Epilogue: A Systemic Corpus

Summary

Here, I hope to push just beyond the scope of the preceding chapters in order to apply the insights of a theatrical Milton to the behaviour of the Miltonic corpus as a theatrical body. In essence, this consideration offers a definition of what that corpus is, at least insofar as Milton had controlled and consolidated it, to the best of his ability, before his death.

First, it would be helpful to set forth some definitive aspects of Milton's theatricality as established above:

• Theatricality involves an embodied rhetorical performance intended to have an effect on an audience.

• Theatricality marks a countering response that works upon this rhetorical body. Theatricality entails a management of a communication between two bodies: that of the rhetor-actor-poet and that of the rhetorical audience-spectators-readers.

• Theatricality destabilises identity, threatening to feminise it, to queer it, to render it indecorous, or to render it foolish and risible.

• Theatricality identifies a discursive field – entailing the rhetorical strategies and effects of framing a given human action, including speech and writing – as an act of theatre. This discursive field takes its origin in classical rhetorical tradition, in the rhetoric of actio, and becomes richer and more expansive during the political and religious struggles of the middle seventeenth century.

• The negotiations of theatricality are negotiations of influences that work to shape the body by way of the passions, which are understood by Milton as a conflux of spiritual feeling, physiological stimulation, and emotions that, in real experience, cannot fully be differentiated.

• Theatricality marks limitations of authority by way of the visual field, in the tension between the rhetor-actor-poet's optical force upon a focal point and the menace of an answering gaze that inhabits the periphery and cannot fully be countered; this menace threatens not only to pull upon the theatrical body, but also to disintegrate it. Theatrical experience can thus involve distinct emotions, ranging from confidence to terror, desire to antagonism, and a range of emotions simultaneously.

• The negotiations of theatricality can be based on script and understood in relation to script. Both rigid obedience to the letter of the script and a wild improvisation based in the performative, embodied ego will violate script, which is always itself and more than itself.