Milton, Drama, and Greek Texts

Tania Demetriou, Tanya Pollard

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138567450
• eBook ISBN: 9781351341318
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This collection reconsiders Milton's engagement with Greek texts, with particular attention to the theological and theatrical meanings attached to Greek in the early modern period. Responding to new scholarship on early modern reactions to Greek authors – especially Euripides and Homer, Milton's particular favourites – the collection emphasizes the associations of Greek with both Protestantism and the origins of tragedy, two arenas frequently in tension, but crucially linked in Milton's literary imagination. The contributions explore a range of works spanning the whole of Milton's career, from the early masque Comus, through the political and religious prose, to the 1671 closet drama, Samson Agonistes. They consider the ways in which the authority and controversy attached to Greek authors framed Milton's approaches to their texts. Looking at both the texts and their interpretative traditions together, this book suggests that Greek authors shaped Milton's attitudes to drama in ways even more extensive and surprising than we have yet recognized. This book was originally published as a special issue of The Seventeenth Century.

Milton, drama, and Greek texts: preface

Tania Demetriou and Tanya Pollard

ABSTRACT

This collection of essays explores the connection between Milton’s approach to drama and his engagement with Greek antiquity. Paying attention to early Christian and early modern interpretive traditions as well as Geek literature, it situates the power of this conjunction for Milton within the larger project of the northern Renaissance.

This collection of essays looks at the conjunction between Milton’s approach to drama and his engagement with Greek antiquity, a tradition often linked by early moderns to the origins of the theatre. The idea of bringing this work together stems from the recent revival of critical attention to the Renaissance afterlife of Greek texts. This new scholarship has begun to give Greek authors a new place in the literary landscape of early modern Europe, not least Homer and Euripides, the poets reported to have been Milton’s particular favourites.¹ It has also illuminated the rich legacy of the Reformation on these authors’ early modern interpretations, in works long-known to have formed part of Milton’s reading.² Such studies have also opened new perspectives on the early modern theatre, by probing the multi-faceted impact on drama of Aristotle’s Poetics, through a commentary tradition familiar to Milton.³ The reception of Greek has, moreover, been crucial to work excavating the complex interaction between Protestantism, confessional pedagogy, and approaches to dramatic performance and genre.⁴ Protestantism and the theatre, frequently in tension in the history of early English drama, shared a link to the study of Greek literature; this very link proved a privileged site of artistic and Christian reflection for Milton.

This connection is at the heart of this special issue. Its five essays revisit vital moments of Milton’s engagement with Greek texts, to shed new and surprising light on his attitudes to writing drama; to the roots of tragedy; to the politics of the theatre; to the philosophical authority of pagan playwrights; and to an ancient devotee of paganism with a puritan aversion to the theatre. Together, they argue for the depth of Greek influences on Milton’s understanding of the resources of drama. By choosing, moreover, to pay equal attention to Greek literary texts, and to Milton’s debts to early Christian and early modern approaches to Greek literature, they make a further claim. It is not by considering the reception of individual plays that the link between Greek antiquity and drama becomes most powerfully grasped, but when we view these works as a cultural corpus or archive and as part of Milton’s appropriation of a much larger enterprise. Jessica Wolfe describes the “scholarly project of the northern Renaissance” as “to trace the philosophical and literary debts that early Christianity owed to Greek antiquity and to discern between those aspects of Greek antiquity that might be, or might not be, ethically or spiritually useful for Protestant culture.”⁵ There have been many astute and comprehensive critical responses to the Hellenic aspects of Milton’s classicism, over the years, as well as recently.⁶ By and large, the tendency in such work has been to relegate the patristic and early modern hermeneutic traditions that Milton was steeped in to the background of the discussion. Bringing these interpretive legacies centre stage, the essays that follow elucidate the larger humanist project that shaped Milton’s reading of Greek texts, and reveal how it endowed the connection between Greek antiquity and the theatre with aesthetic, political, ethical, and theological resonance.

Sarah Van der Laan opens our investigation by exploring a link between the work of drama and artistic and spiritual integrity, under the aegis of the mythological Circe, whose name is etymologically connected to “mixture”. Probing Circe’s presiding presence in Milton’s Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle, Van der Laan parts company with previous explorations by focusing on the important Homeric commentary of Jean de Sponde, a 1583 landmark of Huguenot scholarship well known to Milton, as well as to George Sandys, the translator of Ovid. In the interaction between Sandys and Sponde, Van der Laan demonstrates, the figure of Circe emerges as a locus for thinking – via Augustine and Aquinas – about the possibility and nature of metamorphosis, physical and spiritual. This question speaks directly to the genre of Milton’s only substantial performed piece of drama. Only two years before their appearance in Milton’s masque, its participants had danced at court in Aurelian Townshend’s and Inigo Jones’ Tempe Restored. This work had drawn the figure of Circe into a subtle reflection on the artistic logic according to which the masque’s moral efficacy involves the ethical transformation of those who embody the virtues it represents. Tempe Restored had used Circe to insist – unconventionally – on non-transformation, by presenting her victims as not transmuted, but rather abstracted into their own underlying moral qualities in a process that hinges on free will. Milton, Van der Laan suggests, took that bold move further in his own masque, where Comus’ Circean cup reveals the vices in a mixed nature and thus becomes a “touchstone” or “acid test” for purity; for the metamorphosis traditionally at the heart of the masque, Milton substitutes trial and revelation. The process, argues Van der Laan, is closely connected with the inevitably intertextual project of literary authorship and with the imitation of pagan authors in particular: Milton’s “Circean poetics of mixture may reveal a divinely inspired poet.”

If early modern Homeric commentary becomes a springboard here for rethinking and reforming the spiritual work of the theatre, the next contribution, by William Poole, considers the reception of a very different Greek work, the Misopogon, or Beard-hater, by the fourth-century CE Roman Emperor Julian the Apostate. Poole sees the Misopogon as part of a constellation of references that charged the contest between paganism and Christianity under Julian’s rule with extraordinary suggestiveness for Milton’s rethinking and reforming of literature and drama. Demonstrating Milton’s engagement with patristic debates on how Greek literature is to be used by a “politically engaged Christian writer”, he observes that a recurring historical point of reference in these debates is Julian’s intellectual persecution of Christians, most concretely through the edict that banned them from the teaching of classical literature. Milton’s reading of these Greek Church Historians on the way Christians fought back, and especially on the literary biblical classicism of the Apollinares, shaped “the ethical aesthetic of Milton’s writing career”, Poole argues. On the other hand, Julian’s own Misopogon – an entirely sui generis satire against the Christian Antiochenes who lampooned his aloofness and hostility to their theatrical festivals – paints a picture of the author that Milton’s contemporaries perceived as strongly resonant with seventeenth-century puritanism: a figure of “ostentatious devotion”, “moral precision”, and “studiedly rugged physical appearance”. Yet Julian was also a literary elitist and a philhellenist, whose rejection of the Antiochenes’ spectacles was driven by a different moral vision of what theatre could be. Poole traces the unstable historical alignments between Milton and the Apostate emperor, and the at times uncanny parallels between their aesthetic attitudes, pausing illuminatingly on their reformist attitude to drama; in this, he sees Milton as the simultaneous inheritor of both the “Julian” and the “Apollinarian” sides of this intricate and influential moment of artistic and spiritual appropriation of Greek literature.

Julian and the Church Fathers, and the idea of trial, both feature in Russ Leo’s essay on Milton’s approach to Greek tragedy. Leo looks beyond Milton’s engagement with the texts of “antique tragedy” and Aristotle’s Poetics, to the contributions of patristic writings to Milton’s “tragic archive”. The conjunction between Milton and Greek tragedy has led many critics to the references in Areopagitica and Samson Agonistes, to St Paul’s quotation in I Corinthians 15:33 of a verse from Attic drama: “φθείρουσιν ἤθη χρήσθ᾿ ὁμιλίαι κακαί” (“evil communications corrupt good manners.”) Milton might have taken from this quotation a paradigm for consecrating pagan literary instruments for salutary Christian purposes; certainly, commentators read the passage in this light. Yet no such paradigm determines the poet’s attitude to Athenian tragedy, argues Leo, either in Samson Agonistes or Paradise Regained. Instead, Milton, who idiosyncratically follows the Church Fathers in attributing the verse to Euripides rather than Menander, also adopts their complex arguments on Christian uses of the pagan past. Leo explores two witnesses to this interpretive thread. Socrates Scholasticus brings in the Pauline quotation in his discussion of Julian’s persecution of Christians and of the Apollinares’ achievements; here, he foregrounds not appropriation but trial, in a manner that resonates with the views Milton articulated explicitly in Areopagitica but whose roots were already there, as Van der Laan suggests, in the Masque at Ludlow, evolving alongside reflections on drama and the Greeks. The same emphasis on trial, together with the Euripidean ascription, appears in Clement of Alexandria; they are combined there, however, with the different argument that Jewish antiquity “both predates and perfects Greek thought and heathen culture at large”. Leo finds all of these arguments echoed in Jesus’ answer to Satan on classical erudition in Book 4 of Paradise Regained, including the point that Athenian tragedy is “ill imitated” from its Hebrew precursors. Milton’s view here and his discussion of “the terms and work of antique tragedy” in the preface to Samson, in which he does not underscore the genre’s Hellenic origin, emerge as entirely compatible.

Nicholas McDowell returns to the same nexus of connections as Leo, Poole, and Van der Laan, when he concludes that the “central ethical claims of Areopagitica – that ‘[g]ood and evill, we know in the field of this World grow up together almost inseparably’, but that nonetheless ‘reason is but choosing’” – resulted from a range of influences from the late 1630s “at least”. These influences include the patristic texts explored by Poole and Leo, with their discussions of the uses of pagan literature and trial, but also the innovative comparative philology of his contemporary John Selden, with its discussion of natural law. Among these philosophical resources McDowell also includes classical texts, and adds a striking new authority: the playwright Euripides, whom Plutarch quotes in his well-known essay De audiendis poetis, on the uses of the poets, as giving voice precisely to the view that good and bad “in the same acts with each other twist”. Had Milton thought about this fragment, it would not have been the only time that Euripides might have appeared to him to speak with acute philosophical insight. In fact, McDowell demonstrates that on two occasions, and at moments crucial to the argument in Tenure of Kings and Magistrates and in De doctrina Christiana, Milton places the authority of ideas expressed by the dramatist above what the Bible says on the same issues, exercising in so doing that free will that makes every mixture a Circean touchstone.

Euripidean authority serves as a link between McDowell’s essay and the issue’s final contribution, by Hannah Crawforth, on Milton’s engagement with Greek tragedy in Samson Agonistes. Crawforth argues that for Milton and many of his contemporaries, Greek tragedy in general, and Euripides in particular, explored and sometimes critiqued the ideals of Athenian democracy, while celebrating its challenges to tyranny. These associations, she suggests, had important roots in the mediating texts that shaped Greek plays for seventeenth-century readers, especially Gasparus Stiblinus’s commentaries in one of the period’s most influential editions of Euripides’ plays. Tracing Milton’s responses to these commentaries, she suggests that he developed his reading of Euripides in intimate conversation with their paratextual authority, which went on to shape his own approach to the genre in Samson Agonistes. Crawforth argues, then, that Samson represents a response to Euripides’ textual tradition as well as to Euripides himself. She also argues that Greek allusions are for Milton always politically charged, evoking the particular possibilities and challenges modelled by the Athenian democratic example as he works through his own complex sense of the difficulties and rewards of (a highly limited form of) representational politics.

Evoking democracy and tyranny, pagans and Protestants, purity and contaminatio, Greek texts in these readings encompass multitudes, with potentially paradoxical meanings. Yet each of these moments of contact with Greek antiquity, classical and Christian, offers Milton a rich vantage point for his own explorations of theatre – as a source of literary and political thought, as a space for theological reflection, and as a metaphor for the dialogic possibilities of any and all texts.

Notes

1.See, e.g. Ford, De Troie à Ithaque; Demetriou, “‘Essentially Circe’”; Borza, Sophocles redivivus; Capodieci and Ford, eds, Homère à la Renaissance; Bizer, Homer and the Politics of Authority; Van der Laan, “Tasso’s Homeric Counterfactuals”; Pollard, “What’s Hecuba to Shakespeare?”; Pollard, “Greek Playbooks and Dramatic Forms”; Miola, “Early Modern Antigones”; Demetriou, “Periphrōn Penelope”; Wolfe, Homer and the Question of Strife; and Bastin-Hammou, Fumo and Mouren, eds, Traductions latines du théâtre grec, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Milton, drama, and Greek texts: preface
• 2 Circean transformation and the poetics of Milton’s Masque
• 3 John Milton and the Beard-Hater: encounters with Julian the Apostate
• 4 Paul’s Euripides, Greek tragedy and Hebrew antiquity in Paradise Regain’d
• 5 Milton’s Euripides and the superior rationality of the heathen
• 6 The politics of Greek tragedy in Samson Agonistes
• Index