![]() ![]() Milton retorted, ‘If your Highness thinks that misfortunes are indexes of the wrath of heaven, what must you think of your father’s tragical end? I have only lost my eyes – he lost his head’. ![]() James II visited the elderly Milton and implied that his blindness was a divine punishment for having written in defence of the execution of Charles I (one of the many things Milton disagreed with was Charles dissolving Parliament for a period of 11 years personal rule). Milton wrote P aradise Lost after the restoration ie in response to the failure of these ideals, which couldn’t survive the death of Cromwell. This essentially republican government was Puritan ie Protestant in its values. Cromwell established Puritanism as the state religion but allowed religious toleration ie other faiths. He served in Cromwell’s government, translating government foreign dispatches into Latin. Milton was deeply involved in the political and religious controversies of his time. Seems to have visited Galileo in Florence in 1638, when Galileo was imprisoned by the Inquisition for heresy (his scientific theories contravened the teachings of the Catholic church eg that the Earth was the centre of the universe). Milton very well informed re contemporary political and scientific debates. He went to Cambridge but was expelled after just one term for fighting with a tutor and was one of the last Cambridge students to be publicly flogged. He comes closest to heroism in deciding to share Eve’s fate because he cannot bear to be separated from her but for Milton he still fails because he places his allegiance to Eve above his allegiance to God. Temptation provides as opportunity for moral heroism but Adam fails. There’s no pain, no great obstacle, nothing to fight or even struggle against. The problem is that before the Fall there is little opportunity for heroism as we understand it. Milton uses heroic epic features such as broad shoulders and broad forehead to describe Adam, trying to set him up as our epic hero. In part, Satan represents the propensity to evil in all of us.Īdam, as the father of mankind, represents another side of humanity – the ability to love and be faithful. The ambivalent representation of Satan forces the reader to evaluate his motivation, his rhetoric, to contemplate the nature of evil not just as embodied in Milton’s Satan but in ourselves. In both Macbeth and P aradise Lost we become involved in the psychology of the evil character – it is an essential part of the drama of each text that we understand and become imaginatively involved in the psychological steps of the protagonist as he becomes progressively evil. ![]() Helen Gardner compares Satan to the heroes of Elizabethan ‘tragedies of damnation’ eg Macbeth the audience is compelled to feel for a character who deliberately embraces evil. As the poem progresses he steadily diminishes in stature, appearing in Bk 4 in the decidedly unheroic form of a toad. Satan, who is modelled on classical epic heroes, has heroic attributes eg he’s huge, powerful, courageous and demonstrates resourcefulness and fortitude. He gives the reader his vision of an ideal world which was exactly as God intended it (surprisingly for the time, Milton represents Adam and Eve as enjoying a sexual relationship before the fall unsurprisingly for the period, he also represents Eve as inferior and subordinate to Adam).Įpic heroes are traditionally figures of great stature: physically large, very strong, skilful leaders and warriors, superhumanly brave in action and endurance of suffering ie fortitude. His epic gives him an opportunity to construct imaginatively his image of the pre-lapsarian world (before the Fall). All the political, moral and social corruption he sees around him is a living image of man’s fallen state. For Milton, we live in a post-lapsarian world. It is of course epic in the broader sense ie it is enormously significant for the future of mankind. There were Renaissance epics on creation and biblical narratives but the Fall is essentially unheroic (Adam and Eve fall so fail), which makes it a problematic subject for epic. The travels of Odysseus, for eg, symbolised man’s journey through life and its obstacles. Epic is concerned with ‘truth’, albeit not necessarily historical. ![]()
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