by John Milton
What was that snaky-headed Gorgon shield
That wise Minerva wore, unconquered virgin,
Wherewith she freezed her foes to cóngealed stone?
But rigid looks of chaste austerity,
And noble grace that dashed brute violence
With sudden adoration, and blank awe. (447–52)
Merritt Hughes and John Carey both cite Natali Conti’s Mythologiae IV v as the source for this allegorical interpretation of Minerva’s shield. According to Conti, Minerva ‘wore the Gorgon’s head on her breast, because no one can turn his eyes against the light of the sun or against wisdom and remain unharmed’. One can see why editors would cite this reassuring analogue – even though ‘wisdom’ is something different from ‘chaste austerity’. But the Elder Brother’s rhetorical question invites more than one answer. The Elder Brother never names Medusa, but her story is immediately relevant both to Minerva’s shield and to the debate between the two brothers. In Metamorphoses iv 790–803 Ovid relates that Medusa was a lovely maiden with beautiful hair until Neptune raped her in Minerva’s temple. Outraged at the sacrilege, Minerva transformed Medusa into a Gorgon. The Elder Brother could hardly have chosen a less propitious mythical analogue. In the same breath that he mentions Medusa’s shield, the Elder Brother mentions Diana’s bow. He assumes that both weapons guarantee the inviolability of chaste persons, but a seventeenth-century reader might recall that in Claudian’s De Raptu Proserpinae ii 204–8 the combined forces of Minerva’s shield and Diana’s bow failed to deter Pluto from ravishing Proserpine.
These analogues are of interest because they open the possibility that Milton might not have shared the Elder Brother’s idealistic but naive views (views that are forgivable, even likeable, in an eleven-year-old boy, but alarming in a twenty-five-year-old man). Even if we prefer to see them as a subtext that infiltrates A Masque in Milton’s despite, the analogues from Ovid and Claudian are still worth an editor’s attention. They open possibilities, and invite critical questions, that are pre-empted if an editor hedges Milton’s text with safe analogues drawn from such pedestrian sources as Conti.
Even when the traditional analogues are far from dull, they can present a one-sided perspective. Satan utters the following lines in a soliloquy when he first sees Adam and Eve:
Hell shall unfold,
To entertain you two, her widest gates,
And send forth all her kings; there will be room,
Not like these narrow limits, to receive
Your numerous offspring. (iv 381–5)
Most critics assume that Satan in these lines is being cruelly ironic. Editors usually (and quite rightly) note the suggestive echo of Isaiah’s prophecy of the fall of Babylon:
Hell from beneath is moved for thee to meet thee at thy coming: it stirreth up the dead for thee, even all the chief ones of the earth; it hath raised up from their thrones all the kings of the nations. (Isa. 14–9)
This analogue does make Satan sound malevolent, but ironic statements (as William Empson always maintained) have no point unless they are true, to some degree, in both senses. Empson notoriously believed that Satan was sincere in offering Adam and Eve high honour in Hell.4 Empson points out that the devils are able to live ‘comfortably’ in Hell, so Satan might not know that Hell will be a place of excruciating torture for human beings. Empson concludes that the irony in Satan’s lines ‘belongs only to the God who made Hell’ (68).
Miltonists usually dismiss Empson’s reading, but his intuition draws some support from a second possible allusion – one that editors have not noted. Satan echoes Isaiah, but he also echoes Pluto in Claudian’s De Raptu Proserpinae. As Pluto carries Proserpine off in his chariot, he tries to console her by describing the honours that await her in Hades. He tells her not to miss the earth, for Hades is roomy (immensum), and even has its own sun and stars. This is close to Satan’s contrast between earth’s ‘narrow limits’ and Hell’s ‘room’. Pluto concludes: ‘sub tua purpurei venient vestigia reges’, ‘To thy feet shall come purple-robed kings’ (ii 300). The resemblance between this line and ‘send forth all her kings’ is just about as close as that between Milton and Isaiah. Both analogues are appropriate to the moment, but they call forth different responses. The biblical echo makes Satan seem cruel; the classical one complicates the feeling because it suggests that Satan is capable of finer feelings even when he knowingly commits a wrong.
The Claudian analogue is not far-fetched. Only one hundred lines earlier Milton had likened Paradise to
that fair field
Of Enna, where Prosérpine gath’ring flow’rs
Herself a fairer flow’r by gloomy Dis
Was gathered. (iv 268–71)
After this beautiful and memorable simile, it takes only a nudge to make us see Satan as Pluto (Dis), and Eve as Proserpine. Empson pushes Satan’s soliloquy too far in the direction of generosity, but there is real insight in his intuition. Certainly, we cheapen the poem if we write Satan’s speech off as mere ‘sarcasm’.
From the foregoing examples it should be clear that the noting of analogues is a difficult and delicate task. This is especially true of the similes, many of which are borrowed from earlier epics, and so enter Milton’s poem with a cluster of associations – some excitingly troublesome. At the end of book iv of Paradise Lost Milton likens the good angels (who are preparing to fight Satan) to wind-tossed corn:
th’ angelic squadron bright
Turned fiery red, sharp’ning in moonèd horns
Their phalanx, and began to hem him round
With ported spears, as thick as when a field
Of Ceres ripe for harvest waving bends
Her bearded grove of ears, which way the wind
Sways them; the careful ploughman doubting stands
Lest on the threshing floor his hopeful sheaves
Prove chaff. (iv 977–85)
‘It certainly makes the good angels look weak,’ Empson remarks of this simile5 – and epic precedent supports his view. Homer, Apollonius Rhodius, Ariosto and Tasso all compare armed warriors to wind-tossed grain, and in every case the army so described is demoralized, routed, or about to be cut down. Homer uses the simile of the Greeks when they rush to their ships in despair of conquering Troy:
As when the west wind moves across the grain deep standing, boisterously, and shakes and sweeps it till the tassels lean, so all of that assembly was shaken, and the men in tumult swept to the ships. (Iliad ii 147–50)6
Milton’s angels intend to stand and fight, but the words ‘which way the wind / Sways them’ do not inspire much confidence in their prowess. A seventeenth-century reader might recall that Tasso had used the simile of wind and cornfield to describe Rinaldo cutting down his enemies. Milton’s wording directly recalls Edward Fairfax’s translation of 1600:
He brake their pikes, and brake their close array,
Entred their battaile, feld them downe around,
So winde or tempest with imperious sway
The eares of ripened corn strikes flat to ground.
(xx 60)
Editors have been reluctant to acknowledge these analogues. Fowler briefly notes that ‘the comparison of an excited army to wind-stirred corn is Homeric’, but he omits the detail that Homer’s Greeks are deserting, and he makes no mention of Tasso. For Fowler, the real heart of Milton’s simile is not the cornfield but the threshing-floor. Noting that this was a biblical metaphor for divine judgement, Fowler pertinently cites Jeremiah 51. 33: ‘Babylon is like a threshing-floor, it is time to thresh her: yet a little while, and the time of her harvest shall come’. From this analogue, Fowler concludes that God as ploughman ‘is careful that the final judgement, and the final reckoning with Satan, should not be premature’. Attractive as this reading is, it encounters an obstacle in Milton’s words ‘ripe for harvest’ which suggest that the time of reckoning is now, not later. Pursuing the notion of judgement, Roy Flannagan sees an allusion to Matthew 3. 12 where John the Baptist prophesi
es Christ’s final separation of the wheat from the chaff. To this we might add Psalm 1. 4 where ‘the wicked’ are ‘as chaff which fanned / The wind drives’ (Milton’s translation). Yet even these analogues run into the difficulty that Milton has likened the good angels to ‘a field / Of Ceres’, so it is they, not Satan, who are in danger of becoming chaff.
Milton’s analogues often work like this. Much as we editors would like to police them, they escape our control. My own candidate for a safe analogue (were I forced to choose one), would be Phineas Fletcher’s The Apollyonists ii 40. Fletcher, like Milton, is describing Satan, who has just broken out of Hell, accompanied by a host of devils. These descend on our world as when the South wind
sweeps with his dropping beard
The ayer, earth, and Ocean; downe he flings
The laden trees, the Plowmans hopes new-eard
Swimme on the playne.
The connection with Milton is fortified by the ploughman, who here represents the peaceful world threatened by Satan’s invasion. Critics have often tried to identify Milton’s ploughman with God or Satan, but I suspect that Milton intended him to have much the same significance as Fletcher’s. This does not mean that Fletcher’s simile can drive all subversive possibilities from Milton’s. Whatever Milton’s conscious intentions, the classical and biblical analogues complicate his simile in ways that both trouble and enrich it. Throughout this edition I have endeavoured to annotate Milton’s analogues in such a way as to permit rather than prohibit difficult questions. I do this not because I am determined on indeterminacy, but because I want to provide readers with the materials that will enable them to determine interpretative matters for themselves.
Throughout my notes I have assumed that Milton wrote the De Doctrina Christiana, even though William B. Hunter has argued that the traditional ascription of that work to Milton is unsafe.7 Although I am unpersuaded by Hunter’s arguments, I think they are valuable both for their own sake and for the excellent replies they have elicited from (among others) Christopher Hill, Maurice Kelley, Barbara Lewalski and John Shawcross.8
In preparing this edition I have received valuable help and guidance from many learned colleagues, as well as from graduate and undergraduate students at the University of Western Ontario. I owe a special debt to Gordon Campbell, John Creaser, Roy Flannagan, and Christopher Ricks, both for their own work as editors and for their advice on numerous points of detail. I have also received generous assistance from Christopher Brown, Gardner Campbell, Dennis Danielson, Richard Green, John Hale, Jeremy Maule, Diane McColley, Earl Miner and Alan Rudrum. My work has been greatly assisted by a grant from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada. To the Council I extend my sincerest thanks.
Notes
1. John Creaser, ‘Editorial Problems in Milton’, RES 34 (1983) 279–303 and RES 35 (1984) 45–60.
2. William Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral (1935) 163.
3. Hunter’s essay was first published in Essays in Honor of Walter Clyde Curry (1954). It is reprinted in The Descent of Urania: Studies in Milton, 1946–1988 (1989), 224–42.
4. Empson makes the point in all three of his major works on Milton. See Milton’s God (1961) 68, Some Versions of Pastoral (1935) 168, and The Structure of Complex Words (1951) 103,
5. Some Versions of Pastoral (1935) 172.
6. The Iliad of Homer, trans. Richmond Lattimore (1951).
7. Hunter makes his case against Milton’s authorship of the De Doctrina Christiana in SEL 32 (1992), 129–42, SEL 33 (1993), 191–207, and SEL 34 (1994), 195–203
8. For the replies by Lewalski and Shawcross, see SEL 32 (1992), 143–54 and 155–62. For the replies by Hill and Kelley, see SEL 34 (1994), 165–93 and 195–203.
TABLE OF DATES
Unless otherwise stated, Milton’s works are listed by date of publication.
1608 (9 December) M. born in his father’s house, Bread Street, Cheapside, London.
1615 (24 November) Brother Christopher born.
1620 (?) Enters St Paul’s School. Friendship with Charles Diodati begins. Thomas Young begins to tutor M. at home at about this time.
1625 (12 February) Matriculates at Christ’s College, Cambridge. March: Charles I becomes King.
1626 Probably rusticated (suspended) from Cambridge for part of the Lent term.
1629 (March) BA degree. December: writes On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity.
1632 On Shakespeare published in second Shakespeare folio. July: MA degree.
1632–8 Life of scholarly retirement at family homes in Hammersmith and Horton.
1633 William Laud becomes Archbishop of Canterbury.
1634 (29 September) A Masque performed at Ludlow Castle.
1637 A Masque published. 3 April: mother dies. 30 June: Bastwick, Burton and Prynne lose their ears for writing anti-prelatical pamphlets. They are confined in prison ships on the Irish Sea throughout the autumn. 10 August: M.’s classmate Edward King drowns on the Irish Sea. November: writes Lycidas.
1638 (April)–1639 (August) Continental tour.
1638 Lycidas published in a volume of elegies for Edward King. August: Charles Diodati dies.
1639 (March) War with Scotland (First Bishops’ War).
1639–40 Settles in London where he takes pupils, including his nephews Edward and John Phillips.
1640 (August) Second Bishops’ War. 3 November: Long Parliament convened. Laud and Strafford impeached.
1641 Publication of first anti-prelatical pamphlets: Of Reformation, Of Prelatical Episcopacy, Animadversions upon the Remonstrant’s Defence. Rebellion in Ireland.
1642 More anti-prelatical pamphlets: The Reason of Church Government, An Apology for Smectymnuus. May–June: marries Mary Powell, who left him a month or two later. 22 August: Civil War begins.
1643 The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (first edition).
1644 (February) The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (second edition). Thomas Young, M.’s old tutor, warns Parliament against advocates of ‘digamy’. June: Of Education. August: Judgement of Martin Bucer Concerning Divorce. Herbert Palmer denounces M. in sermon before Parliament. Further attacks from the Stationers’ Company, from Prynne and other Presbyterians. November: Areopagitica. December: M. summoned before the House of Lords, but soon dismissed.
1645 Tetrachordon and Colasterion published. June: Cromwell’s New Model Army victorious at Naseby. July or August: M.’s wife returns. September(?): moves to a larger house in the Barbican.
1646 (January) Poems of Mr. John Milton published (dated 1645). 29 July: daughter Anne born.
1647 (13 March) Father dies.
1648 (25 October) Daughter Mary born. 6 December: Colonel Pride’s Purge of Long Parliament.
1649 (30 January) Charles I executed. Eikon Basilike (then given out as by the King) published one week later. 13 February: The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates. March: M. appointed Secretary for Foreign Tongues by the Council of State. 11 May: Salmasius’s Defensio Regia appears in England. 16 May: Observations on the Articles of Peace. 6 October: Eikonoklastes (M.’s answer to Eikon Basilike).
1651 (24 February) Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio (M.’s answer to Salmasius). 16 March: son John born.
1652 Becomes totally blind. 2 May: daughter Deborah born. Wife dies three days later. June: son John dies.
1653 (20 April) Cromwell forcibly dissolves Rump Parliament. 3 September: Salmasius dies. 12 December: dissolution of Nominated Parliament. Cromwell becomes Lord Protector.
1654 (30 May) Defensio Secunda.
1655 (8 August) Defensio Pro Se.
1656 (12 November) Marries Katherine Woodcock.
1657 (19 October) Daughter Katherine born.
1658 (3 February) Wife dies. 17 March: daughter Katherine dies. 3 September: Oliver Cromwell dies.
1659 (16 February) A Treatise of Civil Power. August: Considerations Touching the Likeliest Means to Remove Hirelings out of the Church. May: Richard Cromwell abdicates.
1660 (3 March) Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth. April: Brief Notes upon a Late Sermon. May: M. goes into hiding in a friend’s house in Bartholomew Close. Charles II enters London in triumph. August: M.’s books burned by hangman, but M. is exempted from the death-list. October: M. arrested and imprisoned until December.
1662 Sir Henry Vane executed. M.’s sonnet to Vane published.
1663 (24 February) Marries Elizabeth Minshull. Moves to a house in Artillery Walk, Bunhill Fields.
1665 M. takes house in Chalfont St Giles to escape the plague.
1666 Great Fire of London.
1667 Paradise Lost published in a ten-book version.
1670 The History of Britain published.
1671 Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes published.
1673 Of True Religion published. Revised and enlarged edition of Poems (1645) published.
1674 Second (twelve-book) edition of Paradise Lost. M. died on or about 8 November, and was buried on 12 November in St Giles, Cripplegate.
FURTHER READING
Editions
Richard Bentley, Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’, 1732.
Cleanth Brooks and J. E. Hardy, Poems of Mr. John Milton: the 1645 Edition with Essays in Analysis, Harcourt, Brace, 1951.
Douglas Bush, Milton: Poetical Works, Oxford University Press, 1966.
Gordon Campbell, John Milton: Complete English Poems, Of Education, Areopagitica, Dent, 1990.
John Carey and Alastair Fowler, Poems of John Milton, Longman, 1968; revised 1980.
Scott Elledge, John Milton: ‘Paradise Lost’, Norton, 1975; 2nd edn, 1993.
Roy Flannagan, John Milton: ‘Paradise Lost’, Macmillan, 1993.
Harris F. Fletcher, Milton’s Complete Poetical Works in Photographic Facsimile, 4 vols., University of Illinois Press, 1943–8.