Margaret J. Arnold
Department of English
University of Kansas
Lawrence, KS 66045
mjarnold@ku.edu


"Home and Exile in Milton’s Samson and the Renaissance Euripides"

This study investigates two related concerns of Milton’s later life: the description of "home" in Samson Agonistes and his continued dedication to educating his countrymen in suiting the classical and pagan past to an inner peace associated with a "home where all is well with one" (Works, 12,114-15). It places Milton’s final drama alongside Euripides’ Phoenician Women, whose context in the editions available for his study and teaching spoke of conflicts over the same piece of land and the images in memory not only of the pains of exile but of its positive uses. Euripides stays in a reader’s mind because his dramas so often touch exile and the price of civil conflict. The paper develops three major issues related to the loss of one’s home. The first emphasizes the physical and social discomfort the displaced person experiences, banned from speaking freely and dependent on others for sustenance. Polyneices’ laments protest literal discomfort and the "injustice" of separation from Thebes. Samson’s real physical discomfort, on the other hand, yields to his sense that he has lost his youthful promptings from God. His painful memories and his longing for restoration to a homeland center less on a place than on a relationship in which he sensed God’s closeness. A second consideration for finding a new homeland in exile leads the editors to Plutarch’s criticism of Polyneices for his use of exile to assemble an army against his own native city. Both Milton and his hero serve God in word and deed after their political power is lost, Milton in poetry and prose, and Samson in repudiating other kinds of "homes" offered to him. A final issue of returning home is that other people depend on the choices a powerful figure makes. Each of Oedipus’ sons claims the right to rule Thebes, overriding proposals which would accommodate both of them. While Samson’s Gaza will never resemble the polity Dalila defends, Samson leaves the future open to his countrymen. Milton’s final work, set alongside a classical drama of irreparable loss, educates the reader. Home is not geographical, and one's place in it is not guaranteed. Yet by remembering and by loyally serving a homeland of the mind and spirit, a reader leaves Milton’s fictive survivors with new insights into ways of transcending defeat.

Ittamar J Avin
Department of English
University of Natal
Durban 4041
South Africa
avini@nu.ac.za

"’BLISS’, ‘DELIGHT’, AND ‘PLEASURE’ IN PARADISE LOST"

The Paper looks at three hierarchically-ordered keywords - ‘bliss’, ‘delight’, and ‘pleasure’ - in PARADISE LOST. The hypothesis to be defended is that Milton distinguishes carefully among these terms, referring them selectively to three distinct organizational realms. Thus ‘bliss’ is selectively referred to Heaven (or to the earthly paradise viewed as a simulacrum thereof), ‘delight’ to the earthly paradise and the prelapsarian condition it nourishes, ‘pleasure’ (in its favourable sense) to much the same categories as ‘delight’ and, in its unfavourable sense, to prelapsarian sensations and to fallen existence. Where apparent exceptions occur, they invariably represent deliberate departures from the norm calculated to achieve special and/or shock effects. A few examples: Heaven is the "seat of bliss" (VI 273) because it is the dwelling-place of the Source of bliss. Accordingly, to be within God’s circuit is to be in bliss: "...the Father infinite,/ By whom in bliss embosomed sat the Son..." (V 596-7). The Edenic Garden, perceived as a simulacrum of Heaven and therefore as a precinct of bliss: "...yea more,/ A heaven on earth, for blissful Paradise/ Of God the garden was..." (IV 207-9). When the Garden is viewed rather in its own terms than as an image of Heaven, it attracts the signifier ‘delight’: consider Eve’s reiterated reference to the Garden as "this delightful land" (IV 643, 652). As for ‘pleasure’ (in its unfavourable sense): adding impudence to transgression, Adam says, just after his Fall, "...if such pleasure be/ In things to us forbidden, it might be wished,/ For this one tree had been forbidden ten" (IX 1024-6). But the most striking evidence of Milton’s deliberate, self-conscious discrimination amongst the keywords in question is his playing them off against one another. This occurs a number of times in the poem, and the bulk of the paper will be devoted to analyzing those instances. ‘Bliss’ is played off against ‘delight’ in Book VIII: Adam refers to his marriage to Eve as the "sum of earthly bliss" (522), this term being played off against the lesser satisfactions of sensuous ‘delight’ (523-8). In one of the poem’s dramatic high-points (in Bk IX) ‘delight’ is played off against ‘pleasure’: momentarily abstracted from himself by the sight of Eve’s beauty (and so, during that privileged moment, no longer himself), Satan fleetingly experiences ‘delight’, but, recalled to his malign purpose (and so to himself), reverts to the fallen sensation of ‘pleasure’ (455-70). These are two instances among some 7 or 8. In highlighting the deliberateness of Milton’s differentiating praxis, the above instances corroborate, from a hitherto unremarked angle, a point often made about his poetic performance in PARADISE LOST (as well as in other works) - namely, his extraordinary artistic self-consciousness and deliberateness (cf. Harold Bloom: "No poet compares to Milton in his intensity of self-consciousness as an artist" (A MAP OF MISREADING 125).

Andrew Barnaby
University of Vermont

"Cringing Before the Lord: Satan, Samuel Johnson, and the Anxiety of Worship"

The paper I’m proposing starts with what, to my mind, has always been the strangest passage from Paradise Lost, the scene in Book 4 where Gabriel accuses Satan of hypocrisy in his current state of apostasy. Gabriel says: "And thou sly hypocrite, who now wouldst seem / Patron of liberty, who more than thou / Once fawn’d, and cring’d, and servilely ador’d / Heav’n’s awful Monarch?" Commentators love to point out that these lines completely change our sense of Satan and his place before the Fall (indeed it is the only prelapsarian portrait we have of him). It is certainly hard to see this as the same Satan who in Book 1 had said: "To bow and sue for grace / With suppliant knee, and deify his power / Who from the terror of this Arm so late / Doubted his Empire, that were low indeed, / That were an ignominy and shame beneath / This downfall."

Viewed from the perspective of Gabriel’s comment, Satan’s vehemence in Book 1 seems a kind of psychological defense, a way of forgetting how that "shame" has been his already. And that shame is, of course, the very condition of being created.

This paper attempts to "read" Satan’s problem as the problem of Christian devotion more generally. Indeed, although Gabriel’s disgust seems to be (unconsciously?) directed toward God in that his portrayal Satan's boot-licking suggests a willing (perhaps vain) recipient of the fawning and cringing and adortion, Gabriel’s disgust more powerfully masks a kind of self-disgust: the humiliation that is inseparable from the position of the worshipper. Such humiliation is, by definition, the subject-position of the Christian in relation to God.

To make this point, I intend to channel my reading of Milton’s Satan through, of all people, Samuel Johnson. In the blistering attacks he levels against Cowley’s Davideis and Waller’s devotional poetry in his Lives of the Poets, Johnson asserts that the problem with religious poetry is that, in essence, it has nothing to do. Johnson writes:

From poetry the reader justly expects, and from good poetry always obtains, the enlargement of his comprehension and elevation of his fancy; but this is rarely to be hoped by Christians from metrical devotion. Whatever is great, desirable, or tremendous, is comprised in the name of the Supreme Being. Omnipotence cannot be exalted; Infinity cannot be amplified; Perfection cannot be improved.

Devotional poetry typically embarrasses itself, Johnson argues, by trying futilely to "apply decoration to something more excellent than itself." What is odd about Johnson's assertion is that he elsewhere notes that this kind of creaturely humbling is the true nature of religious experience: we should come to "Sacred History," he writes, "with submissive reverence, and an imagination over-awed and controlled"; he also writes that the central religious experience is supplication to a God to whom we "can only cry out for mercy." But whereas the necessary failure of devotional poetry should act as a powerful stimulus to the recognition of the very religious experience being championed here ("submissive reverence," "passive helplessness," "humble adoration"), Johnson wants to get rid of it precisely because it makes inferiority all too clear; devotional poetry, in effect, puts our humiliation on display. When Johnson claims that the true language of faith should "suppress curiosity," the curiosity that is being suppressed, I want to suggest, is the viewing of the religious equivalent of the primal scene—a recognition of the structure of creation in which we must live as the supplicants of the Creator. Like Satan’s rebellion, devotional poetry seeks to carry out an impossible task; for poetry that task is "to magnify by a concave mirror the sidereal hemisphere." But the real problem for Johnson, as for Satan, may be that lurking within the necessary failure of this "profane" task is a memory that wants to stay hidden.

Tom Bishop
Case Western Reserve University

"The Staging of ‘A Masque at Ludlow’: some contemporay contexts."

This paper will investigate the original performance conditions for Milton’s "Masque at Ludlow" by careful reconstruction of its social occasion and of the physical dimensions of the available performing spaces at Ludlow Castle, and comparison of those spaces with known masques and plays at the contemporary court. Surviving designs for court performances will be compared with the stage directions specified for Milton’s work in an attempt to determine what was both feasible from contemporary example and consistent with the work’s explicit instructions.

Joan Blythe
University of Kentucky

"Milton and the Flight into Egypt: Theolgy and Landscape Art"

In Milton’s works there appear to be but two forthright references to the Flight into Egypt of Matthew 2: 13-23. In Paradise Regained Mary, troubled by the absence of her Son and pondering over his life, includes the essential elements of the Flight story: the "enforc’t" removal to Egypt and life there until the death of "the Murd’rous King," the Slaughter of the Innocents, and the return home to a quiet life in Nazareth (2.75-82). In Christian Doctrine the Flight is listed as part of the Son’s "Ministry of Redemption," "in vita" (1.16). From the perspectives, however, of both theological (including non-canonical) responses to the Flight and interpretations of the Flight in sixteenth and seventeenth-century landscape art, the significance of the episode for Milton’s biblically-inspired poetry goes much beyond these two specific citations. Theologically, the Flight partakes importantly in Jesus’ role as New Moses, a driving perspective in the Gospel of Matthew as well as in Milton’s poetic portrayals of the Son. Renaissance painters of the Flight, especially those working in a Northern European tradition or in Italy, emphasize the sustaining and acral role of the natural world. I argue that aspects of the theological and artistic treatments of the Flight are particularly germane to "The Nativity Ode," Paradise Lost, and Paradise Regained.

Biblical commentaries on the Flight since the early Christian era have invoked Isaiah 19:1 ("Behold, the Lord . . . Shall come into Egypt: and the idols of Egypt shall be moved at his presence") to give heightened purpose to the event. Apocryphal New Testament accounts such as pseudo-Matthew built on this passage in narratives which tell of the child Jesus toppling all the pagan idols during the Egyptian sojourn. This motif appears in early visual depictions of the Flight and I suggest lies behind the victory over pagan religions in "The Nativity Ode" stanzas xix-xxv, culminating in "Our Babe to show his Godhead true, / Can in his swaddling bands control the damned crew" (227-28). In Paradise Lost I correlate Milton’s view of humankind vis a vis the natural world especially in Book VII and at the expulsion to paintings of the Flight by among others Leonardo da Vinci, Joachim Patinir, Annibale Carracci, Caravaggio, Domenichino, Rembrandt, and Claude Lorrain, which were seminal in the development of European landscape art. In the majority of non-Spanish Renaissance paintings of the Flight, the human figures do not dominate the canvas, but are seen in the context of a physically larger natural world. I also compare Adam and Eve’s seeking rest on their journey from Eden into an also sanctified landscape to paintings of the "Rest" ("Repose") of the Holy family to or from Egypt. With reference to Paradise Regained, I draw on both the theological and artistic traditions of the Flight. Biblical exegetes have long compared a presumed wilderness experience and testing of the Flight to Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness. In paintings of the Flight Mary’s relationship with her Son is emphasized usually in a humble domestic idiom. Such works I compare to Mary’s role in Paradise Regained. The final line of the poem, "Home to his Mother’s house private return’d" harks back significantly to Mary’s account of the return from Egypt to Nazareth where her son dwelt "Private, unactive, calm, contemplative" (2.81).

(This paper will be accompanied by slides)

David Boocker
Tennessee Technological University

"Fit audience find, though few[er]": Seeing Milton in Contemporary 
Fiction and Film

In The Death of Satan, Andrew Delbanco argues that modern secular culture "is now in crisis because evil remains an inescapable experience for all of us, while we no longer have a symbolic language for describing it." Whereas for those living in centuries past "evil had a name, a face, and an explanation . . . called the Fall . . . personified in the devil, and . . . attributed to an original sin committed in Eden and imputed by God to all mankind," modern society, according to Delbanco, seems more inclined to explain the actions of Hitler or Stalin as the result of madness, the effect of which is to diminish their culpability for their atrocities.

The fact remains, however, that in a 1995 Newsweek poll (the same year Delbanco’s book was published), 66% of Americans and 85% of evangelical Protestants said they believe in the existence of the Devil, although only 31% said they believe the Devil is the source of evil. This last point is especially important, and no doubt helps, in part, to account for the kinds of difficulties contemporary writers have in representing evil. Still, contemporary literature and films are filled with stories that feature a devilish figure, often in the mold of Milton’s Satan, whose popularity as a source for representing evil is still strong. However, in many cases, it is clear that while the writers of these stories understand the power and appeal of Milton’s Satan as a literary representation of evil, they also understand that it is not likely that this Miltonic evil will be recognized by their audience.

In this paper I will look at three different types of popular "literature" that feature Miltonic evil: Andrew Niederman’s novel The Devil’s Advocate, which features the Devil in the form of a lawyer named John Milton; the Star Trek episode "Space Seed," which features Ricardo Montalban as Khan, a Satanic tyrant from Earth’s past; and "The Infernal Serpent," an Inspector Morse episode about an Oxford Master-Professor who has a hidden history of having sexual relations with young girls. In all three of these works, Milton and Paradise Lost are featured prominently to explain the actions of the wrongdoers, and in each case, at or near the story’s end, the writers overtly explain the Miltonic references. Why do the writers of these texts explain the Miltonic references? To answer this critical question, I will draw on Umberto Eco’s theory of the reader to show how contemporary works which employ Milton’s Satan can be read in two different ways: "a naive way and a critical way," both of which "are inscribed within the textual strategy." For the "naive reader," whose familiarity with Milton is likely to be limited, the explanation is absolutely necessary, even though it may add little to his/her understanding. For the "critical reader, " who brings knowledge of Milton and Paradise Lost to the text, allusions to Milton and his poem open up textual complexities, revealing the extent to which these texts have been embedded with Miltonic influence--an influence that shows how Milton’s text is still important to our understanding of the nature of evil.

Rob Browning
University of Indiana, Bloomington
jrbrowni@indiana.edu

"‘Immota Triumphans’: Corruptions of Triumph in Paradise Lost and the Caroline Court"

The triumphs of ancient Rome played an important role in the process of legitimizing a leader’s rise to power by allowing the public to actively participate in the rituals. Along with the famous conventions of the laurel wreath and the slave whispering from behind, vocal crowds served as a check against hubris, a reminder to the triumphator that he is, after all, still a man. Playing upon these Roman conventions, Milton created the triumphs of Heaven and Hell in Paradise Lost. I shall focus on the latter, examining how Satan steadily devolves the ritual by increasing formality and class distinction, ultimately replacing civic pageant with an exclusive court masque. Precedents for this maneuver of shutting down popular agency in ritualized form are readily found amongst Charles I’s court masques of the 1630s, several of which co-opted public triumphs, representing the people only by way of paid actors and contrived urban sets. In the cases of both fallen scenarios, we find the authoritarian concept of triumphing without moving–the idea that the sovereign possesses power that transcends the need to move physically about the people.

Michael Bryson
Northwestern University
m-bryson@nwu.edu

"‘Though ye rebel’: The Motivation for Satan’s Rebellion in Paradise Lost"

The question of Satan’s motivation has long been a source of contentious debate, with many critics arguing for the patristic notion that Satan fell due to pride, while other critics prefer to locate the source of Satan’s decision to rebel in some aspect of the poem’s dramatic situation. This essay suggests that pride is insufficient as a motivation for Satan’s actions, and argues that Milton uses the Father’s decree at V.600-615 to make credible why Satan rebels, and why one-third of the angels seem to require little or no convincing to join him in rejecting and warring upon God. The decree is intended to drive dissent out into the open, to create dissent in the first place, or both. Milton first uses the theme of God uncovering and/or causing rebellion in his somewhat loose translation of Psalm 2, the biblical text on which the Father’s decree in book 5 is based. As Milton translates the lines, "I, saith hee, / Annointed have my King (though ye rebel) / On Sion my holi’ hill" (11-13). The phrase "though ye rebel" appears nowhere in the original Hebrew text. Milton includes this phrase in 1653, sketching in miniature what he will years later paint in the broad strokes of Paradise Lost.

Gardner Campbell
Mary Washington College

"'Though I uncircumscribed myself retire': Alterity and Creation in Paradise Lost 7.162-173"

The punctuation of Paradise Lost 7.162-173 is identical in both the 1667 and 1674 editions. Given what we know of Milton's care in seeing both editions through the press, a relatively firm case can be made that the punctuation reflects Milton's intention. Yet no passage in the epic has been more frequently or substantially repunctuated by Milton's editors. The history of textual variants in editions of this passage, along with editors' glosses, demonstrates the continuing enigma of these lines, an enigma that has significantly shaped Milton studies over the centuries. In particular, two influential works of Milton criticism, Denis Saurat's Milton, Man and Thinker and John Rumrich's Milton Unbound, argue that these lines are fundamental to our proper understanding of Milton's aim and achievement in Paradise Lost.

I agree that the lines are fundamentally important, but I differ with earlier critics in assessing why they are important. In my own argument, I first construct an editorial and critical history of Paradise Lost 7.162-173, and then offer a new paradigm for their interpretation. Unlike the more traditional reading of the passage as detailing the mechanics of generating the universe or the essential character of chaos, this paradigm stresses the relational aspects of God's pronouncement. In other words, my reading asserts that the passage allows Milton's God a way to explain the creation of alterity, and thus engages the major paradoxes of Self and Other that inhere in relations between the divine, the angelic, and the human in the epic.

As its primary theoretical basis, my reading relies on theories of alterity and relation proposed by Francis Jacques in Difference and Subjectivity. Jacques' work, anti-Cartesian but not anti-foundationalist, posits that relation is prior to personhood, and that personhood derives from relation, not vice-versa. Jacques further argues that only a triadic theory of alterity can avoid the generation of a self-consuming binary opposition. Using these arguments, I will attempt to show not only how Milton conceives God's alterity, but how Milton's God conceives his own alterity. My argument concludes with some ramifications of that model of alterity for the rest of the epic.

Thomas N. Corns
University of Wales, Bangor

"Milton and History"

This paper returns to a well worked theme in Milton studies–well worked in the sense that many have worked over it; and well worked in the sense that some of the subtlest readings of Milton’s own historical writings and of his controversial prose and of his major late poems are informed by explorations of his historiographical predilections. Thus Achsah Guibbory offers an interpretation of Milton’s larger world vision in terms of a cyclical pattern of history to be challenged by the godly. David Loewenstein reads Samson Agonistes and Paradise Lost in terms of the historical tropes distinguishable in his prose. Nicholas von Maltzahn has chronicled the creation of his History of Britain, and Graham Parry has placed it within the a broad context of seventeenth-century English scholarship in ways that distinguish its technical limitations and conservative methodology. Blair Worden, Martin Dzelzainis, and David Norbrook have variously identified the influences of Italian humanists and Roman historians and poets. This list, of course, is exemplary rather than exhaustive.

Issues remain profoundly controversial and invite resolution or synthesis, though some aspects no doubt are intractably conflicted. I had begun by pondering how a view of history can be linear and cyclical, providential and pessimistic, providential and secular, enlightened and retrograde, and so on. To see Milton working I returned to a too little explored document, his Commonplace Book, and I was almost overwhelmed by a sense of its sheer oddness. A clear intent is to be discerned in some parts of it. We can see him reading Machiavelli with an eye to writing republican defences, and a fascination with marriage practices is pervasive: a heading that reads ‘MARRIAGE. SEE OF DIVORCE’ is interpretatively irresistible. Again, the concerns with English history display a mind working towards his History of Britain. But what about the magpie impulse that causes him to note that ‘The nun Ebba cut of her nose and lips’ or ‘Conjugal affection rare in the wife of Ed. 1. in Palestine’ or ‘the Franks would not tolerate a king who breakfasted on cheap viands’?

This paper considers such curiosities and attempts to relate Milton as a reader of history to Milton the writer of history. It explores the discrepancies between the kinds of history Milton writes and the uses of historical material and interpretation in his controversial prose and his late poetry. It notes, too, the curious omissions of facts and perspectives present in the Commonplace Book and the History from his other writing and reflects on perhaps the strangest omission of all: that, in an age and culture habituated to autobiographical introspection and self-justification, a writer so curiously self-obsessed as Milton should have left no memoir of the events of his own age and his part in them.

Margaret Justice Dean
Department of English
467 Case Annex
Eastern Kentucky University
521 Lancaster Avenue
Richmond, Kentucky 40475-3102
Margaret.Dean@ACS.EKU.EDU

“Unmasking Shepherds in Comus ”

Milton’s Comus presents the three types of shepherds commonly portrayed in early modern literature: rural rustics who guard sheep, lyric poets who celebrate religious and/or political themes, and (true or false) spiritual guides. While Leah Marcus has delineated much of the political and artistic context for the masque, and John King has demonstrated the engagement of religious controversy in Milton’s epic, neither has explored the allegory of shepherd as spiritual guide in Comus. The masque engages the Egerton children in a choice between two shepherds as spiritual guides in order to demonstrate the quality of the education their father has given them. The Attendant Spirit first adopts his disguise as Thyrsis, a shepherd in the livery of the Earl of Bridgewater, at the close of his prologue. Once Comus perceives the approach of the Lady, he appears to her as a shepherd by virtue of his magic dust. He also implies he is loyal to the Earl of Bridgewater. Since both Thyrsis and Comus disguise themselves and appear to the Egerton children as shepherds loyal to their father, the children accept their guidance through the “drear Wood.” The Lady is at first misled by Comus’ pretense and is physically ensnared; her brothers neglect aspects of Thyrsis’ guidance in their attempt to rescue her. None of the three Egertons sees through the disguise of his or her guide initially, but the Lady’s unmasking of Comus’ rhetoric enables her to reject his overtures. Her brothers’ attempt at rescue is salvaged with Thyrsis’ assistance; their initial failure to follow his instructions allows the Lady to observe Thyrsis’ guidance and prove his assistance true. Even though she is physically weaker than her brothers and more exposed than they, the Lady’s education and trial have rendered her more secure spiritually. The masque emphasizes the salutary effects of an aristocratic education in religious disputation by portraying the Lady’s unmasking of both Comus’ rhetoric and the Attendant Spirit’s guidance. What enables the Lady to choose an appropriate spiritual guide, as Eve did not, is the education in religious disputation her father has afforded her. She is temporarily misled, but she rejects the blandishments the false shepherd offers and selects the guidance of the Attendant Spirit. Ultimately the Lady unmasks both spiritual guides in Comus.

Miltonic Contradictions in Toni Morrison's Paradise

Toni Morrison's novel depicts the culture war between two contrasting visions of paradise. Since their late 19th century Exodus
from the segregated South, the families of the black town of Ruby, Oklahoma has founded its independence on the petit bourgeois
values of self-employment and property ownership and the virtues of Protestant piety, discipline, and industriousness. With its
millenarian myth, separatism and self-reliance Ruby's self-governing township evokes the Milton legacy of American Puritanism.
Central to it is the patriarchal family and a gendered division of public and private spheres. Thus, the limits of this Miltonic legacy
despite all its historic strengths may be seen in its demonizing of libertine female collectives which threaten to invade that public
space, as Milton's "the wild rout " "of Bacchus and his revellers." Similarly, Ruby finds its nemesis in the Convent, a1960s haven
for female vagabonds and for feminine energies uncontained by marital domesticity. The contrary virtues of the Convent prioritize
nurturance, bodily pleasure, psychic healing, exploration of the unconscious and female autonomy in community. In reading Milton's
17th Century bourgeois revolutionary vision through Morrison's 20th Century perspective, we can understand both his logic of liberation,
as appropriated by black nationalism, and its limitations, as challenged by a feminist communalism.

Stephen B. Dobranski
Georgia State University 

"Pondering Satan’s Shield"

Critics have traditionally glossed the lunar metaphor that Milton uses for Satan’s "ponderous shield" in Paradise Lost (I.283) as either an allusion to Achilles’ "massive shield flashing far and wide / like a full round moon" (Iliad, XIX.442-3), or an echo of Radigund’s lunar armament as she challenges Artegall in The Faerie Queene (5.5.3.6-9). This paper offers a new reading of Milton’s epic simile by turning to contemporary discoveries in the natural world. Whereas in heaven Satan’s shield resembles a sun (VI.305), in hell it looks like the moon, a "spotty globe" as seen "Through an optic glass" (I.291, 288). Addressing how and why ancient epic and new science collide at the moment Satan gets off hell’s burning lake, the paper explores the role of weaponry in the poem and the reasons Milton chose to allude to Galileo. When examined in the context of Renaissance warfare and, perhaps surprisingly, seventeenth-century animal histories, Satan’s shield resembles not a defensive weapon but an ornamental impresa, a visual device worn by both sides during the Civil War. The shield symbolizes, updates, and undercuts Satan’s heroic aspirations, and simultaneously exposes his amphibious nature, creeping from lake to land, and transgressing from heaven to hell.

Robert Dulgarian
65 Marlborough St.
Boston, MA 02116
Rdlgarian@aol.com

"Lucan, Tacitus, and the Efficacy of Elegy in Milton’s Lycidas"

In the June 1956 issue of Notes and Queries, E.E. Duncan-Jones notes that "Lycidas" occurs in Lucan’s De bello civili (iii.638-9) as the name of a sailor who "drowns" in a naval battle despite the efforts of his companions. Critics have tended to downplay the significance of Duncan-Jones’s note, presumably because Lucan’s epic lies out side the ambit of the Early Modern pastoral tradition as constructed in recent scholarship. This paper will argue that the passage in Lucan is in fact highly significant in that it suggests a model for reconsidering Milton’s Lycidas both as a statement of poetic aspirations and as a figuration of the constraints and paradoxes that such aspirations entail.

Duncan-Jones’s note is slightly misleading in that Lucan’s Lycidas does not drown, but is dismembered. The mode of death is crucial to the import of the Lucanic reference insofar as it resembles that not of the historical Edward King, but that of Orpheus, whose death Milton’s Lycidas cites as the supreme example of the lamentable end of a poet. Whereas the proliferation of pastoral "Lycidae" from Theocritus to Sannazaro guarantees the appropriateness of bestowing the name on the drowned Edward King, the Lucanic "Lycidas" supplies the explicit synecdochal link between the occasion of King’s demise and the mode of his lamentation. The name "Lycidas", then, at once marks King as the object of pastoral representation and announces the insufficiency of the pastoral genre to the elegiac and prophetic demands that King’s death has summoned forth.

It is noteworthy not only that epic should supplement the insufficiency of pastoral reference to the demands of Lycidas, but that Lucan should supply the material that makes up that demand. In contrast to the caution of Vergil’s generic ascent from pastoral through georgic to epic, caution reflected in the Eclogues’ repeated strictures against generic overreaching, Lucan, antiquity’s first successor and rival to Vergil in the realm of epic, is famed for boasting of composing his epic at an age when Vergil had written only his "Gnat". As suchm Lucan is not only a type of poetic hubris, but a particular warning to those who should follow in Vergilian footsteps. At the same time, like Helvidius Priscus, whose ironic relation to deserved fame Milton’s Lycidas adapts from Tacitus, Lucan is also a figure of early and tragic demise; and, as Tacitus records, it is the description of the death of his own Lycidas that Lucan quotes as he opens his own veins at the tyrant Nero’s order. The Lucanic Lycidas, then, operates in Milton’s text not only as a figure of Orphic demise and epic ambition, but of the incapacities and dangers of poetic ambition in the face of the treat of death that gives rise to the impulse of elegy.

In the end, I wish to argue, the generic displacements implicit in the Lucanic reference (the tension between the Luicanic and the more traditionally pastoral "Lycidas" referents, the synecdochal figuration of Orpheus by a figure in historical epic, and the citational invocation in Tacitus of the Lucanic referent to mark the death of its poet) reflect a persistent pattern in Milton’s Lycidas: the ambiguity of figures of memorialization as figures marks the parallel incapacity of funeral elegy to console. Even if poetry, and in particular poetry spurred by epic ambition, can deliver both memory and prophecy, it cannot offer the one true consolation of restoring the dead to presence. The Lucanic "Lycidas" reminds us to read even the twin endings of Lycidas (apotheosis, pastoral framing) as gestures of a poetic mastery that, even ideally realized, offers no ethical nor historical certainty, and the subsequent realization of which remains in doubt.

Katsuhiro Engetsu

"The Concept of the Book in Areopagitica"

The purpose of this paper is to reconsider the concept of the book in Areopagitica (1644). The pamphlet advances Milton’s idea of publication as a model of the public sphere in which all the private persons should be qualified to enjoy free exchanges of opinions. Although the title page of Areopagitica suggests that its argument for the "Liberty" of publication be confined to the form of "PRINTING," the discourse transgresses the self-defined boundary and enters into the field of the non-print forms of publication, such as "music." The pamphlet, which defines itself as a written "SPEECH," reveals that the oral quality of the text is constantly subverting the definitive authority of print publication. This paper will then examine how the self-contradictory concept of the book in Areopagitica shapes the ideologically confusing quality of Poems of Mr. John Milton (1645): the republican poet’s first collection whose title page is proud of its own connection with Henry Lawes the royalist musician.

Angelica Duran
Purdue University

"Captain or colonel," angel or scientist: The angels of Paradise Lost

Milton and the New Scientists share similar didactic goals for education and for their written works: the promotion and production of English citizens whose education guides them to integrate practical and philosophical ideals suitable for always urgent earthly and divine enterprises. Milton expresses that ideal in Of Education (1644), when he states that "the end then of learning is to repair the ruins of our first parents by regaining to know God aright" and that "a complete and generous education […] fits a man to perform justly, skillfully, magnanimously all the offices, both private and public, of peace and war." Similarly, Secretary of the Royal Society Henry Oldenburg repeatedly voiced the end of experimental work to be "for the glory of Nature’s Creator and the welfare of mankind."

With precise and striking regularity, Milton and the spokespersons for the Royal Society also utilize the same examples, metaphors, and strategies at those textual cites where they attempt to represent the transmission of knowledge. English New Scientists often represented themselves as leaders fighting what Isaac Barrow, first holder of the Lucasian chair in Mathematics, called "the Invisible wars of God." That representation was endorsed and repeated by intellectual leaders in other countries like Eccard Leichneer, physician, theologian, and Professor of Medicine at Erfurth, Germany, who described the English Royal Society as "the advance guard of the republic of scholarship and philosophy." By the second half of the 17th century, the military nature of Francis Bacon’s term "the advancement of knowledge" was highlighted.

Milton invests his chief messengers of knowledge–the four angels, Uriel, Gabriel, Raphael, and Michael–with New Scientific qualities. Uriel, whom Milton likens to the "glorious angel […] the same whom John saw also in the sun" details the efficacy of the Scientific Method to the disguised cherub Satan. Milton also invests him with those characteristics that experimentalists Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton did in their detailed discussions of St. John the Divine is such works as Observations on the prophecies of Daniel and the Apocalypse of St. John. The scene of Gabriel and the golden scales at the end of Book IV daringly comments on New Scientific claims comparing their experimental work to Daniel’s reading of the writing on the wall. Finally, Raphael and Michael blaze onto the learning environment of Paradise Lost promoting New Scientific ideology. Their sustained narratives serve to promote the advancement of knowledge in terms that have enabled the epic to sustain its force in our own technological revolution.

Karen Edwards
School of English
Queen’s Building
University of Exeter
Exeter EX4 4QH, England
K.L.Edwards@exeter.ac.uk 

"Lycanthropy, or the Un-English Disease"

The term lycanthropy, or a reference to the behavior associated with it, usually elicits from the editor of a Renaissance text a note to this effect: "a kind of insanity in which sufferers imagine themselves to be a wolf." So annotated, lycanthropy is easily dismissed as yet another fascinating and bizarre example of the ‘old’ medicine. But regarded as one of the culturally-dictated forms in which mental disorder and the understanding of mental disorder express themselves in the early modern period, lycanthropy (like any other cultural form) may be seen as having a political dimension. Milton in The First Defense of the English People and Marvell in The Rehearsal Transpros’d level the charge of lycanthropy against Salmasius and Samuel Parker, respectively. The charges belong to their arsenals of witty ridicule, but to limit the analysis to the nature of the wit (Milton’s ‘heavy-handed’, Marvell’s ‘rapier-like’) is to miss the complex anti-Europeanism they conjure up by calling their Protestant opponents lycanthropes.

To Salmasius’ remark about the "mad dogs of England," Milton responds by seizing upon the name of his opponent’s estate in Burgundy (St. Loup) and shaping it, ultimately, into Lycanthropus. That is, Milton turns back on Salmasius the original charge of madness by contrasting the healthily carnivorous English hound with the rabid French wolf and its unnatural blood lust. (One might argue that the fear of rabies brought over from the Continent is still a component of Englishness.) Milton concludes, "whether you are wolf or were-wolf, you will surely be sport for the English hounds."

For Marvell, too, the un-English behavior of his (English) opponent is represented by lycanthropy. The madness of Samuel Parker "hath formed it self into a perfect Lycanthropy," declares Marvell, and warns that "the Calvinists of England" can hardly "hope to escape his chaps and his paws better than those of Germany and Geneva." Parker, according to Marvell, has lumped together English and Continental versions of Calvinism and condemned both as the enemy to Englishness. Accusing Parker of lycanthropy thus becomes equivalent to accusing him of failing to understand Englishness and, by implication, of not being properly English. There is some evidence in The Rehearsal Transpros’d that Marvell had been reading The Duchess of Malfi. Duke Ferdinand, the play’s lycanthrope, digs up dead bodies-which is what Parker does figuratively, Marvell implies, by opposing Charles’ Declaration of Indulgence.

By the seventeenth century, the wolf itself had long been extinct in England. But it survived in Europe, and it continued to haunt the English imagination in the form of bestial transformations and the practice of witchcraft. Even the rarely-discriminating Edward Topsell chooses to pass over this aspect of the wolf in his History of Four-Footed Beasts: "There be many magicall inventions about the parts of Wolves which I will not stand to recite in this place, because I cannot tell what benefit shall come to the knowledge of them by the English Reader."

Classical scholars both, Milton and Marvell would have been aware that such "magicall inventions" grow out of the wolf’s atavistic role in ancient Roman culture. In this regard, if in no other, pagan and papal Rome are not far removed. When they taunt their Protestant opponents with lycanthropy, Milton and Marvell imply that Salmasius and Parker are types of the deeply perverse, darkly superstitious, un-English intellect. Do they not also imply that Salmasius and Parker are guilty of intellectual, if not theological, Catholicism?

Mary (Mimi) Fenton
Associate Professor of English
424 Coulter Building
Western Carolina University
Cullowhee, NC 28723 

"Milton’s View of Ireland in the 1649 Tracts: When All Liberty is Not Created Equal"

Of Milton’s three 1649 prose tracts, one has long been discounted as either an anomaly or an embarrassment: Observations Upon the Articles of Peace seems the unsavory antithesis to The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates and Eikonoklastes which stand as bastions in the defense of individual and civil liberty. Miltonists have not yet accounted for the ethical incongruities between these tracts that were written in a single year, responding to a single phenomenon: evolution of the commonwealth via the dissolution of the monarchy. This study examines Milton’s 1649 tracts in unison to elucidate why Milton simultaneously encourages the English toward freedom and the Irish toward subjection, and it demonstrates that Milton’s political views on the Irish should be considered in the context of his ideas about the relationship between liberty and obedience, the fundamental differences between rebellion and reformation, and the symbiotic relationship between faith, hope, and charity.

In Observations Upon the Articles of Peace, Milton locates the dissonance between the English and Irish in their conflicting customs regarding land usage and ownership, in Irish religious practice and history, and in an incorrigible Irish recalcitrance and refusal to "know their place" in relation to the British. While critics have attributed Milton’s anti-Irish views to his nationalist elitism, his aversion to Catholicism, his pro-Cromwell / anti-monarchical convictions, and his belief in the "civilizing mission" of colonizers, Milton’s views also reflect and contribute to contemporary vituperative anti-Irish propaganda and help propel Cromwell’s violent colonial policies in Ireland. Paradoxically, however, his views are not inconsistent with his own discourse on the nature of freedom in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates and the role of true reformers in Eikonoklastes. The three 1649 tracts underscore that Milton’s moral mind-set is the infrastructure of his politics, and the tracts together offer clear, if disturbing, insight into Milton’s justification of intolerance.

James Dougal Fleming

"Who otherwise would know me not": Prophylaxis, Pro Se

Milton is often considered a reliably autobiographical author, but his most explicit statements about himself occur in polemical contexts. The relevant passages serve a rhetorical function that militates against their ostensible purpose. For the Miltonic rhetor exposes himself in order to show that he has nothing to expose. He reveals a private life that perfectly mirrors his public one, and is, therefore, gloriously irrelevant. Milton's major ad hominem charge is that his opponents' private lives are hideously relevant: they dwell in a craven and disgusting secrecy, from which the Puritan champion must drag them out. By abjuring his own secrecy - by demonstrating that his life contains no secrets - Milton immunizes himself against the life-writing he performs. In short, he writes anti-autobiography, moral exhibitionism as warding-off. Meanwhile, the casuistical logic of Milton's public abjuration leads away from authorial information, and toward amuletic repetition.

Noam Flinker
Department of English
University of Haifa (Israel)
Address (2001-2 only): Noam Flinker, c/o Dept. of English, 119 Bennett Hall,
University of PA, Phila, PA 19104-6273

"Kabbalisitic Exile and Redemption Ironically Reversed in Milton’s Paradise Lost and Joyce’s Ulysses"

Paradise Lost begins by envisioning Satan as Homer’s Odysseus but concludes with a highly complex account of exile and redemption that takes its inspiration from the world of Kabbalah. This is likewise a major pattern in James Joyce’s Ulysses where Bloom the Jew must, as Odysseus, somehow redeem the primordial Adam in him by freeing Molly/Heva/Eve, his "spouse and helpmate," of her "womb of sin" (Ulysses 38). Milton and Joyce address the problem of exile and the basic human need to return despite the clear understanding that this can never be a simple, unalienated trip back to "Edenville." For both, the amalgam between Homer’s epic and Kabbalistic Genesis provides the basis for their portrayals of the human condition. Kabbalistic texts about creation set up a rich myth of exile and redemption that would have been available to both Milton and Joyce. These materials add depth and meaning to the Ulysses theme which provides ironic structure for the English epics. While Homer’s Odysseus is almost Kabbalistic in his redemptive return from exile, Milton reverses the Greek myth so that Satan’s journey leads to human exile. The redemption that is nevertheless achieved must co-exist with the loss of Eden. This is precisely the movement of Joyce’s epic. Like Milton, Joyce could find redemption only in the face of perpetual alienation and exile.

Coburn Freer
University of Georgia

'Prodigious Births of Mind': Thinking about Paradise

Paradise Lost centers on two contrasting pictures of the relation between consciousness and nature. Drawing upon a variety of classical antecedents, Milton describes Paradise as a vast, infinitely complex single organism, emanating from the divine idaea. Thus when Adam and Eve contemplate nature, they see it as part of their praise of God. Their worship expresses itself in the fervent ways recommended by radical seventeenth-century Protestants, and Adam and Eve also see these forms of worship revealed in nature around them.

God's plan is to have Paradise eventually become like heaven, with humans and angels having the option to live in either. Paradise is part of a transcendent pattern by which human consciousness is to be lifted closer to the divine mind. Of course this pattern is disrupted by the Fall, which becomes nothing less than a decision by Adam and Eve to choose a limited consciousness. Now their world is no longer a vehicle for their God-centered consciousness, and it becomes a largely hostile system. After the Fall man attempts to repeat or re-enact God's thinking the world into being; for Adam this leads to the invention of technology.

Paradise Lost could be described as a poem that explains why the relation of human consciousness to nature will always be problematic. The poem also offers an explanation as to why our consciousness will always find technology, for all its blessings, a dependable source of misery.

Wendy Furman-Adams
Whittier College

Virginia James Tufte
University of Southern California

“‘Earth Felt the Wound’: Gendering Ecological Consciousness in 19th-Century Illustrations of Paradise Lost”

As Diane Kelsey McColley, Richard J. DuRocher, and others have shown, Milton and his contemporaries were deeply concerned with issues that we today would call “environmental.” Over the past decade, we have come to see how Paradise Lost meditates upon the fragile and precious connection between human beings and the oikos, or “house” of nature. As DuRocher has argued, “In Milton’s poem, we are shown immediately what Adam and Eve will only later be forced to realize: that the choices of human beings intimately affect the entire scale of being. Chiefly, yet still perhaps mysteriously, Adam and Eve’s choice wounds the Earth . . . . Milton’s focus on the wounded Earth at the pivotal moment of the human drama shows how closely interconnected is the health of human and natural bodies” (SP 93 [1996]: 115).

Over 150 artists have given visual form to Milton’s Paradise since 1688. They did not, however, immediately foreground this ecological strand in the poem–focusing first on its explicitly theological, then on its more theatrical or symbolic elements. Whether in the literal synoptic narrative engravings of 1688; in Hayman’s theatrical engravings of 1729; or in Blake’s symbolic watercolors of1807 and 1808, the poem’s landscape served mainly as background for its divine and human concerns; and figures–human, divine, or demonic–occupied the central position. But in the mid-nineteenth century a new current arose, in the arts in general and in Milton illustration in particular–a current generated both by the emergence of a new, post-industrial ecological consciousness and by a newly central involvement of women in natural history.

Two nineteenth-century English artists represent these new trends in the context of Milton illustration: John Martin (1789-1854), the well-known printmaker, and Jane Giraud (1810-1868), a water-colorist who was the first woman to illustrate Paradise Lost. Both artists had occasion to be involved in the reform movements that were, as Whitney Chadwick has noted, “part of a growing middle-class response to widespread . . . changes following the industrial revolution” (Women, Art, and Society [London: Thames and Hudson, 1994]: 35). Working just as the term “ecology” came into popular use, both artists foregrounded, as Milton’s earlier visual interpreters had not, the poem’s concerns with the earth and its vulnerability to human volition. They did so, however, in profoundly gender-specific ways. Martin makes his ecological argument by representing Paradise as an enormous park–a vast universe of space consistently dwarfing his human figures, and inevitably viewed from below by the similarly dwarfed human observer. In this Paradise grow vast groves of botanically correct English trees–as accurately represented as in Martin’s earlier botanical work. The viewer also looks upward at Satan atop his throne in Pandemonium, in which Mulciber’s “Starry lamps” have become noxious and fire-prone gas lights. When not working in his studio, Martin worried about the wasting of the earth’s resources and the detrimental aspects of increasing industrialization, and drew up inventive plans for ventilated mines, pure air and water, better lighting and sewage disposal. He was, in short, as interested in preserving landscape as in painting it. Thus Martin represents Eve at staring at her face in the mirror pool. And it is she who looks back longingly (in his terrifying Expulsion), at a landscape being devoured by violence–violence clearly born of a human failure of stewardship and care.

Published within two decades of Martin’s brooding mezzotints, Jane Giraud’s delicate watercolors embody similar intellectual currents in a complementary way: by reducing Martin’s vast landscape to the synecdoche of a flower. Like many Victorian women with artistic talent and aspirations, Giraud may have become a flower painter because botanical illustration was one of the few acceptable activities for a woman of her time and class. But even within this restricted medium, she managed to make a genuine interpretation of Milton’s epic–one that recognizes and celebrates what McColley has called Milton’s “moral and ecological vocabulary” and his role as “a revolutionary epic environmentalist.” For her title-page to Paradise Lost, Giraud chose a telling quotation from Book 9: “Earth felt the wound, and Nature from her seat/ Sighing through all her Works gave signs of woe,/ That all was lost” (9.782-84). She represents this decisive moment with a withering tree enwrapped by a serpent–and with a struggling prostrate bird, bringing death into the world by invisible human hands. By focusing her entire reading of the epic on flowers, Giraud, like Martin, draws our attention away from patriarchal strains of the epic, and toward the natural realm. In Giraud’s story of flowers, as in Martin’s gigantic landscapes, lies the story of an equally precious and vulnerable Nature–a story which Milton has shown us is really “Not less but more Heroic” than the story of “stern Achilles” (9.14-15).

David Gay
University of Alberta

"All Our Law and Story": The Politics of Learning in Paradise Regained

Recent studies suggest that Paradise Regained expresses solidarity with nonconformist sects during a time of persecution after the Restoration. A key moment in these readings occurs in the Athenian temptation, with its emphasis on conscience, scripture, and inward illumination. The Athenian temptation contextualizes these radical values in a reconstruction of the ancient patristic debate over the relationship between Athens and Jerusalem, or classical and biblical wisdom. Jesus’ apparent rejection of the classics assembles disparate patristic views on the right relationship between scriptural and classical authority. These views range from acceptance on typological and moral grounds, to subordination of the classics as imitative of scripture, to uncompromising rejection. Tertullian’s Prescription Against Heretics (197 A.D), for example, cites Paul in regarding heretical attacks as necessary trials of faith and views Jesus as a model of resistance. Milton implicitly casts Satan as an insurgent heretic in his use of the patristic debate. The patristic defenses reaffirmed the scriptural canon, the rule of faith, orthodox Christology and apostolic succession. The outcomes of Milton’s trial of faith include the assertion of a rule of faith that accommodates radical perspectives, the formation of the scriptural canon as a structure of conscience and inwardness, and the use of this structure as a basis for conscientious resistance.

Ann Torday Gulden
Hasselhaugvn. 39
0851 Oslo
Norway
a.t.gulden@iba.uio.no

"A Walk in the Paradise Garden: Eve’s Influence 
on the Triptych of Speeches, Paradise Lost IV 610-688"

In this paper I will discuss the evening walk in the Paradise Garden and the ways in which Eve, summoning her own understanding of the natural world, influences Adam’s way of expressing himself in that world. By analysing the contrasts between Adam’s speeches before and after he has heard Eve’s centrally placed ‘hidden sonnet’, which I will suggest creatively inspires him towards a more comprehensive understanding of his environment, I will show his departure from his former rather monolithic, linear thinking based on perceived authority. In my reading it is Eve who brings forth the poet, or seer, in Adam. Eve’s wider vision informs his, quite as much as he informs hers.

Pitt Harding
Georgia Southern University
enghjh@langate.gsu.edu

"Satan’s Undoing: Paganizing Allusions in the Temptation of Eve"

The fabric of allusions in Paradise Lost invites being read as a coherent subtext or "metapoetic accompaniment" (Fowler) to the epic action. Drawing on studies of Milton’s use of his classical models by Harding, Steadman, Blessington, and Porter, I redirect Harold Bloom’s focus on creative priority from Milton’s agon with his precursors to the dynamics of the poem itself. My contention is that a pattern of allusions enacts, in literary terms, a struggle for priority between Satan and the Son--one that threatens Milton’s narrator as well as Eve.

Before focusing on book 9, I note that allusions in books 1-2 present Satan as the prototype of the classical epic hero. Hell is a pre-Christian literary realm, and generic features such as narrative development and the historical-present tense exert pressure in the direction of classical epic. In later books the heavenly characters subordinate the Satanic epic to a salvific scheme which accords priority to the Son. By granting priority initially to classical epic and then superseding it, the narrative reflects the supersession of pagan religion by Christianity.

Satan’s challenge to this supersession impinges on the compositional process. Having affirmed sacred history in the proems to books 1 and 3, Milton’s narrator rejects the classical muse and renounces martial themes in the proems to 7 and 9. Intertwining the narrator’s fate with the fate of Man, these final proems place in fictive uncertainty the poet’s capacity to assert the priority of sacred truth over later, erroneous fable. They expose and resist a Satanic threat to restore priority to classical epic and hence to undo the poem’s affirmation of sacred history.

Satan embodies this threat by approaching Eve clad in a panoply of classical allusions. His resources include enduring traces of classical culture: Ovidian metamorphosis, the Aeneid, "Scipio the height of Rome." This martial hero’s name heads the acrostic SATAN (perhaps in imitation of Virgil’s acrostic MARS) at the moment when Milton first mentions "Rome" by name, and through an allusion to the myth that Scipio was begotten by Jove in serpent form. Milton’s rendering of Satan’s seduction of Eve thus exploits allusions that earlier aligned Eve with mythic figures who strove to preserve their chastity against ravishment by pagan deities. Satan induces Eve to embrace a pagan theodicy by asking the key question posed at the end of Virgil’s proem: "can envy dwell in heavenly breasts?" These allusions dramatize the danger that Satan poses. For when he urges Eve, in effect, to become a pagan goddess, Satan threatens figuratively to beget upon her the Roman heroes and deities, bequeathing to her descendants the failed Virgilian theodicy which finds in divine wrath not the "anger and just rebuke" that Milton’s narrator accepts, but rather the inexplicable "ire" that "so long perplexed" Aeneas.

Through the subtext of allusions, then, Satan figuratively imperils both Eve and the narrator by threatening to restore the pagan epic that Milton renounced in the final proems. To the extent that Satan succeeds in perverting Man by restoring priority to paganism, Milton’s rebellious antagonist threatens his Christocentric poem and necessitates the re-affirmation of sacred history in the closing books.

Gina Hausknecht
Coe College

"Effeminacy and the Feminine in Eden and at Gaza"

The most important gender dichotomy in Milton’s work is not between masculine and feminine, but between virtuous and corrupt forms of each. The return to God in Paradise Lost and Samson Agonistes coincides with the resumption of the moral posture which Milton explicitly codes as manly; prelapsarian femininity is a version of such manliness. As "He for God only, she for God in him" suggests, femininity in its right form is analogous rather than opposed to masculinity. Both Paradise Lost and Samson Agonistes arenarratives of recovery from debased forms of masculinity and femininity.

Although Milton’s deeply masculinist thinking about gender assumes an inherent connection between virility and virtue, between the vir and virtu, the feminine is not in itself conceptually problematic for Milton. Femininity throughout the oeuvre is abstractly associated with a series of desirable qualities–qualities that are, indeed, necessary to manliness: justice, virtue, and eloquence are all frequently figured as female. It is only femininity in actual women that registers as dangerous and corrupting and only when it slips from women to men; contained and orderly femininity poses no threats. The fear and disgust that permeates Milton’s writing is of contagion.

Effeminacy, the manifestation of such contagion, is associated in Milton’s prose with lack of discipline, with poor management of self and other, and, especially, with having too much power or undeserved authority. Prelates, magistrates, and courtiers, therefore, are all effeminizing agents. Milton’s invocations of effeminacy sound a recurrent theme in his own work, and in a broader social discourse, about the slippery slope from domestic corruption to public weakness: the fear that personal mismanagement makes men unfit for rational political participation pervades the divorce and anti-monarchical tracts and spurs Eikonoklastes’s bitter denunciation of Charles’ reliance on his wife. Eikonoklastes cites copious examples of "how great mischeif and dishonour hath befall’n to Nations under the Government of effeminate and Uxorious Magistrates" (CPW 3:421) and how the Prince of Wales has been spoiled by the "soft effeminacies of Court" (CPW 3:571). In Of Reformation, the prelates have "hamstrung the valour of the Subject by seeking to effeminate us all at home" (CPW 1:588). The corruption of the Sabbath by "gaming, jugging, wassailing, and mixt dancing" (CPW 1:589) is a prelatical maneuver to "despoile us both of manhood and grace at once" (CPW 1:588).

This talk will explore similar effects detected throughout Paradise Lost and Samson Agonistes at the sites of contagion. For example, both Adam and Samson are rendered impotent, and deeply misogynist, by their self-betrayals. Samson’s denunciations of "foul effeminacy" (410) are markers of his despairing inability to accept responsibility for his plight. Eve’s Satanic insights upon eating the fruit ("inferior who is free?" 9.825) indicate not only a perversion of her feminine duty of "meek surrender" (4.494) but the generic, manly duty of obedience to God. Extending recent discussions of masculinity in the political contexts of early modern England by Mark Breitenberg and Matthew Jordan, this talk uses Milton’s own deployment of gender categories to examine the moral and ethical implications of those categories in the later poetry.

John K. Hale
University of Otago

"Tribal Latin: Milton’s Cambridge Performances"

When did Milton address an audience out loud, standing on his legs, as distinct from a more metaphorical, mediated "address" through script and print? By not seeking ordination, Milton relinquished most if not all physical audiences. The public performances which are best evidenced are the ones to various Cambridge audiences. To these audiences, in the various Cambridge Latin genres, he performed as required, either competitively, or as a point of honour, or voluntarily. Consequently, some important aspects of the young Milton are to be glimpsed in these Cambridge performances. They include roads which opened to him there, but which he did not take.

Why then are his University doings not more cherished as a means to understand him? Obviously their being in Latin does not help matters. Moreover, his own vocal dislike of the University "exercises"—especially disputation —has made posterity dismissive. And the dullness of some accounts of the curriculum will have alienated more of us. Nonetheless, that curriculum was lively and even adventurous in its own way. To recover its spirit will illuminate Milton’s participation and revulsion alike.

A first condition of recovery is not to dismiss or apologise for the Latin, but to get inside it. A second one is to ask what Milton was doing, in the anthropological sense of "doing"; what were the various Latin-speaking, role-given transactions in which he took part? Was it a leading or an inconspicuous part? Did he do them in a humdrum and resigned or creative and cheeky spirit? When, to judge by the quality of the Latin, was his heart in the doing, his imagination most engaged? When does the evidence permit us to perceive in him a sense of what his Latin-speaking tribe was doing at its rites of transition, its foundational rituals?

The paper seeks provisional answers to these questions by examining key instances. These range from his ostensibly perfunctory disputations through his ambitious declamations (both genres being obligatory ones), to philosophic verses where he overgoes the established formulae, to voluntary epitaphs, to verse of an incipient political consciousness (consonant with his later convictions) and yet equally to a ludic pastiche unparalleled in his later life. Which Milton is the real Milton?

All are. The tribal rituals and occasions empowered him to express divergent sides of his personality, some of them unfamiliar to us because seldom seen later. He expressed them on behalf of his then communitas. And if they are seen later at all, it is in those sporadic moments when he thinks proto-anthropologically. Ovid and Herodotus may be the major mentors, but he learnt to approach any text in this spirit. His fascinated observation of the festivals of Rome or Athens can be seen alongside his participation in Cambridge’s Latin rites of initiation. They should be viewed together because he himself used the one to explain the other.

David Hawkes
Lehigh University

"Alienated Labor and the ‘Hireling’ in Milton’s Theology"

In the 1650s, many radical polemicists devoted a great deal of attention to the identification and description of "hireling" priests. Milton’s The Likeliest Means to Remove Hirelings (1659) is the most famous instance of such literature, but it is one among many. The term "hireling" was generally used to condemn the clergy of any state church, for receiving tithes. In the mid-seventeenth century, tithes were generally defended on the grounds that they were wages, to which the minister was entitled in exchange for his labor. However, such a conception of tithes proved offensive to many radical Protestant sensibilities. Opposition to the sale of spiritual labor has historically been fundamental to Protestant theology, and it can be traced back to Martin Luther’s criticism of the sale of indulgences and Masses. In such cases, penitential or priestly labor is alienated, by virtue of being equated with a sum of money. The result, according to Luther, is a carnal and worldly attitude towards affairs which are properly spiritual. In other words, the alienation of labor effects an objectification of consciousness. Because of this, Luther, Milton and many other radical Protestants concluded that a "hireling" priest must inevitably prove an idolater––idolatry being the liturgical manifestation of carnality, or objectification.

The concept of the "hireling" also carried implications for the wider consequences of the alienation of spiritual labor. Such alienation was held to result in "works righteousness," or even in the opinion of the "Tradesman" described in Areopagtica, that religion was a "dividuall moveable" which can exist in alienated form, exterior to and apart from the person to whom it belongs. This paper argues that Milton takes Peter’s warning against priests who "through covetousness... with feigned words make merchandise of you" (2 Peter 2:3) seriously, and that he meditates on its precise significance throughout his career, from "Lycidas" through De Doctrina. As Milton argues in The Likeliest Means, to "make merchandise" of a human being is to commodify and thus to objectify them. The notion of objectification, or "carnality", is of central importance not only to Milton’s theology, but to seventeenth-century religious radicalism as a whole. This suggests the presence in such thought of a cogent and virulent critique of the market economy. The fact that this critique is usually undiscerned by modern critics implies that we need to reconsider our artificial and anachronistic dissociation of "economics" from "theology" when we study the polemical texts of this period.

Ken Hiltner
908 Union Mill Rd.
Mt. Laurel, NJ 08054
hiltner@clam.rutgers.edu

"Confusing Paradise Regained"

The question as to whether Christianity is at all compatible with the classical traditions it has been fused with needs to be careful considered.

Paul’s first letter to the Church at Corinth and Luther’s theologia crucis are not only, as recent scholarship has disclosed, sources for Heidegger’s early formulation of modern deconstruction, but direct attempts to undo Christianity’s fusion with the Greco-Roman-exalted Judaic traditions. I place Milton in the company of Paul and Luther in this deconstructive enterprise as Paradise Regained can be seen as a confusing text precisely because it con-fuses (stands against the fusion of) those of us born into an amalgam of the Christian, Greek, Roman, and exalted Judaic traditions. Though in looking past the crucifixion (the source of the deconstruction conceived by Paul and Luther) to Jesus’ temptation in the desert, Paradise Regained radicalizes the approach by holding that Jesus himself countered the prevailing Greco/Roman/exalted-Judaic juggernaut represented in the epic through the central temptations of Greek learning, Roman power, and the glorious Throne of David. In Paradise Regained we can actually see in Jesus the emergence of the paradigmatic Christian Self as a counter to Greek and Roman values: not until Satan offers distrust, power, glory, and a kingdom here does Jesus understand he must privilege trust, weakness, humiliation, and a kingdom not here. While Milton’s deconstruction has profound environmental significance as it places Christianity in the company of such Earth-friendly approaches as Native American spiritualism and the pagan practices of prehistory, the understanding of Christianity put forth in Paradise Regained has the added characteristic of actually being tailor-made (con-structed) to counter the Greco/Roman/exalted-Judaic mindset. To Milton, Christianity is not a disease infecting the Earth, it is a well-crafted cure.

Helen L. Hull
Meg F. Pearson
Erin A. Sadlack

"The Future of Milton on the Web?: Comus.edu"

When Jerome McGann wrote his "Rationale of Hypertext" in the early nineties, he sent out a call to the humanities scholar to explore the untapped potential of the Web, to utilize the new tools available for research. For the most part, that call has gone unheeded, especially in Milton studies. This is much to our detriment. While there are some sites, in particular The Milton Room and the John Milton Homepage, that have begun to edit texts for the web and link to other resources, Milton scholars have not yet grasped the extent to which the internet can revolutionize our work.

Recently, we decided to accept McGann’s challenge and experiment with how his ideas might transform a scholarly approach to one of Milton’s works, A Maske, by constructing a hypertext edition of the work. We found that in creating an edition designed for the internet, we began to think about both Milton’s text and our research in new ways. Multimedia capacity, limitless space, accessibility and navigability of texts all contribute to the inherent value of the internet. Such features represent particular value to Milton studies because of the sheer variety of the author’s texts and the interest in his composition process, as well as the immense quantity and diversity of his sources. A Maske, in particular, provides a unique opportunity for such a project due to its textual history and the fact that it has continually produced its own re-formations and re-presentations of literary genres and coventions in the years since its first production in 1634. We constructed the website with these aspects of the work in mind, seeking to provide scholars with access to the Trinity manuscript, the Bridgewater manuscript, and the 1637 and 1645 print editions of the text as well as with mechanisms that facilitate exploration and comparisons of A Maske’s different texts and with multimedia representations of the work’s various permutations. We would like to demonstrate briefly a few aspects of the site, explaining how we were able to achieve some of these goals.

However, we also want to suggest some of the ways the internet might further advance Milton scholarship. Working with both the capabilities and the limitations of cyberspace forces us to re-assess our assumptions about theories and methodologies inherent to a scholarship based in a codex culture. For example, the very nature of a hyperediting project shifts the emphases and goals of the editing process. While ultimately the comparison of the print revolution to the internet revolution is valid in many ways, in that both allow for increased access to resources, we believe that Milton scholars will find that the internet revolution is one that will carry us to concepts hitherto unimagined. In many cases the comparison between print and web tempts us to reproduce instead of reform, tying us to the fixed page rather than pushing us into the fluid realm of cyberspace. Our work with Milton’s A Maske indicates that it is no longer enough to simply reproduce the codex online. Learning to explore the internet’s potential benefit to our work can only transform humanities scholarship for the better.

Charles A. Huttar
Hope College
P.O. Box 9000
Holland, Michigan
huttar@hope.edu 

"C. S. Lewis, T. S. Eliot, and the Milton Legacy: The Nativity Ode Revisited"

C. S. Lewis’s Preface to "Paradise Lost" (1942) defended Milton against (among other criticisms) T. S. Eliot’s provocative charge of "bad influence." In his 1947 "retraction" Eliot acknowledged Lewis’s contributions (sometimes explicitly, sometimes tacitly) to a extent seldom realized. Most famously, he granted that times change and now, 25 years after The Waste Land, "study of [Milton’s] verse might at last . . . benefit . . . poets." In 1948 Lewis published "The Turn of the Tide," closely patterned after Milton’s Nativity Ode. Arguably, he offered thereby an example supporting Eliot’s hint that a poet can imitate Milton with profit.

Simultaneously, in his departures from Milton, Lewis offered his critique of the Nativity Ode. His mood is far removed from Milton’s celebratory pomp and high-flown rhetoric. Yet his theme is the same, he uses the structure of the Ode for a framework, and he adapts specific details. Both poets view the Incarnation as the turning point of history, but Lewis is firmly contemporary in idiom and in his handling of the theme. Like Milton, he expands the metaphor of "turning point" with reference to the winter solstice; unlike Milton, he treats it realistically, not allegorically, and his poem’s governing image is not the annual solstice but the diurnal occurrence named in the title (cf. line 44).

Lewis’s considerably shorter poem describes first the movement of the universe toward a standstill, then its reawakening: the tide turns. Several details parallel Milton’s poem unmistakably: among them, the sense of kairos, the cessation of war, the "smooth" waters, the "dumb" oracle, the heavenly music, the tableaux. Subtle similarities in rhythmic effects appear, although prosodically the poems are quite unlike, and rhetorically even more different: Milton’s is a rhetoric of public oratory, self-conscious and self-referential, laden with classical devices; Lewis’s, a quiet, private storytelling. Lewis avoids digressions, sudden turns, witty conceits, and any parade of learning. His handling of time is less complex than Milton’s. His diction is colloquial, realistic, strikingly modern. His method in handling the inanimate is mythopoeic, however, in contrast to the rationalism underlying Milton’s device of personification. His evocation of pagan deities develops one possibility latent in Milton’s work, where hints of regret temper triumphalism. Lewis treats positively Saturn and Diana, who find their true destiny within the new order.

Most accounts of the relationship between Lewis and Eliot reflect serious distortion. Eventually they became friends; already by 1948 Lewis had gotten past the antipathy he felt toward Eliot in the 1920s. He read Eliot’s poetry with insight, appreciation, and "admir[ation]"; even when attacking Eliot’s critical positions, he did not attack the man, but gave clear indications of feeling kinship with him on key issues.

Thus his Nativity poem could be viewed as a response in kind to Eliot’s conciliatory 1947 lecture. It exemplifies how to use Milton as a model for imagery and versification, as well as theme, while rejecting Milton’s example in language and rhetoric. Lewis avoided what a modern poet could, or should, not emulate but retained what he considered timeless, and thus he made (in Eliot’s words) "an old masterpiece actual" for contemporary readers..

Galen Johnson
John Brown University
Siloam Springs, Arkansas

"Things Already Attempted: Echoes of Paradise Lost in John Bunyan’s The Holy War"

John Bunyan’s The Holy War first appeared in print in 1682, fifteen years after the original edition of Milton’s Paradise Lost told "Things unattempted yet in Prose or Rhime" (1.16) and only eight years after the revised edition which Milton expanded into twelve books. The Holy War begins much as does Paradise Lost, with rebel angels debating in council how to avenge themselves and eventually agreeing to the suggestion of Satan/Diabolus that the despoilment of humanity—the city of Mansoul, in Bunyan’s case—would bring dishonor to God. But for Bunyan, these events comprise not a previously unattempted story but a familiar story retold. Bunyan does not claim that his record of the contest he describes between Shaddai and Diabolus for "the Losing and Taking again of the Town of Mansoul" (as his subtitle puts it) is original to him, for he prefaces, "What here I say, some men do know so well, / They can with tears and joy the story tell." However, it is because many think of the wars over Mansoul as being more "like old Fables, or such worthless things" that Bunyan hopes to re-present stock material in an attractive new allegorical format. Could Bunyan have been aware of Milton’s description of the war in Heaven and council in Hell and have been trying to retell the popular story with a more strictly evangelical purpose? While it may be impossible to prove with certainty that Bunyan’s affinities with Milton in The Holy War were born of familiarity with the older writer, there are enough natural comparisons between the two to judge any significance in how Bunyan’s approach to the war in Heaven and Satan’s retaliation did in fact retell Milton’s version.

Edward Jones
Oklahoma State University

"The Miltons at Hammersmith