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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 January 2018
During the early 1640s, the theatre of print, as Milton imagined it, showed him encompassed by an allied audience, performing a type of exegetical poetics that, despite being impelled by zeal, was nonetheless constrained by cultural discourses and interpretive manoeuvres that he was beginning to understand but that he could not fully control. At the same time, he was theorising a type of drama that appears, for the most part, devoid of the struggles and complexities of character that defined his own experience in print culture and that would be so integral to the greatness of Paradise Lost. His consideration of the public staging of dramas in a newly reformed London manifested in scores of sketches, in the Trinity Manuscript, for dramas based on stories from scripture and British history. Together, these evince his desire for England to achieve the moral and spiritual edification that would be required of a nation aspiring to be a vanguard of the coming Millennium.
However, by the time that Milton began to write Paradise Lost in the mid-1650s, his faith in a general populace would be all but gone. The final passage of the second edition of the Readie and Easie Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth (1660) implored, on the eve of the Restoration, a remaining
abundance of sensible and ingenuous men […] to bethink themselves a little and consider whether they are rushing; to exhort this torrent also of the people, not to be so impetuos, but to keep thir due channel [… ;] to stay these ruinous proceedings; justly and timely fearing to what a precipice of destruction the deluge of this epidemic madness would hurrie us through the general defection of a misguided and abus'd multitude.
Paradise Lost (1667) opens with a view to the innumerable fallen angels, who are ‘rowling in the fiery Gulfe’, the ‘fiery Deluge’, after having been ‘Hurld headlong flaming […] / With hideous ruine and combustion down / To bottomless perdition’. The final passage from the Readie and Easie Way and the opening scene of Paradise Lost form a continuity of various implication.
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