1 - Speaking Body: The Vacation Exercise and Paradise Lost

Summary

Did the young John Milton attend a play or two, or perhaps more? Almost certainly. We would expect a young bachelor to take in a play here and there. We would expect that re-stagings of Shakespeare and original works by Ben Jonson, or, perhaps, by Milton's Cambridge peer Thomas Randolph, might allure an aspiring poet. Milton implies in two early works that he had attended plays. In Elegia sexta, he writes to Charles Diodati about visiting and fearing to lose himself in the playhalls. Moreover, in ‘L'Allegro’, we learn of the poet's desire to catch a comedy by Shakespeare or a tragedy by Jonson. Later, in the Apology, he would locate himself within the audience of a Cambridge play, as an intensely invested, discerning spectator who joins the crowd in hissing bad actors from the stage. There is speculative evidence, too, that Milton had experienced the popular drama of the London playhalls. A John Milton – not our poet, but perhaps his father – was, for a time, a shareholder of the Blackfriars playhall.

Just as there is no evidence in Milton's writings that he viewed public theatre uncritically, so, too, is there no evidence that he abjured it, that he thought it unfit for his person. The drama, as he encountered it in books, in college or in London, offered models for his own mimeses. The metaphor driving Shakespeare's dramaturgy – of the world as a stage – was one of action, of performing bodies seen by spectators. Indeed, as so much New Historical scholarship has shown, the sign of the staged actor could work as a structural principle underlying late-sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English culture more broadly.

Accordingly, theatre in Milton absorbs its conceptual power from a number of places and centres of social organisation. He read anti-theatrical literature, including Lactantius, Tertullian and, perhaps, William Prynne. He might have attended sermons that decried theatre and, like many contemporaries, might have considered the theatricality of the preachers while attending their sermons. Monarchy, of course, was inherently theatrical, a fact as evident in Milton's Eikonoklastes as in Shakespeare's Richard III and Henry IV, Part I, half a century before.