Doré’s engraving of Lucifer as Classical heroĬommon modern reactions to the thought of reading Paradise Lost include: ‘it’s too long’ ‘it’s boring’ ‘it’s in weird English’ ‘it’s incomprehensible’ ‘it’s sexist’. In these conditions, he wrote the epic poem for which he is most remembered, and which is a serious contender for the greatest English poem ever written – Paradise Lost. He lived for the rest of his life in political disfavour and comparative poverty, as well as blindness. Naturally, this long record of republican activism did not go down well after the Restoration, when Milton lost his job. He continually published poems – which was a form used widely for political argument – criticising social and political behaviour of the day, and defended the right of free speech and republican government. Problems in his first marriage made him campaign for the legalisation of divorce: this was a very risky thing to do since it defied Church teaching, but risk and criticism was not something Milton stayed clear of. He was completely blind by the time he was in his mid-forties (so he never knew what his second and third wives looked like). He married three times, his first two wives dying in childbirth. This fixed his European reputation as the most learned man in England. He wrote rebuttals of Royalist attempts to make Charles I a Christian martyr, and a formal Latin defence of the English people as a state without a monarch. But he was also a passionate polemicist in defence of political liberty and free speech. He was in charge of the Protectorate’s propaganda and censorship. This new atmosphere of libertinism must have been troubling if you had grown up under the overtly religious monarchies of James I and VI, and Charles I, as John Milton did. During the war he was Oliver Cromwell’s Secretary for Foreign Tongues, because he wrote and read, and probably spoke, eight languages. Civil morality plummeted, led by the flamboyant and openly sexualised behaviour at Court. The theatres reopened, and before long even women were appearing on stage. Charles II, son of the decapitated king, was restored as king in 1660, and society went wild. We then had an Interregnum – an interruption of monarchical rule – that lasted from 1649 to 1660, under the Protectorates of Oliver and then Richard Cromwell, that were characterised by severe social austerity under Puritan dominance. We’re in the seventeenth century, when Britain was split in two by the Civil War, which ended when King Charles I was decapitated in central London after a formal trial by his enemies, the Parliamentarians. Hail Lucifer! The Really Like This Book podcast script catch-up tackles Milton’s Paradise Lost, that monster epic of the Restoration in which God is the villain, and Lucifer is the first anti-hero.
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