The Pastoral

• Can be traced back to 3rd century BC
• conventionalized picture of rural life
• natural and innocence vs corruption and artificiality of city and court
• real vs ideal
• Yearning for golden age of innocence
• about shepherds but not written by them
• use shepherd world to present simple image of complex society
• social political religious criticism
• nostalgic
• written by those in cities
• innocence don't have in a corrupt world
• mythologised world
• Theocritus, Virgil
• Leisure which the townsmen attributes to countryman
• Corrupted by outsiders
• community harmony, value of peace
• shepherd piping and dancing
• The garden of Eden
• tradition from bible and virgil merged
• image of responsibility as shepherd
• garden of eden lost suddenly by sin whereas golden age fades gradually by time
• Wakefeild cycle - second shepherd play (medieval mystery plays)
• using pastoral for satire
• The Fairie Queen
• Milkmaid the english equivalent of french shepherdess
• As You Like It - exploring seriousness of pastoral, constant debate between pastoral and anti-pastoral
• The Winter's Tale - only marry shepherdesses if they are secretly daughters of the aristocracy
• Shepherd able to speak for common man
• The Sad Shepherd - Ben Jonson
• Happy Endings
• Milton  in comus and Paradise Lost

Milton's use of Landscape

Milton uses the natural setting of Paradise Lost to explore ideas of the naturalness of obedience to God, using the pastoral idyll, and the time period in which it is set to contrast to Satan’s manipulation of sin.

Milton uses the freshly created universe at his setting, thereby implying that the equilibrium at the start is how the earth was intended to be, using it to show his vision of God’s will. Milton sets Paradise Lost during the biblical book of Genesis when God created the ‘heavens and the earth’. Milton however, does not use the togetherness of heaven and earth that the ‘and’ in Genesis implies, instead using the delineations of heaven, earth and hell to set up a rigid hierarchy. The character of God does not appear in Book 9, with Milton not showing the conversations that Genesis says took place between God and humans, instead using the hierarchy he sets up to explain God’s position in his contemporary time. That Eve argues that ‘Heaven is high’ suggests that God feels far off to her, perhaps because once she has eaten the apple she loses her closeness with God, but the word ‘high’ also suggests his majesty and glory, with Milton perhaps suggesting the God is remote in his holiness, offering an explanation for why humans no longer had the same kind of connection with God in his time, when people went to church regularly but didn’t experience the same kind of spiritual encounters. The word ‘high’ also connotes that God is looking down on ‘earth’, with Milton setting up a hierarchy of rulers being untouchable by the common people, perhaps reaffirming the entrenched class system of his time. This however, would seem more to reflect a King with the ‘divine right’ to rule rather than the parliamentary system Milton served in, with Satan’s attempt to move up in the hierarchy both by attempting to overthrow God and leaving hell having disastrous consequences despite the fact he seems to be seeking a more democratic system where power is shared amongst ‘Gods’. However, Milton could equally be condemning people for criticizing the Government or the Church leaders, both of whom had been replaced in the Restoration. Therefore Milton’s setting Paradise Lost at the beginning of time implies a hierarchical system is natural and ordained by God.

Milton further explores how this perfect system is abused by showing Satan as manipulating the natural setting around him. Satan enters the garden as an outsider and yet is able to use it to lure Eve, not only by blending into his environment by taking over the body of a ‘snake’ but by using the natural elements around him in his plan. In his invocation Milton bemoans how the Garden’s ‘sweet flowers’ hid the ‘ambush’ waiting for mankind, with the word ‘flowers’ perhaps suggesting their ‘sweet’ scent hid the pungent odour of sin. Also as a feminine symbol Milton could perhaps be suggesting that woman’s ‘sweetness’ disguises the sin that she causes, with women at the time seen as temptresses much more interested in sex than men were. Similarly Satan lures Eve alone into the woods, with the extended semantic feild of the ‘mazes’ and Milton use of an epic metaphor which describes Satan as a ‘skillful steersman’ indicating that she may not be able to find her way out again. Also Milton compares Satan to a will o the wisp, suggesting that he is a supernatural and dangerous thing that has been introduced, connoting the more superstitious medieval age and that Eve is being lead astray without the knowledge that people had later on in the renaissance. Le Gallienne also explores the deceitfulness of nature, marvelling at how it’s ‘beauty’ can distort one’s ‘eyes’ from ‘life’s true bitterness and pain, with the word ‘net’ echoing the trap to which Satan is drawing Eve.  Milton doesn’t just show Satan’s effect on nature though, but sin itself, showing the Earth’s reaction when Eve commits the first sin. That it ‘wounds’ the earth suggests a permanence and a pain that can not be undone and that will always be remembered through the scar it leaves, meaning that the earth is no longer perfect and whole, starting the degeneration that Milton criticised in his own time whilst he was a pamphleteer, writing on varied subjects such as the church and divorce. The personification of nature as a ‘her’ sets the earth up as helpless and weak, unable to defend itself against sin, contrasting Earth’s passivity with Eve’s activeness as ‘she plucked, she ate’. The verbs strongly place the blame on Eve and emphasize the fact that they are irreversible, with the past tense used adding to this. This places earth as the victim and humankind as the wrongdoer, abusing their positions as ‘Lords’ of the earth. This could perhaps suggest that Milton thinks rulers have a duty to look after their subjects, or that nature must be respected, although alternatively it could represent the harm sin does to the innocence of the human soul. Hence, Milton’s explanation of how nature can be abused can be seen as a rallying call against temptation and being lead stray by the devil, with humankind being seen as naturally good but in need of constant diligence.

Furthermore, Milton’s use of the pastoral continues his warning against the unnaturalness of sinful acts, presenting God’s natural way as the way to serenity. Satan emerges from the corrupt city of Bedlam in Hell to the ‘worthier seat of the gods’ that is earth, with his longest soliloquy focusing on earth’s beauty and how it makes him question his plan for ‘revenge’.  Adam and Eve could perhaps be the shepherd and shepherdess living in harmony, although they tend the garden rather than sheep, but that they enjoy this task is perhaps shown in Eve’s eagerness to do it more efficiently, calling it ‘pleasant’, not wanting anything to ‘intervene’ in their labour’. Hence Milton seems to suggest that a life at one with nature is what God intended, with Satan’s residence in hell therefore being the perversion of everything God wanted. This criticism of the city could also link to the criticism of modernity, with the city being a manmade invention associated with sin, and it is significant that as soon as Adam and Eve sin they look for somewhere to ‘lie’ so that they can have sex. This perhaps relates to the association of sinful behaviour with the city, and cities fame for prostitutes, with London St James’s park being particularly well known as a haven for vice. The sinfulness of modernity could perhaps relate to the sinfulness of the tree of knowledge, as modernity can only advance with knowledge, with Milton perhaps advocating innocence as a way to be free from sin. In ‘August Moonlight’ the narrator also finds respite in nature, remarking on how the ‘cricket’ ‘’rose’ and ‘butterfly’ lead him away from his existential crisis, and yet in Paradise Lost Milton does not put enough strength in nature to allow it to dissuade any of his characters from sinning. Therefore Milton could perhaps be criticising how far he saw contemporary Restoration society from nature as being, perhaps because of the Restoration leading to the reopening of the theatres and many festivals and parties which were very unpuritanical. Hence Milton continues his warning, wishing for a return to the Lord’s ways.

In conclusion Milton uses his natural setting to contrast the way in which he sees God as having ordained things to be to the way things become when sin enters people and the world, criticising those who go against God’s natural order and advocating a return to his way.

Love in Paradise Lost

3.  “One way or another, poetry always seems to be concerned with love.” How far do you agree with this view?

Both Gascoigne and Milton examine the fidelity of love, and the power it has over one’s action, though while Gascoigne focuses primarily on the love between a man and a woman, Milton goes on to inquire into the relationship between God and Man, and the effect of love for one’s self.

Milton looks into the love between Adam and Eve, putting it at the heart of his poem by involving it in the dilemma of the fall. Book 9 of Paradise lost shows the scope of Adam and Eve’s relationship, with their lovingness turning into lust after the fall,with Milton noting this change’s catastrophic effect on their relationship. Before the fall they are ‘handed’, merged together and completely united, with this ‘handedness’ not only illustrating their closeness but also their equality, going through life as one. Later however, Adam ‘seizes’ Eve’s ‘hand’, with the violent and commanding implications of the word ‘seized’ indicating the effect of lust on their relationship, with love turning to desperation, and they make love on top of Eve’s beloved ‘flowers’, perhaps connoting that their behaviour destructs the natural way ordained by God. Milton however complicates this, as Eve ‘withdraws’ her hand from Adam’s before the fall, seeking separation in order to labour better as their ‘discourse’ and ‘smiles’ distract her from her work. This could illustrate the contemporary Restoration shift to women having more ability to work, and women such as Celia Feinnes who visited every county in England riding alone on horseback, wanting more freedom, although it could also express a desire about the infidelity of women. Indeed as Eve is without Adam she could be seen as being wooed by Satan who flatters her ‘divine beauty’ whereas in Gascgoine’s poem the ‘doubt’ originates from the narrator’s female lover, with him rejecting the other ‘fish’ in the ‘Sea’. Eve however, does not spurn Satan, with his courtly lover language matching that of Adam’s, and the fact that he stands ‘erect’ before her having phallic implications. Adam’s fidelity however is never in question, as Milton makes it clear that he falls for Eve, calling it a ‘trial of love’ much as a courtly lover would compete for his lady and be ready to die for her. Here then, Milton could be seen as echoing male writers long lament of the constancy of men’s love in comparison to women’s, or at least the resistance of women to submit to their place in a relationship as Eve refuses to heed Adam’s warning about the ‘danger’ that might await her, and how she would be better off near his ‘strength’. Either way, Milton bemoans the loss of the pure love that Adam and Eve once shared, with the radical change showing Milton’s readers the bitter consequences of sin.

The other source of infidelity is that of humankind to God, with the breach of this love at the heart of Milton’s poem. He begins Book 9 immediately saying that there is ‘no more’ of the relationship that once existed between ‘God and Man’ where they once shared ‘venial discourse unblam’d’. The word ‘discourse’ suggests genteelness, learning but also discussion, with man and God talking ‘venially’ as friends. The fact that Eve says that their ‘reason is their law’ could perhaps even connote that God didn’t have to rule over them, with no laws being needed as Adam and Eve wouldn’t have contemplated evil. The character of God however, does not feature in the book, with no divine intervention preventing Adam and Eve from disobeying God, which could be seen as undermining the closeness that Milton tries to suggest they had, or could be shown as God allowing them to make their choice, with Milton perhaps examining the worth of love if it is false, with God giving them freedom to test their love. Milton’s contemporary audience would have been aware of the commandment to ‘Love the Lord your God above all else’, with Eve and Adam’s failure to do so being their downfall. Gascoigne’s narrator seems more dependable than that, but only because of the foolishness of ‘wishing’ that you could have all the fish in the sea for oneself ‘alone’ rather than because of his undying love. That he knows that it is futile to ‘wish’ does not diminish the fact that the word connotes that having many women would be something to be wished for, with him only containing himself because he knows that it would be ‘in vaine’. Adam and Eve however do not remain faithful, with Eve loving herself more and Adam loving her more, with Adam’s ‘glorious trial of love’ for Eve having implications that love for her is ‘glorious’ when in fact Milton shows that God has the ‘glory’. Hence while Adam is undergoing a trial he chooses the wrong lover to fight for and threatening the rest of mankind’s relationship with God. Milton therefore seems to urge his readers to rexamine their love for God and to put it before all else, unlike Adam and Eve who reject him and lose all the closeness they once had with their maker.

Milton shows that love of the self is an obstacle to love of God, and a damning force. Both Satan and Eve are driven to breaking away from God because of their wish to become ‘gods’ themselves, with vanity and arrogance driving them away from him. Satan’s wish to have the ‘glory sole’ connotes that he fights for himself alone, as although he has freed the ‘angelic multitude’ he will be the ‘sole’ glorious one, taking the place of God and perhaps having the same ‘adorers’ as God. Likewise he persuades Eve to think better of herself, calling her ‘divine’ and fit to ‘rise’ up to be amongst ‘Gods who will properly appreciate her. Satan coaxes the same forces of vanity and love of the self in her as have motivated him to try to rise up. That Milton chooses Eve, not Adam, to fall for this flattery perhaps reflects common contemporary beliefs in women’s only use being in their beauty, though it could also be argued that Eve wants ‘superiority’ and more for herself because at the moment she is ‘inferior’, with Adam not feeling the same need to be appreciated because he is already at the top of the human hierarchy. That would therefore shift the blame for Eve’s want to better herself onto God, but Milton combats this by making his universe a resolutely meritocratic one, with Adam being above Eve as he has more ‘reason [and] strength’ whereas as Eve has only ‘beauty’. There can be little wonder then, in how Satan is able to use Eve’s only strength to manipulate her, with the ‘fairness’ of her fruit matching her own ‘fairness’. However, Milton make Eve repeat God’s commandment as soon as she sees the tree, showing that she has full knowledge of how it will cause ‘death’, so that the reader knows that she is fully informed and has complete responsibility for her downfall, choosing her own wish to become a ‘God’ over loving and obeying the God who made her. The wish to become a ‘God could be seen as disregarding God’s purpose for Eve and Satan’s lives, or as idolatry, with both upsetting God’s ordained order , building up suspense in the reader about God’s reaction to this having already heard about Satan’s punishment. Gascoignes’ narrator is similarly aware of the consequences of pursuing to many women, with their boats becoming stuck, with this being mirrored in Milton’s probable condemnation of the personal life of Charles II who was famous for his parties and womanising, his hedonistic lifestyle putting his own wishes for pleasure above religious ones.  Similarly Eve and Satan’s love of themselves and wish to promote their own wishes is shown to contradict God’s wishes and to interfere in the relationship between them. Therefore Milton seems to show how love can be a dangerous force hen directed in the wrong way, hinting that the self must be subjected to God and all one’s life devoted to serving him out of love, showing the reader the terrible consequences of diverging from the plans of their loving God.

In conclusion then, Milton examines how love can go wrong, condemning infidelity and love of the self, and advising his religious audience to put the love of God before all else despite living in the increasingly vain and self-centred world of the Restoration.

Critics on Milton

Milton and the Place of  English

Milton is the awkward member of the pantheon of the three great English writers [the others being Chaucer and Shakespeare]. He gained his status for a number of reasons but principally for achieving what he set out to do to – to write of  ‘things unattempted yet in prose or rime’.

To understand the importance of Milton we have to understand how he established English as a language capable of matching other languages’ ability to handle the most complex of human perceptions and experiences through the medium of the epic – the highest form of poetry.  Historically, English was not a major European language. Amongst the learned, Latin, of course, was supreme but it was no longer used creatively. The mediaeval and early renaissance periods had seen a flowering of vernacular literatures across Europe – an expression of a diversity of regional or national cultures: in England, Chaucer bore the prize, establishing the dialect of the East Midlands spoken in London as the principal dialect of English laying the foundations of what would become modern Standard English. Although there was cultural cross-fertilisation in Europe, it tended to be, so far as English was concerned, a case of borrowing rather than lending. Hence Chaucer used various French sources in his writing, but it was Italy that was regarded as the cultural centre of Europe.  Chaucer owed much more to the writings of the Italian Boccaccio whose Decameron provided the source of three tales – the Clerk’s, the Franklin’s and the Shipman’s – as well as the general structure of the series of tales told by a variety of tellers. Chaucer then, like Milton after him, was culturally cosmopolitan, reading his contemporaries in Europe as well as having a classical education and a deep understanding of the writings of ancient philosophers and poets.

Italian, too, had produced three major epics. Two were based on knightly exploits: Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso [1516] is a rather ironic romance in episodes following the wanderings and trials of its hero, Orlando; Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata [1581] is a more solemn account of the crusades to the Holy Land. The most influential epic, however, was Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy [1314], an account of the author’s dream-journey through heaven, hell and purgatory. It is interesting to note that Milton’s original project – The Arthuriad – was to have matched the knightly quest convention of Ariosto; but that he abandoned it for the supreme task of ‘justifying the ways of God to men’ – closer in intention to that of Dante. A language that could manage that had surely come of age. So, for the English, Milton became a matter of national pride – the author who gave the language international status.  

1 Did Milton write in English?

But it was a status that was not unproblematic. Whereas it is comparatively easy to see how, linguistically, there is a continuum in the English of Chaucer and Shakespeare and the language we now speak, that is less obviously so in the case of Milton. The principal criticism can be parodied by the statement that ‘Milton does not write English’.

T.S. Eliot [Milton I 1936]

.… the serious charges to be made against him [are] the peculiar deterioration to which he subjected the language.

Milton writes English like a dead language. The criticism has been made with regard to his involved syntax. But a tortuous style, when its peculiarity is aimed at precision, is not necessarily a dead one; only when the complication is dictated by a demand of verbal music, instead of any demand of sense.

To extract everything possible from Paradise Lost, it would seem necessary to read it in two different ways, first solely fir the sound, and second for the sense. The full beauty of his long periods [i.e. sentences] can hardly be enjoyed while we are wrestling with the meaning as well….

T.S. Eliot [Milton II, 1947]

In this article, Eliot has revised his position. Whereas in 1936 he had seen Milton’s language as a dangerous path – a deviation from the nature of English, by 1947 he sees Milton as a necessary conservative, preventing too rapid change in language and in its poetic uses.

Modern poetry will have much to learn from Milton’s extended verse structure; it might also avoid the danger of a servitude to colloquial speech and to current jargon. It might also learn that the music of verse is strongest in poetry which has a definite meaning expressed in the properest words. Poets might be led to admit that acknowledged of the literature of their own language, with a knowledge of the literature and the grammatical construction of other languages, is a very valuable part of the poet’s equipment. And they might … devote some study of  Milton as … the greatest master in our language of freedom within form… In studying Paradise Lost we come to perceive that the verse is continuously animated by the departure from, and return to, the regular measure [i.e. rhythm].

F.R. Leavis [‘Milton’s Verse’, in Revaluation, 1936]

The great Cambridge critic, F.R. Leavis, shared Eliot’s earlier view of the unnaturalness of Milton’s English.

Even in the first two books of Paradise Lost, where the myth [of the fall of Satan] has vigorous life and one can admire the magnificent invention that Milton’s verse is, we feel, after a few hundred lines, our sense of dissatisfaction growing into something stronger. … We find ourselves protesting against the routine gesture, the heavy fall, of the verse, flinching from the foreseen thud that comes so inevitably, and, at last, irresistibly: from reading Paradise Lost is a matter of resisting, of standing up against, the verse-movement, of subduing it to something tolerably like sensitiveness, and in the end out resistance is worn down; we surrender at last to the inescapable monotony of the ritual.

Donald Davie Syntax and Music in Paradise Lost

Davie argues that one of the strongest [‘muscular’ is the word he uses] effects Milton deploys is a kinetic one – one that creates a sense of movement. He uses I.44-49 ‘Him the Almighty … Onmipotent to Arms’ and II.939-50 ‘Quenched in a bog … or creeps, or flies’ as evidence. He is arguing that the poetry enacts the state it is describing. He also, implicitly, assumes that we are reading the poem aloud to hear the music.

Of the first extract he comments: We occupy in ourselves the gestalt  [roughly ‘total experience greater than the sum of its parts’] of the falling.

Of the second he comments: Milton crowds stressed syllables together so as to make the vocal exertion in reading imagine the physical exertion described. It is the reader, too, who flounders, stumbles, pushes doggedly on. Just as skilful, though less conspicuous, is the way un which line-break, punctuation and metre  combine to make ‘Half flying’ act out, in our speaking of the words, the abbreviated and ungainly flap which they describe.

Although ‘dramatic’ is an inadequate word, it is still the right word for these felicities, because what they do is to force us to participate in the situation and the actions described; we no longer merely observe these, in imagination we suffer them, ourselves embroiled.

Davie offers criticism of the way in which Milton breaks the narrative flow of the plot by looking to the future. He cites examples of Satan’s confrontation with Death [II 720-722] and when he launches into Chaos [II 1021-1028]. He also criticises Milton’s practice of introducing digression into ‘arcane knowledge’ – such as the account of Galileo’s telescope: Davie comments:

… because the overt structure of Paradise Lost is narrative, and because of the speculative learning encrusted upon its every angle, this consistent disruption of the present time inevitably distracts the reader’s attention from the poem as narrative to the poem as encyclopaedia.

If one of the major critical interests of Milton is his use of English, another is that of his allegiance.

William Blake [1757-1827] famously wrote:

The reason Milton wrote in fetters [= chains i.e. Milton was inhibited] when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devil’s party without knowing it.

Interestingly, Blake’s evidence lies in the vitality of language. He sees Milton creatively engaged when dealing with Satan and evil in a way he claims is lacking when he deals with God.

This comment would have surprised – scandalised – Milton who, though heterodox in his views on Christianity, was a believer. He accepted the omnipotence and omniscience of God and the belief in free will as the foundation of the interaction between God and humankind – though he did not accept the doctrines of the Trinity or of predestination.

William Empson [1906-1984]

Empson was a mathematics undergraduate at Cambridge in the 1920s who, while pursuing his avowed subject, wrote a book on the nature of English poetry – Seven Types of Ambiguity – shortly before being sent down from university after a condom was found in his rooms. He subsequently published Milton’s God – the most stimulating study of Paradise Lost. His argument was that, in dealing with Satan, Milton had to give him an intellectual consistency and integrity. This is not necessarily the same as saying that Milton was on Satan’s side. In other words, as is true in all literature, a distinction should be maintained between author and character. One example Empson uses is the description of God as ‘Almighty’ using Satan’s third grand speech in Book I.242-270.

Satan calls God ‘Almighty’ … but Milton expects the reader to impute a tone of irony, because Satan is retorting upon God a familiar accusation against himself [i.e. a word used by God to quell Satan]; he may also mean to express doubt whether God created Hell, but in any case he sneers at the metaphysical meaning of ‘Almighty’ while accepting the common one*:

                                                th’ Almighty hath not built

                        Here for his envy, will not drive us hence: [260]

I am not denying, what Milton regularly asserts, that Satan fell out of pride and envy; but as Satan believes God to be a usurper he genuinely does believe him to be envious. As soon as we waive out metaphysical presumptions [i.e. when we work outside the terms given by orthodox Christian belief] we easily recognise that the motivation will be complex as in human affairs. In another case, resisting Charles I for example, the emotional forces actuating Satan could have made him work for the public good with increasingly public-spirited sentiments. As has often been pointed out, he is in the wrong solely because of an intellectual error [i.e. he mistook the true nature of God. In other words He was really ‘Almighty’ and not simply ironically so]; and we are ill-equipped to dell certain that we ourselves, in his place, would have decided rightly from the right motives.

*[note: Earlier in the argument, Empson had seen Beelzebub’s use of the word ‘Almighty’ to mean simply ‘stronger than us’ because God had defeated them and therefore, militarily rather than metaphysically He was ‘almighty’.]

3 Kingship and Rebellion

A third area that has engaged critics and historians is Milton’s politics and his adherence to the Republican party against the Royalist. That he held the position of Latin Secretary to Cromwell made him, in modern terms, a high-ranking civil servant, but one whose politics were largely in line with those of the Commonwealth Government. His imprisonment after the Restoration of Charles II in 1660 and the threat of a traitor’s death indicate his standing.

Christopher Hill

The pre-eminent historian of the Commonwealth period of English history is Christopher Hill. In his ‘Paradise Lost’ and the English Revolution he sought to tease out the seeming political contradictions within the poem, principally the significance of Satan’s rebellion against God and how it might reflect the politics to which Milton  had devoted his life – and which in 1660 threatened to take his life.

Satan, Hill argues, cannot be simply identified with Charles I. Hill argues that the qualities of pride and ambition are principally human weaknesses. Satan, therefore, reflects humankind misled. He identifies Satan with those plotting to restore Charles II; but he also sees characteristics of the self-seeking republicans whom he observed at close quarters – the major-generals.

Hill argues that Milton did not oppose revolt against authority in itself, but that the defeat of The Good Old Cause of republicanism made him reflect on what form resistance should take.

So far as God is concerned, there could be no equivalence in Satan’s revolt against Him and the Republicans’ revolt against Charles I or the plottings of the Royalists seeking the return of Charles II. Hill warns us against trying to make a simple correlation between the events of the Commonwealth and the events in Paradise Lost. Keep this in mind as you read Hill’s argument.

Milton and the English Revolution, (1977) pp. 365-75

The political allusions in Paradise Lost, veiled though they had to be, are not indecipherable. The poem was no doubt planned as a whole before the Restoration of May 1660. Nevertheless there must have been a break in 1660, when Milton was in danger of his life and had to go into hiding; and a further interruption when he was in prison. It would have been dangerous for friends to visit his hiding-place for the sole purpose of taking down from his dictation, and impossible when he was imprisoned. The invocation to Book VII suggests a fresh start, under more difficult circumstances; the conjecture that Books I to VI were written (at least in first draft) before the Restoration, Books VII to XII after it, appears to be borne out by the evidence of style, which links the last six books with Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes more closely than with the first six books. But 'I sing ... unchanged' (VII. 24) may also be intended to recall to the fitter audience for whom Paradise Lost was written the John Milton whom they knew as the defender of divorce, regicide and the republic.

There is a shift of emphasis in the last six books of the epic. Until April 1660 the revolutionaries still held power, however insecurely. The Royalists had been defeated, although they were desperately scheming revenge. In Books I and II Satan is wrong but grandly wrong. His attempt 'against the omnipotent to rise in arms' (VI. 136) seemed as absurd as a Royalist attempt to reverse the verdict of history! But after May 1660 Satan was not trying vainly to recover power in England: he had won it. His degradation in the second half of the epic is the greater because of Milton's disgusted realisation of the power and influence of evil. It is paralleled by the stepping forward of the Creator-Son and the withdrawal of the impersonal Father. We should not then see Satan just as the apotheosis of rebellion. One subject of Paradise Lost is indeed rebellion, but Milton had himself been a rebel; he wanted now to know where he and his fellows had been mistaken, what kind of rebellion was justified and what not.

Satan, no less than Christ, is a king. His approach to Eve is a parody of the rituals of courtly love at Henrietta Maria [wife of Charles I]’s court. Satan was 'by merit raised' to kingship in hell, as the Son had been in heaven. The analogy with the Son is stressed throughout. Sin, Death and Satan are the infernal Trinity: I see no reason why Milton should not parody this concept, in which he himself did not believe. In the early books Satan's 'grandeur' and 'ruined splendour' predominate. But Satan is also an Asiatic tyrant, associated with Turkish despotism (X. 457) - as Charles I had been in Eikonoklastes. Since 1649 another group of men had been called Turkish bashaws - Cromwell's Major-Generals. It is not unlikely that there is something of them in the fallen angels. The latter are not mere personifications of evil. They were angels of light who have rejected the light. As Northrop Frye says, 'into Satan Milton has put all the horror and distress with which he contemplated the egocentric revolutionaries of his time', whose romantic rhetoric had got them – and those who trusted them – nowhere.

If, among other things, the character of Satan alludes to some of the ways in which the Good Old Cause [i.e. The Republic] had gone wrong, it is to be expected that he will contain a good deal of Milton, who recognised that he too was not without responsibility for its failure. Milton's intellect now told him that he must accept God's will, if only because the Father is omnipotent: but his Submission to the events of 1655-60 [a period in which Milton grew disillusioned with Cromwell’s move towards kingly pretensions] was highly reluctant. Satan, the battleground for Milton's quarrel with himself, saw God as arbitrary power and nothing else. Against this he revolted: the Christian, Milton knew, must accept it. Yet how could a free and rational individual accept what God had done to his servants in England? On this reading, Milton expressed through Satan (of whom he disapproved) the dissatisfaction which he felt with the Father (whom intellectually he accepted).

Milton does not identify with Satan and the rebel angels, who embody and criticise the defects of the military leaders of the Revolution, as well as –  more obviously – of the Royalists. The essence of Satan is his selfish ambition. Jealousy of the exaltation of the Son caused his rebellion. As Defoe observed, Milton gave no real explanation of Satan's fall; it is taken as given from the start of the poem. The exaltation of the Son is one of Milton's inventions, and it appears to be a late insertion in the epic: it is not in the Bible, the commentaries or –  still more significant –  in the De Doctrina [Milton’s declaration of his religious beliefs]. Milton seems to have invented it in order to have an unexplained divine decree leading to the fall of the angels analogous to that which led to the Fall of Man, so as to reinforce the parallel between earth and heaven. Angels, like men, elect their own salvation. This is Arminian doctrine. Milton endowed Satan with conscience (IV. 23) and appears to envisage the possibility of his repenting (IV. 71-104). This too must be intended to stress the analogies between him and mankind.

Satan has freedom without self-discipline, dynamic energy and driving individualism with no recognition of limits. 'Satan has more to say about liberty than any other character in Paradise Lost. Milton had heard the name of liberty bandied about a good deal by either side during the civil war.' Satan's kind of liberty, like the Ranters' kind, became licence - and so ceased to be truly free. Satan also has much to say about equality (Paradise Lost, I. 248-9).

This approach enables us to admit a great deal of Milton in Satan without reviving the view of Blake, Shelley, Belinsky – all romantic radicals, we note –  that Satan is the hero of Paradise Lost, or that he is the first Whig. Satan is heroic: as heroic as Milton still thinks the English Revolution had been. But the Revolution had utterly failed. It had failed because the men were not great enough for the Cause. Satan had always been a rebel for the wrong reasons - self interest, jealousy, ambition. Like Muggleton's Satan, Milton's personified selfish Reason. As early as 1641 Milton had been arguing that the selfishness and greed which were mixed up with the motives of the original reformers did not destroy the value of the Protestant Reformation. Now perhaps he saw deeper. We must, however, not take Milton's condemnation of Satan as condemnation of rebellion, any more than we should take his acceptance of a hierarchy of being from man up to God as acceptance of a traditional social hierarchy of 'degree'. Milton's is a hierarchy of virtue, of merit. In Paradise Lost Adam increases in virtue as Satan decreases; in Paradise Regained Christ grows in merit. Only God's virtue is by definition absolute: that is why he must be obeyed.

Nevertheless the magnificent Satan of the early books of the epic does convey some of the defiance which Milton himself must have felt tempted to hurl in the face of omnipotence as the republic crashed about his ears. The rebellious energy ebbs in the later books, after the restoration of Charles II has brought Milton to recognise the full magnitude of the rethinking that is required. Perhaps Milton felt that he and his peers had been too tolerant of the Satanic fellow travellers of the Revolution. God, after all, is not only King of the English Commonwealth, he is also the historical process: what he wills is fate. So Satan is a rebel against history itself, not someone Milton can identify with. In the De Doctrina Milton began his list of the sins involved in the Fall of Man with credulity in Satan and lack of confidence in God; it ends with deceit, aspiration to divinity, pride and arrogance. Presumptuous aspiration, use of the wrong means, pride and arrogance: they are the vices against which Milton and other radicals had warned Oliver Cromwell and his generals. Deceit: like Dalila quoting,

                   that grounded maxim

So rife and celebrated in the mouths

Of wisest men, that to the public good

Private respects must yield;

         (Samson Agonistes, 11. 865-8)

or like Cromwell pleading 'public reason just, / Honour and empire', to justify an aggressive foreign policy. (Milton underlined the point for contemporaries by referring to Satan's use of 'necessity, / The tyrant's plea' in the following lines. The phrase recalled accusations that Cromwell made necessities in order to plead them e.g. by Joseph Beaumont in Psyche (1648), and by George Cony, an old Parliamentarian stalwart, when refusing to pay taxes to Cromwell: Cony himself was echoing Hampden's lawyer in the Ship Money Case [one of the causes of the rebellion against Charles I – the imposition of arbitrary taxation], and Hampden was Cromwell's cousin. In Book V Satan plans to recover power 'by violence, no, for that shall be withstood, / But by deceit and lies' (V. 242-4).

The Satanic Parliament gave Milton the chance to stress what was most lacking in 1658-60 - unity among the defenders of the Good Old Cause:

O shame to men! Devil with devil damned

Firm concord holds, men only disagree

Of creatures rational, though under hope

Of heavenly grace: and God proclaiming peace

Yet live in hatred, enmity and strife

Among themselves, and levy cruel wars,

Wasting the earth, each other to destroy:

As if (which might induce us to accord)

Man had not hellish foes enough besides

That day and night for his destruction wait.

                                                                           (II.496-505)

[Even at the heart of democracy – Parliament – Hill detects a disillusionment with the way it operated during the Commonwealth, though not with the institution itself.

Hill, later in his book, makes the case for the unrecognised success of the Commonwealth period. The Restoration may have returned the monarchy, but it was a very different institution to the pre-Commonwealth one. Charles I had tried to assert an absolutist position – ruling by decree and without Parliament. Charles II, having learned from his father’s fate was happier as a bourgeois monarch, a position that was consolidated after the expulsion of his own son James II in the Glorious Revolution of 1688 which brought Mary and William to the throne as joint monarchs.]

Note: Hill deals with the historical context. Remember, however, that Paradise Lost is not a political manifesto. It is a piece of literature speaking about universal concerns. 

Claire Tomalin

'a man possessed by natural and human beauty, by dreams, myths and legends, a man full of ideas that are sometimes in conflict with one another; who was prepared to give up his vocation as a poet for years in order to serve a political cause; and who overcame blindness to write his greatest work, full of exquisitely imagined scenes'

Milton makes you think, provokes you into arguments about power, good and evil, about responsibility, innocence and the right to knowledge. He shows God forbidding this right, but we remember that Milton had himself defended it furiously in his essay on the freedom of the press, "Areopagitica". The clash between Milton the Renaissance humanist and Milton the faithful servant of God makes things interesting.

One of Milton's characteristic effects is to collide Christian and pagan imagery and legend. Eve is compared to a wood-nymph in Diana's service. Raphael arrives in the garden of Eden like the god Mercury, shaking his plumes and giving out "Heavenly fragrance".

Dr Johnson felt there was 'gigantick loftiness' about his poetry

Joseph Hazlitt felt that Milton's imagination could melt down "as in a furnace, the most contradictory materials"

Randeep Ramesh

Milton's Satan was loosely modelled on Oliver Cromwell, a compromised figure who had led a de facto benevolent dictatorship where discussion and argument substituted for true freedoms in a political democracy. Milton had been left bitter after Cromwell failed to empower people and deliver the country from the tyranny of the king. Today Britain has to decide not whether it wants to get rid of a divine monarchy but whether it wishes to overthrow a divine market.

Like Satan, whose fallen angels ultimately lose to God, the Restoration triumphed over Cromwell's puritan party. In many ways Paradise Lost is a literary rendition of today's political argument for the status quo: There Is No Alternative. Now the question is not whether the country would choose enslavement to the throne but whether it remains bonded to an almost biblical belief in the benefits of deregulated markets. This market theology not only caused the Great Crash of 2008, it has also spread both greater inequalities and a higher degree of economic insecurity in our lives for decades.

The fall of humankind through the temptation of Eve is paralleled by an economically ravaged people being seduced and falling again for free-market policies that will leave them leading poorer and more precarious lives.

J. B. Broadbent: a comfortably pessimistic survey of world history

Jonathan Richardson (1734): "'Tis Adam, Adam the first, the representative of human race. He is the hero in this poem.... The business of it is to conduct man through a variety of conditions of happiness and distress, all terminating in the utmost good: from a state of precarious innocence through temptation, sin, repentance, and finally a secure recumbency upon . .. the Supreme Good by the mediation of his Son."

Merritt Y. Hughes Milton's Adam surrendered to Divine Justice, Mercy, and Love. Seen in the light of history as equivalent to attainment of an ideal resembling Platonic or Aristotelian temperance, to which all violence and excess are opposite, or as equivalent to modern man's intellectually disciplined submission to the phvsical and social principles of life, the attainment of the mood of the last dialogues and the prayers of Adam and Eve in Book X seemed to Tillyard to be no less a crisis-a turning point in the medical sense of the word-than their Fall in Book IX

Heroic virtue is a divine attribute which can be shared by men and even by angels only as long as they are true images of God himself. By this severe logic, Adam ceases to be heroic when he loses the divine image after the Fall. What was intended is an ever-refining idea of heroism.
It is a part of Milton's own "long choosing" of his "Subject for Heroic Song," to settle at last upon the "fortitude / Of Patience and Heroic Martyrdom / Unsung" rather than the dissection of "fabl'd Knights / In Battels feign'd"-"hitherto the onely Argument / Heroic deem'd" (IX.26-32). His literary experience complements Adam's discovery that "renown on Earth" is poor material for history. The upshot might seem to be Saurat's view of Milton as his own ironically unconscious hero.

Tillyard suggested that Eve wanted Adam to coax, her, say how much he loved her then put his foot down, Eve being coquettish

Fredson Bowers sees Adam as the embodiment of reason whilst Eve is the embodiment of passion

Joan S Bennett

• Liberty as the goal of contemporary revolutionaries
• For Milton, no law was to be obeyed because it was a law eg breaking sabbath to heal the sick
• Dilemma or knowing what is holy spirit and what is own desire