Читать книгу The Life of the Author: John Milton - Richard Bradford - Страница 12

After seven years at Cambridge (1625–32), there were several career paths open to Milton. In 1631, his younger brother Christopher had been admitted to the Inner Temple in London to study for the profession of lawyer, but it had been assumed that John would make use of his considerable academic achievements and enter the more respectable sphere of the Church. Instead he chose an existence that some might regard as self-indulgent. He would spend the next seven years reading, thinking, writing and travelling.

In the autumn of 1631 Milton’s father retired from business, gave up the house in Bread Street and moved with his wife Sara to Hammersmith, now part of Greater London but then a quiet country village some seven miles from the City. Less than a year later his son took up residence with him to begin what amounted to an extended period of self-education. As he would later reflect, ‘At my father’s house in the country, to which he had gone to pass his old age, I gave myself up with the most complete leisure to reading through the Greek and Latin writers; with the proviso, however, that I occasionally exchanged the country for the town, for the sake of buying books or of learning something new in mathematics or music, in which I then delighted’ (WJM, VII, p. 120). There is a sense here of Milton attending at once to the orthodoxies of intellectual endeavour, particularly classical learning, while calculatedly removing himself from the demands and opportunities of the contemporary world. He seemed set upon an objective, but its exact nature and the manner of its realisation remained undisclosed. There were, however, indications.

The most revealing account of what Milton was attempting to achieve during those years of retirement came from the man himself in a 1633 letter to an unidentified correspondent (the fact that the letter is in English, rather than Latin, and that its manner is formal rather than intimate, discount Diodati as the recipient). He confesses that the ‘sin of curiosity …’ was causing him to become ‘the most helplesse, pusilanimous and unweapon’d creature.’ He reflects upon the various options of an active life – marriage, the routine professions of the moneyed classes – and by his tone betrays a disinclination towards any of them, bordering upon fecklessness.

There is against yt [his supposed inclination to the retired life] a much more potent inclination imbred which about this tyme of a mans life solicits most, the desire of house & family of his owne to which nothing is esteemed more helpefull then the early entering into credible employment … and though this were anough yet there is to this another act if not of pure, yet of refined nature no lesse available to dissuade prolonged obscurity, a desire of honour & repute, & immortall fame seated in the brest of every true scholar which all make hast to by the readiest ways of publishing & divulging conceived merits as well those that shall as those that never shall obtaine it.

(CPW, I, pp. 319–20)

Regarding the ministry, he refers to the parable of the talents,

from due & timely obedience to that command in the gospell set out by the terrible seasing of him that hid the talent. It is more probable therefore that not the endless delight of speculation but this very consideration of that great commandment does not presse forward as soone as may be to underg[o] but keeps off with a sacred reverence & religious advisement how best to undergoe[,] not taking thought of being late so it give advantage to be more fit.

(CPW, I, p. 320)

He appears here to be ransacking the Gospels for some pretext that would justify his decision to remain in a state of limbo. To become a clergyman, indeed even to partake of the ceremony of marriage, would mean that he would have to declare some degree of affiliation to a faction of the Protestant faith, a phenomenon that was becoming more splintered by the month. To some, this might seem a strategy of avoidance yet there is evidence to suggest that he had chosen to observe events from a distance, consider what he witnessed in relation to his private regime of reading, and wait upon the day that the sum of his wisdom might be employed as a calling or vocation.

Milton would already have witnessed at Cambridge the growing tensions between the advocates of Puritanism and the better-established champions of high-Anglicanism. In the University, theology was still largely a matter for abstract speculation and private commitment but within England as a whole these same divisions were coming to influence conventions governing behaviour and lifestyle. The Puritan position was made clear in William Prynne’s Histrio-Mastix: or, The Players Scourge and Actors Tragedy (1632). As indicated by his title Prynne was particularly agitated by stage plays and masques, which he saw as licensing hedonism and immorality, but this was but his opening tirade in a thousand page invective against dancing, maypoles, sports of any kind, rural fairs, stained glass windows, ostentatiously decorated altars, the wearing of garishly coloured vestments by members of the clergy and much more. Prynne’s logic is clear enough: there is a causal relationship between secular activities in which display or enjoyment are prominent and religious practices that show allegiances to Catholicism. Prynne and many other extremist Puritans held that indulgent gratification was not only immoral but an indication of treacherous affiliations to enemies of England, specifically the Catholic nations of continental Europe.

Prynne’s book was prompted by a tendency in Charles’s court to sponsor plays and masques which celebrated him and Queen Henrietta as at once passionate yet ungoverned by the rules thought appropriate for fallen humanity. Moreover Charles attempted to promulgate the culture of his court to the nation as a whole. Throughout the early 1630s he issued proclamations commanding gentry and nobility to run their country estates as hospitable sinecures in which the lower orders would be encouraged, with financial sponsorships, to treat the Sabbath and other holidays as the opportunity for relaxation and recreation. Indeed as a direct rebuke to Prynne’s polemic Charles ordered to be reissued in 1633 a revised edition of James I’s controversial Book of Sports. According to this, on Sundays ‘our good people be not disturbed, letted or discouraged from any lawful recreation, such as dancing, either men or women; archery for men, leaping, vaulting, or any other such harmless recreation, nor from having of May-games, whitsunales, and Morris-dances; and the setting up of May-Poles and other sports therewith used.’

During that same year Laud became Archbishop of Canterbury and immediately began to bring the church into line with his own high Anglican beliefs and practices, ordering his bishops to supervise closely what was preached and what rituals performed. Puritan-leaning ministers would be ejected and forbidden from setting up private chaplaincies. Ordinances were issued requiring fixed altars to replace plain communion tables and clergy were told to conduct services in vestments that were virtually identical to those of Catholic priests. It is certain that Milton was aware of this. Even if his self-imposed country exile detached him from the cauldron of dispute that was London he would need only to attend his local parish church to witness the changes. While he showed reluctance to comment directly on contemporary events it is clear from his poetry in this period that such matters were exercising his imagination.

Close to the Milton house was the estate of Harefield, presided over by Alice, Countess of Derby. Milton was introduced to the household by Henry Lawes, a composer and musician, who had been a friend of his father’s since the Bread Street days. Lawes, at the time, was music teacher to the Countess’s grandchildren. Milton’s attachment to the household is celebrated in his 1633 piece ‘Arcades’. ‘Arcades’ began as a masque, a brief drama involving verse, music and scenic effects, in which the Duchess is presented as the matriarch of a rural paradise in which the arts flourish. (Countess Derby, then aged seventy-two, had been a well-known patron of poets and playwrights, Spenser included.) But the work is more than a gift to his patroness. In the middle of the piece Milton introduces the ‘celestial sirens’ (63), figures borrowed from Plato’s Republic whose voices harmonise the concentric whorls of the universe, and blends this image with his by now familiar notion of

… the heavenly tune, which none can hear Of human mould with gross unpurged ear

(72–3)

This, like the music which accompanies the birth of Christ in the ‘Nativity Ode’, is an expression of God’s presence from which the Fall has detached human beings.

The most interesting section of ‘Arcades’ is the conclusion of the Genius’s address (74–84), in which Milton finds himself having to reconcile the notion of music which is beyond human comprehension with the newly elevated, almost otherworldly, status of the Dowager. To have caused her to hear it would have been both sacrilegious and sycophantic, and Milton provides a deftly evasive compromise: ‘[S]uch music’ would be worthy of ‘her immortal praise’ if only ‘my [Milton’s] inferior hand or voice could hit/Inimitable sounds’ (75–8). The ‘heavenly tone’ would indeed be a fitting tribute to her status, but she is attended by lowly human beings who cannot produce it.

While this might seem to ally him with the Court-sponsored forms of entertainment so decried by the Puritans he subtly incorporates a meditation on the timeless notion of spiritually and the limitations of the ordinary human state. He was, demonstrably, answering questions raised by his refusal to commit himself to a career. Tentatively, he was finding in poetry a means of exploring the controversies that would soon drive England into warring factions. His next step in this process would be ‘Comus’. In June 1631 the Earl of Bridgewater, the Countess’s son-in-law, was appointed Lord Lieutenant of Wales, and Lawes and Milton decided to collaborate in the writing of his second masque to celebrate this. ‘A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle’, later to be known as Comus, was first performed in September 1634 in the grounds of Ludlow, one of Bridgewater’s official residences. Lawes wrote the music for the song parts, and the words, sung and spoken, were Milton’s. Three of the parts would be played by Bridgewater’s children, who, as Lawes’s pupils, had been well prepared for the demands of acting and singing.

The uncomplicated plot centres upon the kidnapping by the eponymous Comus, a semi-human demonic presence, of The Lady (played by the fifteen-year-old Lady Alice), whom he then attempts to seduce. It is a fairy story involving a conflict between Virtue and Vice; the former triumphs and a joyous, idyllic mood prevails. Comus was designed as the centrepiece of an evening of dancing and restrained conviviality; it was intended to reflect for its audience, and its participants, a collective feeling of familial order and optimism. (The Lady is eventually rescued by her two brothers, played by Lady Alice’s brothers, John and Thomas). Milton, who was responsible for the script and the direction of the plot, wraps a moral fable in light and decorative poetic dress, but at the same time, particularly during the verbal struggle between Comus and the Lady, he inscribes a more disturbing subtext – something that would have resonated for the adult, informed members of the audience. Three years earlier, in 1631, Countess Derby’s other son-in-law, Lord Castlehaven, had been at the centre of a trial which, if tabloid newspapers had existed at the time, would have become the newsprint scandal of the decade. Castlehaven was a bisexual, a paedophile and a sadist. He obliged a number of his male servants to have sex with him and on several occasions forced one of them, called Skipwith, to rape Castlehaven’s twelve-year-old stepdaughter Elizabeth, an act in which he was both spectator and participant. The biographical resonance of the Castlehaven scandal has been debated by Milton scholars for the best part of a century but while his most recent biographers refer to the events none suggests that they had a direct influence on the writing or performance of Comus. The consensus seems to be that while there are unsettling resemblances between what happened in life and in the masque there is no proof of a causal relationship between the two, a point made by John Creasey’s widely praised 1987 article whose title speaks for itself: ‘Milton and the Irrelevance of the Castlehaven Scandal’ (Milton Quarterly, 4, 1987, pp. 25–34). Creasey’s opinion, endorsed by everyone since 1987, is based on the premise that we cannot reassemble potentially relevant details to create a model of the author’s state of mind as they created a poem, play or novel. As we will see in Chapters 13 and 14, attempts to assemble a profile of an author and their intentions from biographical and contextual evidence went out of fashion in the 1980s. By the same token we might argue that because there is no direct reference in Orwell’s Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four to a particular place or regime then we can rule them out as representations of Soviet totalitarianism. Few would regard this as anything other than imbecilic, so why are we not allowed to apply the same contextual model to Milton’s Comus?

Castlehaven was found guilty and executed in May 1631. He was beheaded and the two servants who allegedly colluded with him in various acts of rape and sodomy were hanged, as befitted their lower social ranking. The family would have recognised the parallels – an adult, demonic figure of aristocratic bearing attempts to satiate himself with a virgin child. Comus, unlike Castlehaven, fails, but there was an implied postscript. Castlehaven was a Roman Catholic and an enthusiastic supporter of Charles I. Prynne, in Histrio-Mastix cites Castlehaven as the worst exemplar of his religious creed, and from this he argued that the grand ceremonialism of the Roman Church encouraged the most sinful, lewd, pernicious aspects of our fallen condition. For virtually everyone who witnessed the performance of the masque the curious intersections between the Castlehaven case and the broader polemical sweep of Prynne’s book would have been evident. We have no evidence from those present at the performance of how what they witnessed triggered uneasy recognitions of what had recently happened to the Bridgewaters, but consider: a year before the masque was performed a non-aristocratic fourteen-year-old girl had been raped by a gang of men in the grounds of the castle. Amazingly, she named those who had assaulted her and insisted that charges be pressed, though we know nothing of the result. We cannot prove that Milton knew of the incident but at the same time we can’t be certain that he did not: the parallels between a brave early teenager who goes after the rapists and Milton’s The Lady who heroically resists them are stunning. Moreover Alice’s mother the senior Lady Egerton had written a letter to her friend stating that she feared that Alice had been bewitched, entranced by the husband of a servant who had acquired his powers from Satan. It is unlikely that Milton knew of the letter but he was certainly alert to the neuroses and preoccupations of his sponsors, the house of aristocrats for whom he was writing a play that would not dispel their anxieties but which might help them in their attempts to confront them. Milton was harnessing his talents as a poet to a more solemn and pragmatic commitment, involving fundamental elements of belief and behaviour. His seemingly self-indulgent period of withdrawal was in truth quite the opposite.

The most important section of Comus is lines 558–812, in which The Lady is ‘set in’ and apparently unable to remove herself form ‘an enchanted chair’. It is made up of a dialogue between The Lady and Comus, who appears to have entrapped her in a fantastic, enchanted realm. Comus is attempting to seduce her and the following are examples of his rhetorical technique:

If all the worldShould in a pet of temperance feed on pulse,Drink the clear stream, and nothing wear by frieze,The All-giver would be unthanked, would be unpraised,Not half his riches known, and yet despised.

(719–23)

Beauty is nature’s coin, must not be hoarded,But must be current, and the good thereofConsists in mutual and partaken bliss,Unsavoury in the enjoyment of itself.It you let slip time, like a neglected rose It withers on the stalk with languished head

(738–43)

The passages are significant because they transcend their immediate context and involve Milton in an engagement with contemporary poetic and social conventions. They invite comparison with the amatory mode of Metaphysical poetry in which the male addresser makes use of his considerable stylistic and referential abilities to persuade the female addressee of something; frequently that sex with him is entirely consistent with God’s design for the universe and the status of human beings within it. Comus argues that nakedness is God’s gift and that He would be ‘unthanked’ if it were not fully appreciated and indeed made use of ‘in mutual and partaken bliss’. Beauty is transient and will ‘like a neglected rose’ wither if not enjoyed. These strategies are almost clichés and are abundant in Donne’s ‘The Flea’ and ‘The Ecstacy’ and in Marvell’s ‘To His Coy Mistress’. But while Donne’s and Marvell’s addressees remain silent and, one assumes, enchanted, Milton allows The Lady to reply:

I had not thought to have unlocked my lipsIn this unhallowed air, but that this jugglerWould think to charm my judgement, as mine eyes,Obtruding false rules pranked in reason’s garb.

(755–8)

The closing line of this extract is remarkable: ‘false rules pranked in reason’s garb’ is a succinct and unambiguous rejection of the tendency in the verse of the Metaphysicals for the use of figurative language as a means of undermining the customary perceptions of the listener. During John Donne’s lifetime his poems circulated only in manuscript form among the London-based literary intelligentsia. We have no proof that Milton had read any of them but given his sense of his own role as part of the burgeoning new age of English writing it is difficult to imagine that he did not avidly seek out the verses of the man he’d heard preach in the cathedral attached to his school. Most significantly, Donne’s poems went into print in 1633, roughly seven months before Milton began work on Comus and we can take it as a given that Milton was confident that most, if not all of his audience, members of the aristocratic and cultural elite, would have obtained copies of the work of the secular alter-ego of the Dean of St Paul’s. It is of course impossible to claim any knowledge of what was going through Milton’s mind when he composed Comus but, knowing the circumstances, we might be forgiven for suspecting that he was inviting his audience to compare his masque with the ingrained habits of his immediate creative forebears. Consider, for example, Donne’s ‘The Flea’, reckoned to be popular among his peers and a work that typifies the defining features of Metaphysical verse. In three stanzas the male speaker attempts to seduce his female listener, using the eponymous flea as the foundation for a bravura performance in twisting and turning a metaphor back and forth. First he compares her reluctance to submit to his desires with the insect, an insignificance. Next, when she attempts to swat it, he treats it as symbolic of their unity; it has bitten them both and united their blood. Finally, when she succeeds in killing it, he proposes that its disappearance means nothing compared with their enduring love. The woman never speaks. We know, by implication from the man’s words, of her acts and opinions but we listen only to him. Aside from anything else it is a lesson in the proprietorial conventions of verbal dexterity. Men speak, invent, persuade, and women listen. Milton’s Lady answers back and stops Comus in his rhetorical tracks. The passage is an unrecognised crossroads in literary history; for the first time the woman takes control of the direction of the mood and plot of the work. Milton, I would argue, was inviting his audience to compare the battle of the sexes on this stage with a pre-decided contest in literature everywhere else. Would his audience have detected the allusion, the invitation to compare the performance with their acceptance of a norm? The fact that it was so radical a gesture indicates only one response: yes. Consider Samuel Johnson’s famous dismissal of Metaphysical and Renaissance drama technique: ‘their learning instructs and their subtlety surprises; but the reader commonly thinks his improvement dearly bought …’ (Johnson 1779–81). ‘His’ improvement might be dearly bought by figurative excess, but what about hers? The Lady continues,

Thou hast not the ear nor soul to apprehendThe subtle notion, and high mysteryThat must be uttered to unfold the sageAnd serious doctrine of Virginity …Enjoy your dear wit and gay rhetoric That hath so well been taught her dazzling fence Thou art not fit to hear thyself convinced.

(783–91)

There are very few women in Renaissance literature who use language with such confidence and authority as Milton’s Lady. Most importantly she removes any doubt that Milton had absorbed and reflected on key passages in his edition of Shakespeare’s 1623 Folio and was determined to demonstrate his intellectual and moral superiority to his predecessor. Portia in The Merchant of Venice and Isabella in Measure for Measure are clever and effective advocates for their respective causes but their status is undermined by the fact that the former is only listened to when disguised as a man and the latter, irrespective of her intellectual capacities, is a pawn in a male-dominated game. Would the audience of Comus have seen Shakespeare’s plays? Some would. After Shakespeare’s death, performances continued in the capital with audiences ranging from the semi-literate artisan classes to the upper gentry. Let us then assume that a reasonable numbfer of the Ludlow audience would know something of Measure for Measure and that they would recognise Milton’s implicit invitation to compare what they were seeing with what had already become a contemporary classic. There is a passage in Act II, scene ii, where Isabella, novitiate nun and sister of Claudio, argues with Angelo over the ethical and judicial validity of her sibling’s death sentence. Lucio, friend of the latter and resourceful opportunist, stands at her shoulder, offering confidential encouragement and advice, rather in the manner of a theatre director.

Isabella We cannot weigh our brother with ourself: Great men may jest with saints; ‘tis with in them, But in the less foul profanation. Lucio (Aside to Isabella) Thou’rt i’ th’ right girl: more o’ that. Isabella That in the captain’s but a choleric word Which in the soldier is flat blasphemy. Lucio (Aside to Isabella)) Art advis’d o’that? More on’t. Angelo Why do you put these sayings upon me? Isabella Because authority, though it err like others Hath yet a kind of medicine in itself That skins vice o’ the top. Go to your bosom; Knock there and ask your heart what it doth know

(126–37)

Isabella and Angelo, as befits their social rank, conduct their exchange in blank verse, marshalling orotund figurative devices to service their opposing arguments. Lucio, the pragmatist, comments to her in an unkempt colloquial manner.

Ay touch him; here’s the vein (70)Ay well said (89)That’s well said (109)O, to him to him, wench! He will relent: (124)

Lucio might of course admire her intellectual gravitas and linguistic versatility but it soon becomes evident that the he regards these as of little value in a world governed by instinct and opportunism. He is aware that Angelo is as entranced by her physical presence, and because of her vocation, her hidden sensuality, as he is persuaded by her argument. Angelo, supposedly guardian of high principles, does indeed offer Isabella a reprieve for her brother, provided that she has sex with him. The Duke in disguise arranges a ‘bed trick’ when Angelo’s ex-fiancée Mariana is substituted for Isabella and Angelo becomes entrapped by his own hypocrisies. Isabella typifies the woman in Renaissance drama. She, like her peers, is accorded a degree of autonomy, and self-reliant intelligence but in the end they are subservient to the controlling presence of men, as figures who dominate society and governance. Look beyond Measure for Measure to other plays and you will find that the same allowances given to Isabella – indulgence and conditional respect, but not too much – obtain. But in Comus Milton went radically against prevailing mores. The Brothers eventually arrive ‘with swords drawn’ and transport their sister from Comus’s realm of debased enchantment, but the Lady has already effectively disempowered Comus by undermining his rhetoric. As he puts it, ‘I feel that I do fear/Her words set off by some superior power’ (799–800). No other ‘Lady’ in Renaissance drama exerts such formidable power over her male adversary by turning his poetic and intellectual skills against him.

The exchange anticipates the one that would take place in Book IX of Paradise Lost, between Satan and Eve, with one obvious difference: Eve, despite her precocity, is persuaded and precipitates the Fall of mankind.

It is evident that Milton, even when creating a night of entertainment, was aware of another duty as a poetic authority, someone who would cause his audience in the midst of their enjoyment to stop and think. He had not, while still in his early twenties, attempted to claim for himself the role of the modern epic poet, but thirty years later he would.

In 1637, he wrote to his friend Charles Diodati that he had become particularly concerned with history. He knew well the Greek and Roman theorists of philosophy and politics, but he was equally intrigued by the ways in which classical maxims of government had been variously cited and disintegrated by the warring factions of Europe through the dark ages and during the later medieval period. He had begun to feel that the so-called purer times of early Christianity were to some extent a myth, and was becoming more convinced that the real opportunity for Christian contentment and equilibrium was more recent. He summarised Church history as ‘after many a tedious age, the long deferred but much more wonderful and happy reformation … in these latters day’ (WJM, III, p. 326). This was his only comment during this period on the religious controversies that had beset Europe for a century and his implication that the ‘Reformation’ might now have reached its culmination might well have been prompted by a sense that in England the true reformers were entering a desperate decisive struggle for survival.

William Laud’s forces of conservative Anglo-Catholicism had, by 1637, gained complete control of the Church and had begun to make use of ecclesiastic courts to supplant the instruments of secular power. Puritan clerics and preachers – all now effectively forbidden from taking up or remaining in posts – were being persecuted as common citizens and censored as speakers and writers. John Bastwick and Henry Burton had, like William Prynne, produced numerous pamphlets which advertised Puritan theology and religious practice, and accused the Laudian establishment and Royal family of courting Catholicism under the disguise of Anglicanism. All three were arrested and summoned before ecclesiastical courts, bodies which refused the accused the protection of Common Law. Each received the same sentence and in June 1637 they were flogged publicly in London and their ears were then hacked off.

In 1635 Milton’s father had moved from Hammersmith to a grander house in the village of Horton a few miles further west. The village, adjacent to the royal palace of Windsor, was idyllically rural, its main houses circling a green and at its centre a pretty church of Norman vintage. On the outskirts was the medieval manor house of Henry Bulstrade, the principal landowner in the locality. Milton senior rented from Bulstrade the second most prestigious house of the area, Berkin Manor, which stood in its own spacious grounds to the east of the village. The original building was demolished in the mid-nineteenth century and replaced by a large farmhouse in the Elizabethan red-brick style which carries the same name. Milton had stayed with the family and continued with his regime of private study, but in 1636–37 the equilibrium of his detached existence would be unsettled. His father, five years retired, was visited by summonses and law suits relating to share dealings with clients of a decade earlier. These would be settled but they reminded his son that the world was something that one was obliged to experience as well as observe. On 3 April 1637 his mother died, an event which brought the family together and united them in a sense of loss. The year, to Milton, would have seemed characterised by endings and terminations. In January he had attended the funeral of the Countess of Derby, effectively his patroness. William Sound, one of his St Paul’s teachers, died a month after that, and during August, London mourned the passing of a figure who seemed to many to be the last remaining representative of a literary generation: Ben Jonson was buried in Westminster Abbey on 6 August. In the same month Milton heard of the death at sea of one of his near contemporaries from Cambridge, Edward King who had, following graduation, been elected to a Fellowship at Christ’s College: King also was a poet. Whether Milton and King had been close friends or passing acquaintances would become a contentious point for the former’s biographers because it was not so much King’s short life and tragic death that has caused him to be remembered to this day but a poem by Milton on both called ‘Lycidas’. The piece was commissioned by John Alsop, a Fellow of Christ’s, as part of the collection of commemorative verses entitled Obsequies for Edward King, lost at sea …. The other twelve verses have largely been forgotten but ‘Lycidas’ became a literary event in its own right and is, after Paradise Lost, Milton’s most complex, puzzling and intensely scrutinised poem. It is, ostensibly and as required, a memorial to King, but its real subject is its author. It has frequently been compared with a piece of music, not because it was intended for song but as a consequence of its curious and unpredictable shifts in tone, subject and perspective. Some found this to be an anticipation of changing harmonies of the symphony (Nicolson, 1971, p. 105), but in truth it bears a closer resemblance to the radical, modernist literary technique of constantly altering the style and the perceived speaking presence of the text. King’s death is its starting point but thereafter it takes us through reflections on the nature of poetry, the complexities of religious belief, and political and theological conflict, all of which are interwoven with intimations of something terrible and apocalyptic about to happen. The question why Milton produced such a strange piece of work can best be addressed by treating it as an allegory. While Milton’s memorial to King is sincere enough it also serves as a pretext for exploring the world from which the latter had recently departed.

In the middle of the poem Milton takes us to the banks of the ‘Camus’ (103), the Latin name for the Cam. Earlier in the piece Cambridge had been introduced as the intellectual home of King and Milton but this time we return there to address a religious and political agenda. Suddenly we are introduced to ‘the pilot of the Galilean lake’ (109) who bears ‘Two massy keys … of metal twain’. This is an allusion to St Peter, to whom Christ gave the symbolic keys of the true church; it was the central divisive issue of the Reformation. The Papacy was regarded by Roman Catholics as the legacy of St Peter, its authority licensed by Christ, while many Protestants treated Rome as the corrupt usurper of Christ’s word. Cambridge, as we have seen, had by this time become a microcosm of this dispute and the Anglo-Catholics who by 1637 gained control of the city, and of the Church of England, are introduced as the ‘Blind mouths’. In 1865, in his (Sesame and Lilies, I, p. 22), John Ruskin offered the most enduring explanation of this image: ‘A “Bishop” means “a person who sees”. A “Pastor” means “a person who feeds”’ he argued, and concluded that ‘Blind mouths’ refers to the higher clergy of the Laudian church who deserved neither the title of bishop, since they had blinded themselves to Christian truth, nor the generic term pastor since they were greedy and corrupt. Milton says, they:

Scarce themselves know how to holdA sheep-hook, or have learned aught else the leastThat the faithful herdsman’s art belongs

(119–20)

They are not the shepherd pastors who would care for their flock, but hedonists more concerned with the ‘lean and flashy songs’ of high ceremony. ‘The hungry sheep’ (125) have already become prey to ‘the grim wolf with privy paw’ (125) – the Roman Catholic Church – who ‘Daily devours apace, and nothing said’ (129). But Milton warns that the

… two handed-engine at the door,Stands ready to smite once, and smite no more.

(130–1)

The general consensus is that this instrument is the broadsword or axe that will be wielded by Protestantism against the Anglo-Catholic hierarchy, a shrewd diagnosis of the tensions that within five years would lead to Civil War.

Aside from the poems and the brief enigmatic letters, all that remain from Milton’s reclusive period are his Commonplace Books in which he made notes on the vast range of material he scrutinised. These amounted to an index in prose, a sequence of comments by Milton on all he had read, listed according to his own subject-classifications. Under ‘Ethical’ are specified the subcategories of ‘moral evil’, ‘avarice’, ‘gluttony’, ‘suicide’, ‘curiosity’, ‘music’, ‘sloth’, ‘lying’ and ‘knowledge of literature’. It is intriguing that he associates literature and music, if only by implication, with issues that are by their nature fundamental and all-encompassing. By comparison, matters ‘Economic’ involve ‘food’, ‘conduct’, ‘matrimony’, ‘the education of children’, ‘poverty’, ‘alms’ and ‘usury’, and in the ‘Political’ section we encounter ‘state’, ‘kings’, ‘subjects’, ‘nobility’, ‘property and taxes’, ‘plague’, ‘athletic games’ and ‘public shows’. Notably, the pragmatics and diversions of existence (‘poverty’, ‘kings’, ‘subjects’, ‘matrimony’, ‘athletic games’, ‘public shows’) belong in separate – and dare one say, lesser? – categories while ‘knowledge of literature’ is part of the field of ethics. This is quite a radical perception of what literature – and in this regard literature involved almost exclusively poetry – meant. Even its more enthusiastic champions during the Renaissance conceded that verse was an entertaining subsidiary to such serious discourses as philosophy and theology.

The Commonplace Books are prescient in that many of the entries anticipate some of his most controversial treatises of the Cromwellian years. He makes copious notes on Tertullian’s and Cyprian’s observations on public shows and popular entertainment without comment, but their relevance is self-evident: this was the period in which Calvinists and High Church clerics seemed obsessively preoccupied with the morality, or otherwise, of entertainment. He is more outspoken on his defence of marriage both for ordinary clergy and bishops and goes so far as to argue that polygamy among some Jewish sects should be tolerated. The Civil War had not yet begun but here is his view on the status of the ‘King’: ‘The name of kings has always been hateful to free peoples, and he [God] condemns the action of the Hebrews in choosing to exchange their freedom for servitude’ (CPW, I, p. 440).

He was forming opinions, based on a regime of evaluative research, but for what purpose? He did not even hint at what his particular ambition or vocation might be but, in the manner of closing a circle, consider his apparent elevation of poetry to a state of intellectual significance in relation to his unorthodox comments on the church, marriage, kingship et al. and then look at his reflections on Dante’s notions of choice and fate: ‘The nature of each person should be especially observed and not bent in another direction; for God does not intend all people for one thing, but each one for his own work’ (CPW, I, p. 405). This is, admittedly, enigmatic but with hindsight it is possible to interpret it as an attempt by Milton to reconcile his undoubted talent, as a poet, with his deeply felt religious, political and social opinions. How might he harness the latter to the former? Political poets were, at the time, an unknown quantity. Later, however, apocalyptic events would force Milton’s affiliations together.

He had become aware that his programme of self-absorbed reading and study must soon end (see ‘Letter to a Friend,’ CPW I, p. 319), but he was not certain of what would follow it. Briefly, he took rooms at the Inns of Court, presumably with thoughts of following his brother into the legal profession; but he stayed there only for a few weeks. It is likely that his studies of the history of the civilised world had reached a natural conclusion. He now confronted the present day and what he saw caused him to think again about his role, his duty. As a poet, in ‘Lycidas’, he presented the reader with a vision of uncertainty, possibly catastrophe. The tensions between the London-based Anglo-Catholic hierarchy and their pro-Calvinist counterparts in Scotland had moved beyond theological debate and would, in 1639, spill over into military conflicts – brief and inconclusive but anticipatory of the Civil War.

What did Milton do? He chose to go abroad, to Europe. This decision might appear symptomatic of at best self-possession and at worst indifference, but it was quite the opposite. The intellectual, political, religious divisions of England had their origins further south: Calvinism, Catholicism, the Renaissance fabric of intellectual and aesthetic radicalism, were the products of Continental Europe. Milton, in order to become fully aware of what he could contribute to the condition of his homeland, first needed to encounter its influences.