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The Puritan age and the Restoration

The period from the accession of Charles I in 1625 to the Revolution of 1688 was filled with a mighty struggle over the question whether king or Commons should be supreme in England. On this question the English people were divided into two main parties. On one side were the Royalists, or Cavaliers, who upheld the monarch with his theory of the divine right of kings; on the other were the Puritans, or Independents, who stood for the rights of the individual man and for the liberties of Parliament and people. The latter party was at first very small; it had appeared in the days of Langland and Wyclif, and had been persecuted by Elizabeth; but persecution served only to increase its numbers and determination. Though the Puritans were never a majority in England, they soon ruled the land with a firmness it had not known since the days of William the Conqueror. They were primarily men of conscience, and no institution can stand before strong men whose conscience says the institution is wrong. That is why the degenerate theatres were not reformed but abolished; that is why the theory of the divine right of kings was shattered as by a thunderbolt when King Charles was sent to the block for treason against his country.

The struggle reached a climax in the Civil War of 1642, which ended in a Puritan victory. As a result of that war, England was for a brief period a commonwealth, disciplined at home and respected abroad, through the genius and vigor and tyranny of Oliver Cromwell. When Cromwell died (1658) there was no man in England strong enough to take his place, and two years later “Prince Charlie, ” who had long been an exile, was recalled to the throne as Charles II of England. The next twenty years are of such disgrace and national weakness that the historian hesitates to write about them. It was called the period of the Restoration, which meant, in effect, the restoration of all that was objectionable in monarchy. Another crisis came in the Revolution of 1688, when the country, aroused by the attempt of James II to establish despotism in Church and state, invited Prince William of Orange (husband of the king’s daughter Mary) to the English throne. That revolution meant three things: 1)the supremacy of Parliament, 2) the beginning of modern England, and 3) the final triumph of the principle of political liberty for which the Puritan had fought and suffered hardship for a hundred years. Among the writers of the period three men stand out prominently – John Milton, John Bunyan and John Dryden.

John Milton (1608-1674). John Milton was born in London in 1608 in a wealthy, well-educated family. His father, who had been disinherited by his family for becoming Protestant, instilled in his son from an early age a love of learning and strong religious beliefs. By the age of sixteen he could write in Latin and Greek and had a good knowledge of philosophy. He attended Christ’s college, Cambridge, where he took his master of Arts degree and distinguished himself as an outstanding student. For a period of time he considered taking religious orders, but finally decided to move back home, where he continued his studies and wrote.

John Milton’s work can be divided into three periods. Period I: Early poems and a masque. The first period covers his years as a student. Being only fifteen years old he wrote his first poems, which were paraphrases of Psalms. While studying at Cambridge he wrote poetry in Latin. In 1629 he wrote his first masterpiece, “The Ode on the Morning of Christ’s Nativity”, a celebration of the coming of Christ and the abandonment of pagan Gods. Milton was fascinated by Italian culture. He studied writers like Petrarch, Dante and Tasso, and their works influenced his early poems “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso” (1632). In 1634 his masque “Comus”, which combined music, verse and dancing, was first performed. In 1637 he published his greatest minor poem, “Lycidas”, a pastoral elegy in remembrance of the death of a fellow student. Period II: Prose writings. In his second period of creativity Milton focused on prose writing. In 1643 he published “The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce”, claiming the right of a husband or wife to dissolve a marriage on the grounds of incompatibility. In his personal life Milton had married a seventeen-year old girl in 1642. She left him after just a few weeks because of his austere attitude to life and their religious differences. The two were, however, reconciled, but Milton never fully forgave his wife and became a strong supporter of divorce.

One of his greatest prose works, “Areopagitica” (“Things to be declared before the Areopagus”, a hill in Athens where a respected council met to take important decisions) was published in 1644. In this work there is Milton’s plea for freedom of speech and the press. In his pamphlet he compares the Greek council and the English Parliament, which had just passed a law controlling the press.

In the same year (1644) he wrote the pamphlet “Of Education” which promoted encyclopaedic educational schooling for the formation of humanistic leaders. However, while publicly Milton explained the importance of broad education, in private he did nothing to educate his daughters. His eldest daughter was totally illiterate. Because his eyesight was falling he taught his other daughters to read mechanically to him in foreign languages, without understanding the words they read. Period III: Poetic masterpieces. In 1660 Milton retired from public life and dedicated himself to the writing of his great poetic masterpieces. He had always wanted to write an epic poem in English in the classical style of Virgil’s “Aeneid”, and initially he had considered the legend of King Arthur as a suitable subject matter. However, he finally chose the Fall of Man as his theme and set to work on “Paradise Lost”. Published in 1667, “Paradise Lost” tells the story in twelve books of Satan’s banishment from Heaven and his attempt to take revenge on God through the temptation of Adam and Eve. The poem is written in blank verse and follows the classical epic requirements:

1) the hero is a figure of great importance. Adam represents the entire human race;

2) the setting of the poem is ample in scale: the action takes place on Earth, in Heaven and in hell;

3) the action involves superhuman deeds in battle and a long and arduous journey: “Paradise Lost” includes the war in Heaven and then Satan’s journey to the newly-created world to corrupt mankind;

4) an epic poem is narrated in an elevated style that is deliberately distanced from ordinary speech: Milton’s grand style is created by the use of Latinate diction (the choice of words in a literary work), words of Latin origin, and syntax, wide-ranging allusions (there are references to Homer, Virgil, Dante, Tasso, Ariosto, Spenser and the Bible) and long listing of names;

5) the narrator begins by stating his theme and invoking a muse: in the opening lines Milton calls on God to be his guiding spirit in writing his “adventurous song”;

6) the narrative starts when the action is at a critical point: “Paradise Lost” opens with Satan and the fallen angels in Hell, gathering their forces and plotting revenge. It is not until Books V-VII that we learn from the angel Raphael about the events in Heaven that led to this situation.

Milton wanted to write a poem in praise of God. As he said in one of his sonnets, he wanted to use his literary gifts “to serve therewith my maker”. Some critics have claimed that the true hero of “Paradise Lost” is, however, Satan. It has also been suggested that Milton may have identified a parallel between Satan’s struggle against the absolute power of God and his own fight against the absolute authority of the monarchy.

In 1671 Milton published “Paradise Regained” in four books. Written in the same epic style as “Paradise Lost”, it tells the story of Christ’s temptation by Satan in the desert.

For over two hundred years Milton was regarded as one of the greatest writers in the English language. At the beginning of the twentieth century some influential literary figures such as Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot criticized his “grand style”, claiming that it was artificial and rhetorical and too removed from the speech of common people. Other critics have since argued that his style is appropriate to the subject matter and epic form, and have rehabilitated him to a prominent role in English literature.