Introduction: Theatrical Milton

Summary

When the poet Andrew Marvell wrote the earliest piece of criticism on Paradise Lost, he imagined John Milton as a staged body: ‘When I beheld the poet blind […]’. Marvell's Milton appears as the Biblical revenger Samson, whom Samson Agonistes, published three years prior, places on stage in the theatre of a false God. ‘On Mr. Milton's Paradise Lost’, published in the prefatory material for the 1674 second edition of the epic, presents a theatrical Milton, an embodiment shaped by audience, politics and scripture – in short, by what he would and did himself shape. He is his own preface, emerging from the conditions of writing. Were we to read the sinews of this body closely, we would, in the process, construct a new model of a poetic career. We would see the precise contours of Milton's interest in theatre and discover how it afforded him resources for poetic and polemical representation, as well as means to know, to transform and to re-present himself.

At the core of Milton's works is a contradictory relation to theatre that has neither been explained nor properly explored. Typically, scholars have linked Milton to theatre through his interest in genres.2 In 1628, he wrote and performed in a comedic interlude as part of a Cambridge initiation ceremony. In 1632, he wrote a provincial aristocratic progress loosely related to the masque. In 1634, he wrote the Ludlow Maske (‘Comus’). In the early 1640s, he drafted scores of sketches for possible Old Testament, Christian and British historical dramas. Two of the most developed of these sketches are for a drama about the Fall. In 1671, he added to Paradise Regained and the closet drama Samson Agonistes. And yet this evidence tells less than half of the story of Milton's relation to the dramatic medium in its various forms and discourses. Taken alone, it tells a misleading story.

Scholarly discussion of a ‘dramatic’ presence in Milton is fragmented and contradictory, largely because Milton's application of theatrical structures and engagement with dramatic forms cannot be reduced, at any point in his career, to an unqualified pro- or anti-theatrical stance.