Milton - Paradise Lost

What did the 1667 edition of PL exclude

paratext, no courtly apparatus. no indicats pf sort of poem, no genre label. 10 books = Pharsalia, Camoes’s 10 book Lusiads.

reissued 1668 and 1669 with prose arhs and a note on verse. 1674 reissued in 12 book form = Virgilian - ambience of CHalres; restoration - engraved protrait of author, commendatory latin poems, defense by Marvell  

What does Marvell say about Milton’s impact on the genre in his commendatory verse added for the 1674 edition of PL

‘so that no room is here for writers left.’

How does Milton describe rhyme in his prefatory material ‘The Verse’

‘the invention of a barbarous age … the troublesome and modern bondage of rhyming.’

Burrow - wat is Milton’s principal concern

1993 - ‘duties and bonds which link creations to their creators’

PL and the muse

‘sing heavenly muse’ - Moses (genesis)

B7 - Urania

Loewenstein - God of paradise = like angry parents with the Son in B3

2010 - ‘the God of Paradise Lost is a deity of emotions’

What does Milton believe about free will

Radical Arminianism - rejects the calvinist determinism prevailing in orthodox protestant theology.

Adam to Eve about free will B9

‘God left free the will, for what obeys/ reason, is free’

Quotes suggesting JM wants to equal or surpass ancients

‘Soar above th’ Aonian Mount’

‘Things unattempted yet in Prose or Rime’

‘not less but more heroic’

What did Thomas Newton say that PL contained

seeds of epic destruction

JM primacy - reflect opening of aeneid

‘of mans first disobedience’

Satan speaking with lexis of war against Adam B9 - irony bc no actual fight occurs. refuses to fight Gabriel and flees from the Son in B10

‘Foe not informidable exempt from wound/ I not’

Snakification B10

‘down their arms,/ down fell both spear and shield’

Burrow - Milton and epic origins

1993 - ‘makes the epic vanish into its own origins’

How is Satan like Achilles

‘fixed mind/ and high disdain’ (B1) - echoes Achilles B9 embassy

BUT unlike Achilles suffers defeat - recoils from Abdiel, writhing in pain from Michael B6.

How is S like Aeneas

B10 ‘star bright’ = Aeneas before Dido B1 clarus - signalled by latin adj ‘flulgent; B10 - cognate of verb given to Aen B1 refulgeo

also cf. Eve like Dido - temptation. natural world reaction to temptation echoes world when Dido and Aeneas quasi-marriage. S like Venus? worse?

How is S also like Odysseus

Wanderer - but his ‘dark Illimitable ocean’ B2 worse than O’s as ‘time and place are lost’

How does S pervert role of knighst in romantic gardens

‘the fiend/ saw undelighted all delight’ B4

speajs to E in the language of renaissance love poetry

How is S like a perverted St George

becoming dragon ‘constrained/ into a beast, and mixed with bestial slime’ 9. 

JM anti war

‘not sedulous by nature to indite wars’ B9

Eve and Ovid’s Narcissus B4 - Met 3

would have ‘pined with vain desire,/ had not a voice thus warned me’

lead to Adam ‘whose image thou art’

What does the angelic rebellion lead to

B6 ‘horrid confusion’ of civil war.

Son as true hero B7

‘girt with omnipotence, with radiance crowned’.

B9 tragedy

‘now must change these notes to tragic’

PL end B12 - A and E become human

‘some natural tears they dropped, but wiped them soon’

PL B1 - darkness

‘what in me is dark illumine’

B4 Adam and Eve gender - diff hair, Eve ‘veil’, A broad.

‘He for god only, she for god in him’

Politics postlapsarian adam and eve

hide behind fig tree - compared to Indian, and in B4 clothed in leaves as Columbus ‘found the American so girt’

B6 gunpowder (cf 5 Nov 1605)

‘training his devilish enginery’

B9 - JM self

‘an age too late, or cold climate, or years damp my intended wing’

David Orvis 2018 - QUeer Milton

queerness of angelic sex - nonreproductive, ungendered

‘as flesh to mix with flesh, as soul with soul’

Purkiss 2005 - Sin (ES Error) - motherhood

‘the maternal body made invisible in the birth of christ is painfully open in the birth of death’

B11 Sin folds - top half woman

‘ended foul in many a scaly fold/ voluminous and vast’

Date of John Milton’s Paradise Regained

1671

What is Paradise Regained about

retells the temptations fo JC by Satan in the desert - based on Luke 4:1-22

PR - ref to PL

‘I now sing recovered paradise to all mankind’

Loewenstein describing PR

2010 - ‘an inward looking epic about the quiet heroism of spiritual warfare’

How does PR subvert traditional epic themes.

Satan wants to test JC w ‘manlier objects’ and temptations B2 – urges contemplative JC to assert self more actively and aggressively. Satan compares JC w Alexander ‘young scipio’, ‘young Pompey’, ‘great’ JC – classical military heroes inflamed w thirst for glory B3. Inward looking JC denounces Homeric violence B3 doesn’t completely eschew militant means to subdue ungodly – ‘the stubborn only to subdue’ B1 – unmoved by S’ dispay of empire and military power.

Dryden The State of Innocence (opera libretto) date

1677

How does Dryden rework PL in The State of Innocence

disperses Satan’s speeches among the angels - recalls parliament. presents the rebellion as a scheming cohort of parliamentary rebel lords driven by hate of universal monarchy.

written in heroic verse - reversifies blank verse.