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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Paradise lost, in spite of all the critical and scholarly acknowledgements that it is a “typical” seventeenth-century epic, has not often enough been seriously considered in the context of the Restoration, when, of course, it appeared. The audience that read it was also reading Dryden. And while it was obviously not a “party poem” in the way that Absalom and Achitophel was, it certainly was not detached from its age. In his own way, Milton was responding to contemporary events and issues with something of Dryden's hardness of mind and spirit. Indeed, certain aspects of Paradise Lost may appear in an altogether new perspective when we consider how closely Dryden used Milton's epical material in his own small epic. We may, to pursue one aspect in detail, even turn up a plausible model for Satan.
1 See my article “Dryden's Miniature Epic,” JEGP, LVII (1958), 211–219, in which I discuss this matter at length.
2 James H. Hanford, A Milton Handbook, 4th ed. (New York, 1946), p. 190.
3 E. M. W. Tillyard, Milton (London, 1949), p. 195. Opinion is not unanimous that Books i and n were composed during this early period. Allan H. Gilbert, On the Composition of Paradise Lost (Chapel Hill, 1947), lists these two books, in his table showing the sequence of composition, as coming after the rest of the epic had been “settled on.” Pp. 154–155. See also pp. 8–9, footnote 5.
4 Tillyard, p. 195.
5 David Masson, The Life of John Milton (London, 1859–94), iv, 606.
6 For example, Hanford says “there is a certain analogy between Satan and Cromwell as military leaders . . . .” Handbook, p. 238. But he also comments (p. 198) that Moloch's speech is delivered “with a brevity and force which remind one of the oratory of Oliver Cromwell.” F. Tucker Brooke suggests Cromwell may have sat for Beelzebub; General Monck, he feels, inspired Belial. Albert C. Baugh, ed., A Literary History of England (New York, 1948), p. 692.
7 “The evidence that Vondel . . . deliberately intended in the creation of his Lucifer to present a counterfeit of the famous English leader is very strong, and there can be little doubt that to Cromwell, specially, the closing sentence of the introduction to the drama [Lucifer] was intended to apply. ‘We are the more eager to bring ”Lucifer“ upon the tragic stage since he, stricken at last by the thunderbolt of God, is thrust down to hell, as a signal example to all thankless and ambitious persons, who audaciously dare to rise up against consecrated powers and majesties and lawful authorities’. ” George Edmundson, Milton and Vondel (London, 1885), pp. 35–36. For a discussion of whether or not Milton knew Vondel, see Edmundson, pp. 13–30; for parallels between Paradise Lost and Lucifer, see pp. 36–87. Now Edmundson suggested that Satan's emergence as “hero” in Paradise Lost was the result of Milton's possibly responding to Vondel's framing the character of Lucifer “upon that of the great Rebel, Cromwell” (p. 35), but it would seem more reasonable to suppose that, if Milton did indeed respond directly to Vondel's work, it was to react against an identification of Lucifer with Cromwell, and to reply to Vondel by depicting as Satan an opponent of Cromwell.
8 Details of Cooper's career are drawn from Masson, Life of Milton, iv, passim; H. D. Traill, Shaftesbury (The First Earl) (New York, 1886); B. Martyn and A. Kippis, Life of the First Earl of Shaftesbury, ed. by G. W. Cooke, i and n (London, 1836); W. D. Christie, Life of Shaftesbury, i and u (London, 1871); W. D. Christie, ed., Memoirs, Letters, and Speeches of Cooper . . . (London, 1859); Louise Fargo Brown, The First Earl of Shaftesbury (New York, 1933); and from the DNB article. Perhaps I should say that I myself take no position on Shaftesbury's deviltry, or lack thereof.
9 Traill, Shaftesbury, p. 20.
10 Burnet accused Cooper himself of spreading this rumor. “… Then he was much courted by Cromwell and said he did him great service in some of his parliaments, insomuch that he told some that Cromwell offered once to make him king, but he never offered to impose so gross a thing on me . . . .” Gilbert Burnet, A Supplement to History of My Own Time, ed. H. C. Foxcroft (Oxford, 1902), p. 59. See Brown, p. 63, for a more sympathetic explanation of this rumor.
11 If Books i and ii were indeed written after the Restora“ tion, as Gilbert suggested (see note 3 above), then Milton would have had fuller opportunity to see Cooper more clearly, more unmistakably, in the role of arch rebel against Cromwell.
12 Quoted in DNB.
13 Memoirs, Letters, and Speeches of Cooper, p. 169.
14 Quotations in this paragraph are from Supplement to History of My Own Time, pp. 58–60; and from A History of My Own Time (London, 1838), p. 64.
15 Augustan Satire 1660–17SO (Oxford, 1952), p. 68.
16 First two lines quoted in Edmund Malone, “Life of Dryden,” in The Critical and Miscellaneous Prose Works of John Dryden (London, 1800), i, Part 1, 141, and in R. F. Jones, “The Originality of Absalom and Achitophel,” MLN, XLVI (1931), 217. All four lines quoted in Christopher Hollis, Dryden (London, 1933), p. 91.
17 There was certainly good reason for Milton not to be more clear, more specific, in his description of Shaftesbury, for Shaftesbury, when Milton was writing Paradise Lost, was no less powerful a figure than he was when Dryden, more than a decade later and with the king's backing, depicted him anonymously as Achitophel. Conceivably, Dryden may even have felt he needed the support of Milton's precedent in so harsh an attack on a powerful politician. There remains, too, the barest of possibilities that Milton himself may at one time vaguely have connected Shaftesbury, Satan, and Achitophel, through Nathanael Carpenter's Achitophel, The Portrait of a Wicked Politician, a pamphlet published widely in the 1630's, describing Achitophel in some detail with satanic characteristics. See my “John Milton, Nathanael Carpenter, and Satan,” N&Q, TV, 293–295.
18 For an account of the circumstances leading to Sobieski's election, see “Jan Sobieski, 1674–96,” by O. Forst de Bat-taglia, in The Cambridge History of Poland to 1696 (Cambridge, 1950), pp. 532–556, especially pp. 536–537.
19 Quoted in The Poetical Works of Dryden, ed. George R. Noyes (Boston, 1950), p. 964.
20 See my “Dryden's Miniature Epic,” passim.
