to abandon this plan – or so he claimed fifteen years later in his Latin Defensio Secunda (1654), written to justify the king’s execution. ‘The sad tidings of civil war from England’, he then wrote, ‘summoned me back. For I thought it base that I should travel abroad at my ease for the cultivation of my mind, while my fellow-citizens at home were fighting for liberty.’2 Milton has sometimes been mocked for the pretentiousness of this claim. Samuel Johnson (an arch-Tory who denigrated Milton as ‘an acrimonious and surly republican’) wrote in 1779: ‘Let not our veneration for Milton forbid us to look with some degree of merriment on great promises and small performance, on the man who hastens home because his countrymen are contending for their liberty, and when he reaches the scene of action, vapours away his patriotism in a private boarding-school.’ Johnson has a point. One might have expected Milton to have played a more active role on his return to England. Instead, he turned to teaching and took in a few private pupils, including his own nephews.
But he was not politically idle during these years. He entered the fray in 1641, when he threw in his lot with the Presbyterians, who were seeking extensive church reform. Milton has sometimes been criticized for voicing his opinions only when it was safe to do so, after Charles had been forced to convene the Long Parliament in November 1640. It is true that Milton’s first anti-prelatical pamphlet, Of Reformation, did not appear until May 1641, but this was the culmination of several years of intense study.
Civil war broke out in England on 22 August 1642. In May or June of that year the thirty-three-year-old Milton had travelled from London to Oxfordshire to collect a debt for his father. He returned a month later without the money, but with a wife, having married Mary Powell, the debtor’s daughter. At seventeen, she was half Milton’s age. The marriage was not happy (at least not in its beginning) and after about a month Mary asked permission to return to her father’s house for the remaining part of the summer. Milton permitted her to go, on condition that she return by Michaelmas (29 September). Meanwhile, war broke out. Mary’s family were Royalists, while Milton was ardently supportive of Parliament. This divide did not bode well for the couple’s happiness, and Mary did not return as agreed. Milton sent several letters imploring her to return, but all went unanswered. He then sent a messenger, who was rudely dismissed. In the following year Milton created a scandal by publishing his most notorious pamphlet to date, The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce. His basic argument in this work is that divorce should be permitted on grounds of incompatibility. This seems innocuous to many people today, but it created a scandal in 1643. The Presbyterians, Milton’s erstwhile allies against the bishops, were horrified and Milton soon fell out with them, never to be reconciled (though his wife eventually returned to him in 1645).
The rift between Milton and the Presbyterians grew even wider after the execution of King Charles on 30 January 1649. The Presbyterians had begun the war fighting against the king, but their aim had never been regicide. Oliver Cromwell and the more radical Parliamentarian army officers had to purge Parliament of its moderate members before the trial and execution could proceed. Milton approved of these acts, and defended them in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649), published just two weeks after the king’s death. In this tract he vilifies the Presbyterians as backsliders. Appointed Secretary for Foreign Tongues by the Council of State, he went on to defend the new regime both at home and abroad, in English and Latin, winning both fame and notoriety in his pamphlet war with the Protestant French scholar Salmasius, who had espoused the cause of the Stuart monarchy. During these years Milton’s eyesight deteriorated to the point that he became totally blind in 1652. His wife Mary died a few weeks after he lost his sight, leaving him with three daughters (one newborn) and an infant son, who died a few weeks later. In November 1656 Milton married his second wife, Katherine Woodcock, whom he dearly loved, but she died in February 1658, closely followed by her infant daughter. Most critics have thought that Milton wrote his great sonnet, ‘Methought I saw my late espousèd saint’, in response to his loss of Katherine. The sonnet describes a dream in which Milton’s wife returns to him after death. She wears a veil – presumably because her blind husband had never seen her face. Just as she is about to embrace him – and lift her veil – he awakes to blindness and disillusion: ‘I waked, she fled, and day brought back my night’ (14).
Disillusion was to torment Milton in his later years. The Restoration of the monarchy in 1660 was a particularly bitter blow: at one stroke, it shattered all of his hopes for England and undid everything he had worked for in the past twenty years. He had put politics before poetry for most of this time. So far as we know, he wrote no original poems (except for a few sonnets) between 1637, when he wrote ‘Lycidas’, and about 1658, when he began to work in earnest on Paradise Lost. He did not abandon his poetic ambitions during these years; he delayed fulfilling his vocation while he attended to what he believed were more pressing matters. On the very eve of the Restoration he was willing to risk his life (and his unfinished masterpiece) by publishing The Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth – his passionate plea to his fellow countrymen not to throw away their hard-won liberty. The plea fell on deaf ears and Milton came close to suffering a traitor’s death. Several of his friends and erstwhile colleagues were hanged, disembowelled and quartered. Even the dead were not safe: in 1661 the corpses of Oliver Cromwell and two others who had judged Charles I were exhumed from their graves and beheaded in a grisly public spectacle. It is likely that Milton alludes to these events in Samson Agonistes, when the Chorus (ostensibly referring to Old Testament heroes, but with an eye on recent English history) complains that God too often abandons his loyal servants, leaving them
to the hostile sword
Of heathen and profane, their carcasses
To dogs and fowls a prey, or else captíved:
Or to th’ unjust tribunals, under change of times,
And condemnation of the ingrateful multitude. (692–96)
Milton went into hiding while the (now Royalist) House of Commons discussed the question of which of the king’s former enemies should die. He was arrested and imprisoned, and copies of his books were burned by the public hangman. We do not know how he managed to escape with his life. He doubtless owed much to the intervention of influential friends, such as the poet Andrew Marvell (1621–78), MP for Hull and Milton’s former assistant as Latin Secretary to Cromwell’s Council of State. Milton’s blindness might also have helped to save him, for Royalist propagandists could (and did) triumphantly point to it as a sign that he had been punished by God. This argument meant that he was more useful to the Royalist cause alive than dead.
Milton married his third wife, Elizabeth Minshull, in 1663, by which time relations with his three surviving daughters (all by Mary Powell) had become strained. If these final years of Milton’s life were characterized by political disappointment and domestic unhappiness, they were also the time in which his lifelong poetical ambitions at last bore fruit. He published Paradise Lost in 1667, and Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes in 1671. A revised edition of his shorter poems (many of which had been published in an earlier edition, dated 1645) appeared in 1673. In 1674 he published the second edition of Paradise Lost. Where the original 1667 version had consisted of ten books, for this second edition Milton split the original Books VII and X into two, thus creating a twelve-book epic on the model of Virgil’s Aeneid. He died in November 1674 in his house in Bunhill Fields. His friend Cyriack Skinner relates that ‘hee dy’d in a fitt of the Gout, but with so little pain or Emotion, that the time of his expiring was not perceiv’d by those in the room’.3
Milton wrote his first great poem, ‘On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity’, in the early hours of Christmas Day 1629, when he was twenty-one. He clearly thought it a significant landmark in his poetic career, for he placed it first in both his 1645 and 1673 Poems. It is now commonly referred to as ‘the Nativity Ode’, but Milton never called it that, and the familiar title is in some ways misleading. The poem does refer to itself as a ‘humble ode’ (24), but the ensuing twenty-seven stanzas (the bulk of the poem) are designated ‘The Hymn’. Odes differ from hymns in that the former are addressed to men, the latter to gods, or God. Since Jesus is both man and God, we have as much reason to call the poem ‘the Nativity Hymn’ as ‘the Nativity Ode’. The ambiguity – ode or hymn – goes to the heart of the mystery of the Incarnation, which is a significant part of the poem’s subject.
The final third of ‘The Hymn’ describes the banishment of the pagan gods. Following a tradition dating from early Christian times, Milton identifies pagan deities with devils. Some of these (such as Moloch, with his cult of child-sacrifice) are unappealing and we may suppose that Milton was glad to see them go, but a note of regret is audible when he describes the banishment of Apollo from Delphi (176–8) or the exile of the ‘yellow-skirted fays’ from their ‘moon-loved maze’ (235–6). The sense of loss is most poignant in stanza XX:
The lonely mountains o’er,
And the resounding shore,
A voice of weeping heard, and loud lament;
From haunted spring, and dale
Edged with poplar pale,
The parting Genius is with sighing sent,
With flow’r-inwoven tresses torn
The nymphs in twilight shade of tangled thickets
mourn. (181–8)
Editors since the eighteenth century have detected in this ‘voice of weeping’ an echo of Herod’s slaughter of the innocents: ‘In Rama was there a voice heard, lamentation, and weeping’ (Matt. 2:18). Are we to infer that the banished devils are innocent? This may be going too far, but the cries of grief are incongruous in a supposedly joyful Christian hymn. The inevitable result of this incongruity is moral ambivalence.
Such ambivalence is present not only at the end of the poem; it is also found earlier, when the angels sing. Their music is so beautiful that it briefly raises the hope that nothing else is necessary to restore lost Paradise. As so often in Milton, however, hope is dashed with a ‘But’:
But wisest Fate says no,
This must not yet be so,
The babe lies yet in smiling infancy,
That on the bitter cross
Must redeem our loss. (149–53)
The question ‘Why?’ inevitably presents itself. Why should God permit suffering if he can restore lost Paradise with music? Moments like this have led some readers to wonder whether Milton had mixed feelings about Christianity and the paganism that it supplanted. Readers must decide for themselves where Milton’s deepest sympathies lie in his first great English poem. Whatever we decide, it is clear that ‘On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity’ anticipates the probing questions of Paradise Lost.
Milton’s poems often express, or at least explore, a division of loyalties. This is most evident in ‘L’Allegro’ and ‘II Penseroso’, the companion poems written early in Milton’s career, probably in the 1630s. The titles respectively mean ‘the cheerful man’ and ‘the contemplative man’. There are many exact parallels and oppositions between the two poems, beginning with the ten-line preludes in which Mirth rejects Melancholy (‘L’Allegro’, 1–10) and Melancholy rejects Mirth (‘Il Penseroso’, 1–10). Critical opinion is divided as to whether the poems are crafted so as to present two carefully balanced alternatives, neither of which prevails, or whether ‘Il Penseroso’ emerges triumphant. Much depends on whether the Melancholy rejected by ‘L’Allegro’ is the same as that welcomed by ‘Il Penseroso’. The joys hailed by ‘L’Allegro’ closely resemble the joys that ‘Il Penseroso’ calls ‘deluding’ (1), but it is less certain whether the two poems are talking about the same kind of melancholy. The melancholy rejected by ‘L’Allegro’ is that of the Greek physician Galen. Milton’s contemporary, Robert Burton (1577–1640), author of The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), had associated this kind of melancholy with madness and depression. The Melancholy of ‘Il Penseroso’, however, is that of Aristotelian medicine, which the Florentine Platonist Marsilio Ficino (1433–99) had associated with poetic and prophetic inspiration. Ficino’s melancholy would appeal to a poet of Milton’s high seriousness. ‘Il Penseroso’ enjoys two further advantages over ‘L’Allegro’: it is given more words (176 lines as opposed to 152), and it is given the last word. Milton was nevertheless a poet of the senses who in his prose tract Of Education (1644) averred that poetry should be ‘simple, sensuous and passionate’. His poems often seek to control sensuousness, but they do not reject it outright.
In A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle we see the first appearance of what will be the major theme of Milton’s mature poems – the theme of temptation. A Masque was written to celebrate the formal inauguration of John Egerton, Earl of Bridgewater, as President of Wales and the Marches. It was performed before the Earl and his guests at Ludlow Castle in Shropshire on 29 September 1634. The roles of the Lady and her two brothers were played by the Earl’s daughter Alice, aged fifteen, and her brothers John, Viscount Brackley, aged eleven, and Lord Thomas Egerton, aged nine. Henry Lawes, the children’s music tutor, composed the music for the songs and played the role of Attendant Spirit. Lawes was Milton’s friend, so it was probably he who invited Milton to write the text.
A Masque has been known since the late seventeenth century as Comus, though Milton himself did not give it that title. Both the familiar and the authentic titles are problematic. The familiar title Comus gives too central and exalted a status to the villain. But A Masque is also something of a misnomer, for the work is not a representative Stuart masque. In traditional court masques, music and spectacle predominate over plot and character. Milton’s masque places unprecedented importance on dramatic dialogue and so is perhaps better described as a pastoral drama. It nevertheless includes some traditional masque elements. Following Jonson, Milton includes an ‘anti-masque’ in the revels of Comus and his bestial followers. He also retains the processional quality of a court masque in his story of the children’s journey to Ludlow. Court masques were intended to compliment their royal or aristocratic audiences, who would often be included in the action, sometimes as the recipients of a direct eulogy, sometimes as participants in a concluding dance. The climax of Milton’s masque is the presentation of the three children to their father, who would have been conspicuously seated in the audience. The children resemble conventional aristocratic masquers in that they play idealized versions of themselves.
The story is simple, though its meaning and significance have been much debated. Comus is a pagan god invented by Milton: the son of Bacchus, god of wine, and Circe, the immortal sorceress who turns Odysseus’s men into swine in Homer’s Odyssey. Like his mother, Comus waylays unsuspecting travellers and tempts them to drink his magic liquor. The faces of those who do drink are magically transformed to those of beasts. The Lady, having become separated from her brothers in a wood, meets the disguised Comus, who offers to lead her to safety. Instead he leads her to his palace, where he throws off his disguise and offers her his cup. In a long and eloquent speech he urges the Lady to partake of the earth’s riches and (in particular) to ‘be not cozened / With that same vaunted name Virginity’ (737–8). The Lady speaks earnestly in virginity’s defence, and Comus is temporarily discomfited. The Lady’s brothers then rush in and drive Comus from the stage – but neglect to seize his wand. The Lady is left silent and immobilized on Comus’s magic chair. The Attendant Spirit then invokes Sabrina, goddess of the river Severn, who releases the Lady, though all three children remain silent when the Attendant Spirit presents them to their parents.
This story is obviously allegorical, but its significance is unclear. Just what is meant by ‘Virginity’? Some have inferred that the youthful Milton had taken a vow of lifelong sexual abstinence when he wrote the masque, but in Puritan usage ‘virginity’ could include married chastity, so it is not certain that the Lady intends to remain unmarried for her whole life. Her immobility and silence after Comus’s exit have provoked much debate. Is she frozen by Comus’s magic or her own? Freudian commentators have suggested that she is frozen by her own repressed desires, but Comus had threatened to freeze her if she did not drink (659–62) and the fact that she is frozen suggests that he has acted on his threat. The Attendant Spirit says that she is immobilized by ‘the clasping charm’ and ‘the numbing spell’ (853). The ‘clasping charm’, imposed by Comus’s chair, prevents the Lady from rising to her feet, but it does not completely immobilize her or prevent her from speaking. The more potent ‘numbing spell’ freezes the Lady like ‘a statue’ (661). Comus presumably casts ‘the numbing spell’ by waving his wand just before the brothers drive him offstage – but there is no explicit stage direction to this effect, so readers are free to imagine that the Lady is frozen by some other force. One of the key decisions a director must make in a modern stage production is whether or not to have Comus wave his wand before exiting.
A persuasive tempter, Comus has charmed many critics. He speaks some of the loveliest lines in the poem, and many have felt that he wins his argument with the Lady. Critics in the mid-twentieth century often dismissed both the Lady and Milton as nay-saying prigs. In recent years, however, the Lady has been defended by feminist commentators, some of whom have likened her to a victim of sexual assault. Comus’s temptation of the Lady is certainly different from Satan’s temptation of Eve. Unlike Eve, the Lady is not free to walk away from her tempter. It may be significant that the words ‘tempt’, ‘tempter’ and ‘temptation’ never appear in A Masque, though they are common in Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes.
‘Lycidas’, the greatest of Milton’s short poems, is a pastoral elegy, a form established in the third century bc when Theocritus composed his lament for Daphnis (Idyll 1). The most famous English examples before Milton were Edmund Spenser’s Astrophel (1595, a lament for Sir Philip Sidney) and Spenser’s November eclogue in The Shepheardes Calender (1579). ‘Lycidas’ includes many of the traditional features of pastoral elegy, such as the procession of mourners and the lament of nature, but it omits the refrain which was prominent in ancient examples of the form.
The immediate occasion of ‘Lycidas’ was the premature death of Edward King, a former classmate of Milton’s at Cambridge, who drowned in the Irish Sea on 10 August 1637. His body was never recovered. The poem was first published in a commemorative volume of Latin, Greek and English obsequies, Justa Edouardo King naufrago (1638). ‘Lycidas’ was placed last of the English poems, perhaps in recognition of its superior quality. Milton was probably not close to Edward King, whose political and religious opinions differed from his own; but ‘Lycidas’ is not only about King. Milton’s further subject is the meaning and purpose of human life when mortality can cut it short at any moment. Like Milton, King had poetic ambitions and a vocation to serve the Church. His premature death prompted Milton to reflect upon his own lofty ambitions and unfulfilled promise. What would Milton’s own life amount to if he too were cut off in his prime?
Alas! What boots it with uncessant care
To tend the homely slighted shepherd’s trade,
And strictly meditate the thankless Muse? (64–6)
The ‘shepherd’s trade’ signifies both the writing of poetry and the service of God as a clergyman. This latter sense was of course alien to pagan pastoral, but Christian poets were able to combine classical decorum with biblical metaphors of good and bad shepherds so as to turn pastoral into a vehicle for anti-ecclesiastical satire. Petrarch, Mantuan and Spenser had used pastoral eclogues in this way, and Milton does too, most notably in St Peter’s ‘digression’ excoriating false ministers in the Church of England (113–31). The Laudian censorship was still strong in 1637, so Milton had to word his criticisms carefully. The headnote in which he congratulates himself for foretelling ‘the ruin of our corrupted clergy then in their height’ was added only in 1645 after the Laudian Church had collapsed.
Milton began Paradise Lost in about 1658 and finished it in about 1663, but the poem’s roots lie deep in his youth. His lifelong ambition had been to write an epic, and he had also wanted to re-create the story of the Fall of Man. His original intent had been to write an epic on an ancient British subject, and to present the story of the Fall as a tragedy. Several brief drafts for such a tragedy, probably dating from the early 1640s, survive in a manuscript at Trinity College, Cambridge. At some later date Milton decided that the subject he had intended for a tragedy was better suited to an epic. He was ‘long choosing, and beginning late’ (IX, 26), but he eventually matched the right subject with the right genre. War, the traditional epic subject, did not suit his poetic temperament or his exalted notions of moral heroism. Paradise Lost includes some fighting (Book VI describes the War in Heaven), but its main action is very simple: two people eat an apple in a garden. This would have seemed absurd to Virgil. Even the Christian poet Torquato Tasso (1544–95) had chosen a military subject (the First Crusade) for his epic Gerusalemme Liberata (Jerusalem Delivered) (1580). Rejecting this long tradition, Milton writes a wholly new kind of epic – one that aims to redefine heroic values.
Paradise Lost is paradoxically more dramatic for not being confined to the limits of a drama. The drafts in the Trinity Manuscript follow the classic limitation to a single place and time. The epic form gave Milton a licence to cover vast tracts of space and time. Spatially, the action ranges over the whole earth, throughout the universe, and beyond our universe to Heaven, Chaos and Hell. The action extends back in time to depict events before the creation of our universe, and forward to the Final Judgement and beyond. This cosmic sweep would have been impossible in a drama. Had Milton stuck with his plan to present the Fall on stage he would have faced another insuperable obstacle. Adam and Eve could not have appeared naked. Milton would have had either to garb them in fleshcoloured robes or keep them offstage until after the Fall. The epic form allowed him to portray Adam and Eve before, during and after their Fall, and to make ‘naked majesty’ (IV, 290) a major theme of his poem. This was a bold decision and we should not take it for granted.
Milton’s decision to portray Adam and Eve before the Fall gave him great freedom but it also presented difficulties. One of these was how to present (or even imagine) a state of innocence. Many first-time readers of Paradise Lost expect innocence to be identical with inexperience. If we approach the poem with that assumption we will misread a number of key episodes. Chief among these are the newly created Eve’s attraction to her own reflection in a lake (IV, 449–91), her dream of eating the apple (V, 28–94), unfallen Adam’s passion for Eve (VIII, 521– 611), and Adam and Eve’s argument about working separately (IX, 205–384). Each of these episodes (two of which are included in the present edition) teases us with the possibility that Adam and Eve are somehow ‘fallen before the Fall’. The easy inference is either that Milton has botched his job (sinlessness being difficult to portray) or that he is unconsciously impugning God by implying that he created Adam and Eve with a fatal flaw. But easy inferences are dangerous, especially in Paradise Lost, which repeatedly challenges us to refine our first impressions. Milton’s God did not place Adam and Eve in Paradise with the intention of keeping them there for ever. They are on probation. God’s intent is that they should work their way up to Heaven by a slow process of trial. The crucial point is that Adam and Eve are free to make mistakes, and it is part of God’s design that they should grow by learning from these. The only fatal error is to eat the apple God told them not to eat. The point about such episodes as Eve’s attraction to her own reflection, therefore, is not that they lead inevitably to the Fall, but that they provide Adam and Eve with an opportunity to learn and grow.
Milton’s declared purpose in Paradise Lost is to ‘justify the ways of God to men’ (I, 26). God’s justice was a major concern for Milton, who chose for his greatest poems subjects that called God’s justice into question. We have seen an instance of this in Lycidas, with its urgent questions as to why a good God would permit his servants to suffer premature death. The question of God’s justice will recur in the tragedy Samson Agonistes, where the chorus affirm: ‘Just are the ways of God, / And justifiable to men’ (293–4). But does Milton succeed in justifying the Christian God? Many have thought that he fails, and many have thought that he was presumptuous even to try.
Milton sets himself a hard task in Paradise Lost – one that some Christians wish he had left well alone. He sets out to convince his readers that it is beautiful and just that they and all of humankind should die (and most people suffer torment in Hell for all eternity) because two people ate an apple in Mesopotamia some thousands of years ago. For Milton, the question of God’s justice is compellingly urgent, not just an academic issue of literary criticism. A sense of moral urgency also characterizes the best of Milton’s critics, whether they be Christian apologists, like C. S. Lewis, or foes of Christianity, like Percy Bysshe Shelley in the nineteenth century and William Empson in the twentieth. Empson famously quipped that ‘the reason why the poem is so good is that it makes God so bad’.4 Empson, like Shelley before him, thought Christianity a wicked religion, and its God ‘the wickedest thing yet invented by the black heart of man’ (here). If Empson is right about Christianity, Milton might deserve our gratitude for failing to justify the Christian God – even though Milton himself would not have been grateful for Empson’s backhanded praise.
Many readers have had misgivings about Milton’s depiction of Satan and God. William Blake, in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (c. 1790–93), coined the most famous and provocative aphorism about Milton’s Satan: ‘The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true poet & of the Devils party without knowing it’. Blake’s precise meaning is a matter of some dispute, but his brief comment has become a rallying call for those who suspect that Milton’s deepest sympathies in Paradise Lost lie with Satan. This suspicion is not (as critics of God’s party often claim) merely silly. Paradise Lost is, among other things, a poem about a civil war. As such, it inevitably invites us to think of the English Civil War, which occupied so much of Milton’s time and energy. The difficulty is that Milton’s declared loyalties in the poem are the opposite of what we might expect, given his politics. Milton had championed the revolutionary cause in England, applauding the new republic for having the courage to depose and execute a tyrant. In his poem he takes the side of ‘Heav’n’s awful Monarch’ (IV, 960). Readers have long wrestled with the question of why an anti-monarchist and defender of regicide would have chosen a subject that obliged him to defend monarchy. C. S. Lewis addresses, and swiftly dismisses, this question in his influential book A Preface to ‘Paradise Lost’ (1942). Arguing from the principle that ‘the goodness, happiness, and dignity of every being consists in obeying its natural superior and ruling its natural inferiors’, Lewis contends that there is no contradiction between Milton’s poem and his politics, since God is Milton’s ‘natural superior’, while Charles Stuart is not. Charles was merely playing God; God is God.5 Milton is therefore consistent in arguing that we should obey God and disobey Charles. Within its own terms, this is a satisfying answer, but it fails to engage with the sheer emotive power of Satan’s revolutionary rhetoric.
Milton’s Satan is certainly charismatic. His manly beauty and commanding presence are a surprise to readers who expect to see the familiar monstrous figure with horns and cloven feet. Milton’s Satan is a ruined Archangel, shining still, though with ‘faded splendour wan’ (IV, 870). His resplendent glory is arguably even more appealing for being partly extinguished:
he above the rest
In shape and gesture proudly eminent
Stood like a tow’r; his form had yet not lost
All her original brightness, nor appeared
Less than Archangel ruined, and th’ excess
Of glory obscured: as when the sun new ris’n
Looks through the horizontal misty air
Shorn of his beams, or from behind the moon
In dim eclipse disastrous twilight sheds
On half the nations, and with fear of change
Perplexes monarchs. (I, 589–99)
Milton’s Satan is not the Prince of Darkness but the Prince of Twilight. William Wordsworth (1770–1850) did not share the moral admiration for Satan felt by many other Romantic poets, but even he was bewitched by these lines. William Hazlitt (1778–1830) recalls that Wordsworth would read the lines ‘till he felt a certain faintness come over his mind from a sense of beauty and grandeur’.6
It is not just Satan’s physical appearance that seduces many readers. He also moves us with his finer sensibilities. The sight of his loyal followers in Hell moves him to tears, ‘Tears such as angels weep’ (I, 620). His first impulse on seeing Adam and Eve in Paradise is to love them (IV, 363), and he almost abandons his quest to destroy humankind when he is temporarily enraptured by the sight of Eve’s innocent beauty (IX, 459f.). It is possible to dismiss such moments as instances of Satanic hypocrisy, but to do that is to cheapen the poem. Satan may harden his heart, but at least he has a heart to harden. Milton’s Satan is one of the great tragic figures in English literature, and we do Milton as well as Satan an injustice if we do not acknowledge this.
Satan’s appeal does not rest solely on heroics. Some of his most probing questions occur not in his great public orations, but in the seemingly casual asides that arise unprompted from his lips, often in soliloquy. Shortly after arriving in Paradise, the disguised Satan approaches Adam and Eve in order to overhear their conversation. When he hears Adam recount the terms of the prohibition, his immediate and spontaneous response takes the reader by surprise:
all is not theirs it seems:
One fatal Tree there stands of Knowledge called,
Forbidden them to taste: knowledge forbidd’n?
Suspicious, reasonless. Why should their Lord
Envy them that? Can it be sin to know,
Can it be death? (IV, 513–18)
It would be rash to assume that Satan here has humankind’s best interests at heart. He at once goes on to express glee at the opportunity God’s prohibition gives him (‘O fair foundation laid whereon to build / Their ruin!’). But this does not remove all the ethical difficulties. Satan may be a wicked opportunist, but he is also genuinely incredulous on hearing of the prohibition. He had believed that God was low, but he had never dreamed he would sink to this. Satan’s motives are not pure, but his spontaneous response to the prohibition raises probing questions about God. It is part of the enduring value of Paradise Lost that it does not shrink from asking tough questions. ‘The sacred Milton’, wrote Shelley in his Preface to Prometheus Unbound (1819), ‘was, let it ever be remembered, a republican, and a bold inquirer into morals and religion.’7 Shelley offers a one-sided view of Paradise Lost, but he was right to see Milton as a bold inquirer.
Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes were published together in one volume in 1671. Thomas Ellwood, a friend and pupil of Milton’s in the early 1660s, claims to have played some part in the engendering of Paradise Regained. Milton lent Ellwood the completed manuscript of Paradise Lost, which Ellwood read and returned, commenting: ‘Thou hast said much here of Paradise lost; but what hast thou to say of Paradise found?’ Milton did not reply, ‘but sate some time in a Muse’. Some time later he presented Ellwood with the completed Paradise Regained, saying: ‘This is owing to you; for you put it into my head by the question you put to me at Chalfont; which before I had not thought of.’8 Milton’s nephew, Edward Phillips, confirms that Milton began Paradise Regained only after the publication of Paradise Lost. Phillips also tells us that the first readers of Paradise Regained considered it ‘much inferiour’ to Paradise Lost. Most subsequent readers have agreed with this verdict, but Milton himself ‘could not hear with patience any such thing when related to him’.9
The plot of Paradise Regained is based upon the Gospels account of Christ’s temptation in the wilderness. By resisting temptation, Jesus, the Second Adam, stands where Adam fell. Jesus’s ‘firm obedience’ (Paradise Regained, I, 4) contrasts with ‘man’s first disobedience’ (Paradise Lost, I, 1). This sounds straightforward, but the poem has provoked a wide divergence of critical opinions, even on the most basic interpretative questions. It is not clear just how (or even whether) Jesus’s withstanding of temptation regains Paradise for Adam and Eve’s descendants. Most Christians have thought the Crucifixion more important than the temptation in the wilderness, but Milton in his mature poems never portrays the Crucifixion, and barely even mentions it. Are we to conclude that he thought it unimportant? Some have made this inference, but it may be rash to do so. At the end of Paradise Regained, a chorus of hymning angels congratulates the Son of God and exhorts him to ‘begin to save mankind’ (IV, 635). The significant word ‘begin’ implies that Jesus’s mission is not yet complete. But it is not clear, in that case, why the poem is called Paradise Regained.
In presenting Jesus’s temptation, Milton combines different elements from the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. He follows Matthew in placing all of the temptations after Jesus’s forty-day fast (in Luke, the temptations themselves last forty days). But he follows Luke, not Matthew, in the order of the temptations. In Matthew, Jesus’s first temptation is to turn stones into bread, his second to cast himself down from the temple, and his third to worship Satan in exchange for the kingdoms of the world. Following Luke, Milton reverses the second and third temptations so that the temptation on the pinnacle becomes the climactic episode. Biblical commentators had long discussed the question of just what Satan was trying to accomplish by tempting Christ. One view was that he was trying to discover Christ’s true identity, and that the temptations were intended to make him acknowledge his divinity. It is possible to attribute such a motive to Satan in Paradise Regained. Satan remembers the ‘first-begot’ (I, 89) who drove him out of Heaven, but he is tortured with anxiety as to the identity and significance of this new Son of God. Jesus too is unsure of who he is – though it is possible that memory comes flooding back to him at the climax of the poem when he tells Satan on the pinnacle to ‘Tempt not the Lord thy God’ (IV, 561). Jesus’s curt imperative is a quotation from Deuteronomy 6:16 such as any pious man might utter, but it also invites the deeper meaning ‘Do not tempt me, your God’.
Jesus’s stern rejection of Athenian philosophy and poetry (IV, 286–364) has dismayed many readers, not least because Milton had devoted so much of his own life to the study of the classics. Milton has been chided for his bad literary taste in making Jesus declare that Greek literature is ‘unworthy to compare / With Sion’s songs’ (IV, 346–7). In fairness to Milton, however, we should remember that his verdict was based on a knowledge of both literatures in the original languages. Few if any literary critics can claim such knowledge today. Jesus’s rejection of Greek culture is in any case not unequivocal. Satan offers the kingdoms, and asks for Jesus’s worship, before he turns from Rome to Athens (IV, 155–69). The implication is that Athens is not in Satan’s gift in the way that Parthia and Rome are.
Samson Agonistes is usually seen as Milton’s last poem, though there is no firm evidence as to the date of composition. A closet drama modelled on Greek tragedy, it was never intended for the stage. Critics differ as to whether the prevailing spirit is Hellenic, Hebraic or Christian. It combines elements of all three. Following Greek practice, Milton limits the action to one day, the last of Samson’s life. At the beginning of the action, Samson is a broken man, blinded and imprisoned by the Philistines, and tortured with guilt at having betrayed the secret of his strength to Dalila in one fatal moment of weakness. Here Samson’s crime differs from those of most Greek tragic protagonists. Samson has not incurred divine envy by aspiring too high; he has fallen by relaxing his vigilance. This notion of transgression is Hebraic rather than Greek. The Christian elements in Milton’s tragedy are harder to recognize, and not all readers agree that they are there, but the majority view is that the drama traces Samson’s progress towards spiritual regeneration.
The word Agonistes in the title is Greek and means ‘champion’ or ‘contestant in the games’. It refers to Samson’s display of strength in Dagon’s temple and so (in the manner of such titles as Prometheus Bound or Oedipus at Colonus) indicates which episode in the hero’s life the drama will present. Edward Phillips compiled a dictionary, The New World of English Words (1658), in which he defines ‘agonize’ as ‘play the champion’. The chorus in Samson Agonistes several times refers to Samson as God’s ‘champion’ (556, 705, 1152, 1751). Agon is also a Greek term for a set-piece in a tragedy (usually a distinct scene) where two hostile characters confront each other with opposing speeches of about equal length. Samson’s confrontations with Dalila and Harapha are ‘agones’ in this sense. In Christian usage the word implied a spiritual struggle. Jesus’s ‘agony’ at Luke 22:44 is called an agonia in the Greek. The name ‘Samson’ was defined by Phillips as meaning ‘there the second time’, and this (false) etymology may have suggested Milton’s idea of a second encounter with Dalila (which is not found in Judges).
In his prefatory comment ‘Of that Sort of Dramatic Poem which is Called Tragedy’, Milton names the Greek tragedians Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides as his models. He also offers a detailed discussion of catharsis (‘purgation’), a much-disputed term that Aristotle had applied to tragedy in his Poetics. Following Italian Renaissance critics, Milton understands catharsis in terms of homoeopathic medicine (‘like cures like’). According to this view, tragedy does not (as Plato had argued) improperly feed negative passions. Rather, it cleanses and releases them by first raising them, then reducing them ‘to just measure’. The final line of Samson Agonistes – ‘And calm of mind all passion spent’ – confirms that Milton’s aim is to leave his reader in a state of peace and inner harmony.
It is a moot point whether Samson Agonistes achieves this aim. An insuperable obstacle for many readers is Samson’s final slaughter of the Philistines. The scale of the destruction is so appalling that many readers find catharsis impossible. Some have excoriated both Samson and Milton for their savagery; others have persuaded themselves that Samson is Milton’s villain rather than his hero. Several critics, including William Empson in 1961, have likened Samson to a suicidal terrorist. John Carey, writing in the Times Literary Supplement a year after the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, has gone so far as to ask whether Samson Agonistes might be ‘an incitement to terrorism’. Carey’s letter provoked a flurry of angry responses in the weeks that followed, and the debate about Samson’s destruction of the Philistines is not likely to go away any time soon. One of the most hotly debated questions is whether Samson acts in accordance with God’s will when he pulls down Dagon’s temple. Samson agrees to go to the temple only after he has received the spontaneous prompting of ‘Some rousing motions’ (1382). Do these mysterious ‘motions’ come from God or are they rooted in Samson’s own vengeful malice? The spontaneity of Samson’s ‘motions’ tells against Carey’s analogy with terrorism. As Samson exits with the Philistine officer, he senses that God has called him to perform ‘some great act’ (1389), but he does not yet have a clearly formulated plan. His is not the calculating malice of a suicide bomber.
Critics on both sides of the argument about Samson have tended to use the word ‘terrorist’ in a way that implies that terror has no place in tragedy. This is odd, since terror is one of the two emotions that Aristotle had deemed most appropriate to the genre. As Milton writes in his preface ‘On That Sort of Dramatic Poem Which is Called Tragedy’, tragedy is ‘said by Aristotle to be of power by raising pity and fear, or terror, to purge the mind of those and suchlike passions, that is to temper and reduce them to just measure with a kind of delight, stirred up by reading or seeing those passions well imitated’. One might argue that Samson Agonistes is deficient in pity or delight, but it is strange to complain that a tragedy has too much terror. Milton certainly takes pains to stir up terror in Samson Agonistes. ‘O what noise! / Mercy of Heav’n what hideous noise was that?’ cries Manoa on hearing the temple crash to the ground (1508–9). Terror is also clearly audible in the voice of the Messenger who brings news of the destruction. Since the Messenger is a Hebrew, one might expect him to express grim satisfaction (as the Chorus do), but instead he expresses horror. The Chorus have not seen the destruction. The Messenger has, but wishes he had not:
O whither shall I run, or which way fly
The sight of this so horrid spectacle
Which erst my eyes beheld and yet behold?
For dire imagination still pursues me. (1541–4)
As Carey rightly notes, the Messenger wants only to rid his mind of what he has seen.
One of the advantages of the tragic genre is that it can excite pity and terror even at the spectacle of an enemy’s ruin. This was well understood by the Greeks, who were capable of being moved by the suffering of their enemies. Euripides presented The Trojan Women just a few months after his fellow Athenians had killed or enslaved the entire population of the island of Melos in 416 bc. Milton shows something like Euripides’ magnanimity in allowing his readers to be moved by the horror of the Philistines’ destruction. A lesser poet would have offered only propaganda. Milton also follows the Greek example in allowing his ‘bad’ characters to voice strong arguments – the strongest he can give them. Milton’s Dalila, like Aeschylus’ Clytemnestra, Sophocles’ Creon, and Euripides’ Medea, speaks with passion and conviction, and she has persuaded many critics of her sincerity and even the justice of her cause. This is entirely in the spirit of Greek tragedy and is much to Milton’s credit. Readers must decide for themselves whether Samson Agonistes is successful in raising and purging pity and terror. Some might feel that Milton has more success in raising than in purging these passions, but that is an objection that can be made about many tragedies, ancient or modern. How many of the world’s great tragedies really do leave us in ‘calm of mind, all passion spent’? Some of the world’s greatest philosophers, including Aristotle, Hegel, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, have wrestled with the difficult question of how tragedy can give pleasure when the things it depicts are those we try to avoid in real life.
Milton is a poet who demands moral engagement, but readers often find it difficult to make confident moral judgements. In part, this is because the great theme of all his major poems is temptation. If this theme is to command our interest, it is both inevitable and desirable that the poems should express and create a division of loyalties. W. B. Yeats famously wrote: ‘We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.’10 John Milton in his lifetime had many quarrels with others, but it is his quarrels with himself that give his poems their enduring life and potency.