The critical question of liking a character is perhaps at this moment relegated largely to: How do we judge the things they do and decisions they make given the situations they have been placed in? From the critic’s chair, the character is a puppet on the strings of the author (who is alive and well). In what directions they pull those strings contributes largely to whatever it is we are going to take from the novel. (This exercise can be done, I believe, even with something essentially plotless.) The morality of a character is not an inherent quality we receive wholesale, existing in stasis as in a painting, but the accretion of actions over pages, and is in many ways as much a nonexistent object as the buttons on Holmes’s jacket. The worst, heaven help, is when a character’s action is judged to weaken a novel because it is deemed something they “would not do.” In The Portrait of a Lady, Isabel Archer is to the very end doing something she would not have previously done; this propels the novel and contributes to its genius.

I admit it would certainly liven up the bin-bound pages of magazines if there were more statements of preference about characters, as though the critic were a spouse we could gossip with after a party. These would be necessarily subjective stances, and goodness or wit are not reliable metrics. As is true of people I meet life, I like characters who are not good and vice versa; I often decide I like people, including those in novels, for no particular reason. If I find a character personally sympathetic, that might prompt me to like or dislike them depending on what of myself I see in them. That being said, to write the stance of any thinking person off as merely subjective is boring, but I can’t shake the feeling that in a post–I.A. Richards world, practical criticism dictates that not only do we stay with the text itself but that even as subjects we mustn’t bring our subjectivity to bear on the object.

I have noticed something of a presupposition that literature is littered with one-dimensionally virtue-bound characters we all struggle with liking. Call it the Fanny Price Problem. For what it’s worth, I think she bears an unfair load at this point, a kind of straw woman that we stand up every time we want to talk about likable characters who possess “goodness.” Is she really representative of a type? To me she comes across as singular. And it is difficult to accept any character about whom we can talk so much as a paper doll of simple virtue. There are characters who serve as mouthpieces for the rights and wrongs the author wants you to attend to, which might be more the thing that we might class as a failure. But again, that has little to do with action. (“Messy heroines” can also be quite boring, if extremely easy to like, but there lies digression.)

What is particularly exciting is when I meet with an author whose strong opinions about their own characters you can feel on the page or over the course of reading, such as with Tolstoy in Anna Karenina, as he finds himself liking (maybe loving) Anna despite his intentions. Murdoch holds all of her characters in the most vicious contempt, which gives her work its irresistible gallows aspect. I like Anna, and I dislike most of Murdoch’s characters. In writing my novel, I find myself presupposing that I like my central characters and have them always behave in the most right way, whatever that might look like: say the right thing or have the right feeling in the right situation. I don’t see this as having much to do with virtue or morals, but I suppose it is akin to likability. It is something that I would not fault a critic for taking issue with. But as most contemporary novels are not undertaken as moral projects, it is unsurprising that this would be a natural mode for an author to slip into. And as I understand, that brings us past Oliver’s question to a new one: Should we be bothered by unwavering rightness in characters?

But does it matter if you like them? To answer the question quickly, yes it does. Not in the sense that it matters to the reader’s estimation of the novel whether they like all of the characters — obviously — but in the sense that being able to form such an opinion about the actors and actions we see in the text is proof the novel contains complex objects that we as subjects contend with, decide about, disagree with. They just have to say the wrong thing every once and a while.

I don’t know if much more really needed to be said than this scene from the movie Metropolitan, but this is not a post about need. Go watch that.

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Such it is with Areopagitica.1 The pieces are madly hung together, an argument prototype confined by an individual genius. Start with the title, or maybe straightforwardly, with political context, or instead with the allegory where Truth and Falsehood “grapple” in a field “in a free and open encounter.” The layers of allusion to biblical antiquity, or the theology (especially the bad theology), the anti-Papism, the assessment nobody asked for that the poet Edmund Spencer was a better thinker than Aquinas.

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And, for what it’s worth, Milton would later serve in a kind of quasi-censor role as Latin Secretary under Cromwell. So the extent to which he even believes in his project can be questioned, and answered, I think, with the fact that everything up for debate here can be laden with qualifications. Milton became easily overwhelmed in his writing by his own convictions, whether or not they conformed to wider philosophies to which he ostensibly subscribed; his writing, verse and prose, was a vector for the expression of ideas and, radically, emotion, rather than the articulation of a system. Any way you choose, John Milton’s so-called censorship pamphlet is not nearly as pious as a “censorship pamphlet” sounds.

Let’s start with the title: “Areopagitica.” Unfriendly to the tongue and opaque in meaning, at least (I’m guessing) to most modern readers. But readers of Milton’s pamphlet in 1644, published when the poet was thirty-six, would’ve likely clocked the reference to the Classical rhetorician Isocrates and his oration addressing the court at Areopagus in Athens.

Isocrates begins with a martial metaphor (an appropriate echo for the situation in England in 1664, the height of the English Civil War):

Many of you are wondering, I suppose, what in the world my purpose is in coming forward to address you on the public safety, as if Athens were in danger or her affairs on an uncertain footing, when in fact she possesses more than two hundred ships-of-war, enjoys peace throughout her territory, maintains her empire on the sea, and has, furthermore, many allies who, in case of any need, will readily come to her aid, and many more allies who are paying their contributions and obeying her commands. With these resources, one might argue that we have every reason to feel secure, as being far removed from danger, while our enemies may well be anxious and take thought for their own safety.

Security and safety—those are the stakes. Military strength is no good against threats to the moral fabric of a society. The Licensing Act of 1643 had complicated the landscape of publishing by re-instating the practice of pre-publication censorship, or “licensing”—slightly different than banning a book after it’s been published or hauling the author in for an obscenity trial, which is the kind of censorship familiar to us today. Instead, a small bureaucratic body would review a manuscript and deem it fit or unfit for publication. Milton was no doubt also thinking of the Catholic Church’s similar practice of approving books for publication; for a virulent anti-Papist such as himself, that familiar taste in the mouth would’ve been nauseating.2

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So the poet picks up his pen and starts writing, arriving eventually at one of the more well-known lines in Areopagitica:

For Books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them. I know they are as lively, and as vigorously productive, as those fabulous Dragons teeth; and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men. And yet on the other hand, unless weariness be us’d, as good almost kill a Man as kill a good Book; who kills a Man kills a reasonable creature, Gods Image; but he who destroys a good Book, kills reason it self, kills the Image of God, as it were in the eye.3

“Good” here is not a cozy modifier, but a distinction from Bad, and that’s important. There is an essential goodness and badness to any text, akin to what is at the heart of a person; the same way a book is inherently good, so are its readers. He goes on: “Read any books whatever come to thy hands, for thou art sufficient both to judge aright, and to examine each matter.” He is basing his endorsement of censorship on the belief that knowledge of the good is inherent — if God has decided one is good: “A wise man will make better use of an idle pamphlet than a fool will do of a sacred Scripture.”

It’s all sounding pretty basic: salvation lies with the individual, and it is deterministic Calvinism with its usual fatalist piquancy — there is no writing that can sway a soul, so good individuals must be left alone to find the books that will bolster their own inherent goodness. Those already outfitted with errant souls are in bad shape no matter what. We must protect with limitations from what might put them at risk: “A man may be a heretic in the truth … if he believe things only because his Pastor says so, or the Assembly so determines, without knowing other reason, though his belief be true, yet the very truth he holds becomes his heresy.”

Amid all of this, there is for me what is the most baffling line of the whole pamphlet: “For God sure esteems the growth and completing of one virtuous person more than the restraint of ten vicious.” This one I can’t explain, so completely opposite is it to what any educated Protestant would find in the Gospels. Perhaps it can serve as evidence of Milton’s obsession with correct action so dogged that it dismisses the obvious in favor of the extreme, even if it means an inversion of what is so clearly laid out in Scripture.

Milton began to go blind in his thirties, and his anxiety about this deterioration applied to the entire system of his body, as any good Galenite would have it. In notebooks he details bodily discomforts. Paradise Lost has quite a bit of body stuff—Satan’s heavenly rebellion is an “intestine war” and Adam sleeps well because of “pure digestion.” Raphael tells Adam:

Knowledge is as food, and needs no less
Her Temperance over Appetite, to know
In measure what the mind may well contain,
Oppresses else with Surfet, and soon turns
Wisdom to Folly, as Nourishment to Winde.

In Areopagitica, Milton also spins out his preoccupation with the relationship between physical and mental constitution, and it is again tidy Calvinistic determinism: “To the pure all things are pure, not only meats and drinks, but all kinds of knowledge whether of good or evil; the knowledge cannot defile, nor consequently the books, if the will and conscience be not defiled.” Just as it is impossible for something to corrupt the physical body, the spiritual are immune from anything that might otherwise prove dangerous. These two consumptions are one and the same: “When God did enlarge the universal diet of man’s body, saving ever the rules of temperance, he then also, as before, left arbitrary the dieting and repasting of our minds.”

If I am aiming to say something fresh about this pamphlet, it is this: this is an attempt to reconcile politics with the metaphysical. This is the project of so much with John Milton. Just as Paradise Lost seems a poem about sin that is then also about politics, this pamphlet is about politics until it is about sin.

This pamphlet, touted in the centuries following its publication by thinkers of various persuasions trying to understand “liberty” writ large, was in its own time not taken as a definitive word on the topic. If you’ll allow me another free assertion: there is too much in it that cannot reconcile with itself. There is a fearlessness in its convictions, though they often bring us to contradictions or down dead-ends. But it is this grappling for something essential that is the point, and in making that point where he excels as a poet rather than as a philosopher or polemicist, in the most lyrical of passages, returning once more to the language of war:

The temple of Janus with his two controversial faces might now not unsignificantly be set open. And though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth, so Truth be in the field, we do injuriously, by licensing and prohibiting, to misdoubt her strength. Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter? Her confuting is the best and surest suppressing [….] When a man hath been labouring the hardest labour in the deep mines of knowledge, hath furnished out his findings in all their equipage: drawn forth his reasons as it were a battle ranged: scattered and defeated all objections in his way; calls out his adversary into the plain, offers him the advantage of wind and sun, if he please, only that he may try the matter by dint of argument: for his opponents then to skulk, to lay ambushments, to keep a narrow bridge of licensing where the challenger should pass, though it be valour enough in soldiership, is but weakness and cowardice in the wars of Truth.

What remains consistent throughout is the leitmotif of temperance: of the mind, of the soul, of the body. For Milton, this cannot be manufactured by policy or committee. Let Falsehood and Truth wrestle above our heads as we below toil for knowledge, needing no less temperance over appetite, to know in measure what the mind may well contain.

The country he returned to was utterly chaotic. Amid the play-dirty mud-wrestling for power happening between crown, church, and state, in July 1641 Parliament abolished the court of the Star Chamber, which had for the previous century and a half been censoring published writing in England using increasingly corrupt procedures to dole out severe, often physical, punishments on unruly writers. Unleashed was a new chattering class: between 1560 and 1620, the number of students enrolled at Cambridge had tripled. All of these university men would have been trained in rigorous argumentation, and were now armed with paper and ink and the permission to publish what they had to say. Milton, the son of a scrivener, had managed, largely through education, something like upward social mobility; he and others like him would not have taken for granted the world around them, and no doubt saw how drastically it could be changed by the application of mind and will. The profusion of pamphlets, and pamphleteers, was huge—most of them lost now, melted in the rain or swept down a London gutter.

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Milton wrote of this moment that “all mouths were opened,” his included. Pamphlets were a kind of publishing that was cheap to do and cheap to buy, easy to get quickly into the hands of readers. His writing came full-throated and thunderous, and witty, and arrogant, and personal. Today, infuriating as often as it is invigorating. The prose can be overfull; there is not a single short sentence. But even so, these tracts are clear-eyed and purposeful in their arguments, the hot-blooded art of polemic. In the words of a biographer, Milton “almost single-handedly created the identity of the writer as political activist.”1 He takes to the work with haughtiness; in Apology against a Pamphlet, he states that his “purpose is not, nor hath been formerly, to look on my adversary abroad, through the deceiving glass of other mens’ great opinion of him, but at home, where I may find him in the proper light of his own worth.” Do not mistake him; this examination will not be an exercise in balance. His debut: “Of Reformation Touching Church Discipline in England,” published in 1641.

This series of newsletters will take up each of Milton’s prose writings in turn: religion, England, censorship, marriage, monarchy. I’ve wanted to spend time with these documents for almost a decade, harboring what has proven an unshakeable fascination with the inner life of this infinitely strange and difficult poet. I believe also that these documents ought to be coaxed out from the great shadow of Milton’s poetry, and at the same time brought to bear on the poetry itself. Reading Paradise Lost means taking the politics of the man, like it or not. Here, instead of starting with the poem, run the equation backward. There is not much in the pamphlets that can’t also to be found in his masterpiece Paradise Lost, and many other works in verse. It is also the aim to dust off an image that lingers with us of an old blind poet writing about the Bible. There was before him a young man with a radical vision of something like modernity at his fingertips.

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The answer to our titular question is, on a superficial level, “no.” Paradise Lost is composed in 10,565 lines of blank verse, meaning broadly that it doesn’t rhyme but the lines have a uniform meter, a rhythm to their syllables. It is a poem, an epic poem, meaning broadly that it has a narrative with a grand theme and is long: those ten-thousand-plus lines are organized into twelve sections, each with their own narrative progress. It is not made up of paragraphs or chapters, the dialogue is delivered in speeches rather than conversational. It is not a novel.

Now, that might be enough of an answer for you, all you needed, thanks. But if you’ll remain with me a bit longer, we might look for a moment at the controversial alternative that, yes, Paradise Lost is a novel, or does something of what a novel is meant to do. I don’t want to be too cute about this—the “novel” would not have been something Milton would have conceived of while writing in the later half of the seventeenth century. His intention was to write an epic poem (something indeed Homer would not have conceived of himself as writing). But at the conclusion of this cheeky inquiry is, I believe, an insight into both the poem and the possibilities of fiction.

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Paradise Lost is nestled here between the epics that came before it and the Romantics that came after. It does not have the big, juicy adventure aspect of the Homeric epic. Poetry is not yet the inward-facing emotional expression of the Romantic period. The poets of this period, even when composing epics or something like them (Edmund Spenser’s very long Faerie Queene comes to mind), really did not want that much action in comparison to what had come before, and were much more bookish in their poetic pursuits; perhaps it was the result of a new class of poet who had gone to university.

What resulted was so-called metaphysical poetry, poems caught up in highly cerebral “conceits” or concepts that could often read more like intellectual exercises than anything to do with the translation of experience. Milton, however, does not fall into this category, usually has both of his feet firmly planted in the real world, and this is—and I’ll get to this presently—because of not only his religious preoccupation but his distinctly Old Testament one.

Poets just after Milton would go through a phase of calling what they’d written an “essay” even when it was clearly a poem: Alexander Pope’s “Essay on Man,” John Dryden’s “Essay Upon Satire.” This was just about a century after Montaigne had put the essay proper on the literary map, so to speak, and it could simply be that everyone wanted a little plot on this fashionable new terrain. But though these forays of argumentation are done out in verse, that does not at all undermine the fact that they are functioning essayistically: they have a thesis about their subjects they set out to prove. Genre was conceptual more than concrete. (In some ways, it always has been—think of the nineteenth-century fad for calling paintings “symphonies” and “nocturnes.”)

All to say that poetry in this period was a bit of a toss-up, perhaps evidenced by the sheer amount of defending of it by its practitioners. It was in many ways a period of great experimentation not so much with form but with content, and what could be molded to fit verse: more lofty than prose—which was having a different sort of hey-dey in political pamphleteering—yet able to reason and speak frankly.

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Settling the question of “what makes a novel” would preoccupy critics only after, or at the height of, realism’s pinnacle, and the result is useful work that does enlighten a reader: Henry James’s The Art of Fiction, E.M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel, John Ruskin’s Fiction, Fair and Foul. One might qualify “Modernism” as a break with the formality of distinctions drawn by these and their contemporaries. But the novel in execution was never so rigid—and the rather practically minded interrogations of the studies just listed are perhaps examinations of craft rather than of any one essential nature to the form itself.

Something essential to the novel form is the convergence of disparate narrative parts such that they cohere into one uniform idea. Often this means bringing the internal world to bear on the external. Eric Auerbach’s essay “Odysseus’s Scar,” a deft examination of temporality in narrative and of its relationship to psychological depth, essentially sets up in comparison Homer and the Hebrew Bible to argue that the latter is “fraught with background” in a way that blooms with psychological import such that the Homeric epic cannot achieve.

The richness of Paradise Lost, its theological ranginess, is supported entirely by the fact that what will happen is known—fraught with background. And range theologically it does, both directly in long disquisitions from angels and indirectly in the narrative action. This is a poem of ideas argued by the actions of people—as solid a definition of the novel as any. It lacks the narrative suspense of later fiction that keep us reading so that we might learn, say, who Isabel Archer marries; but it grips us instead with the development of how precisely these characters will arrive at the inevitable.

There is a final turn to this screw, if you will, and that is in the much lesser-read Paradise Regained, about the temptation of Christ by Satan in the desert. This its theological imagination: basic Christian teaching links together the Old and New Testaments by claiming that Christ redeems the Fall during his crucifixion, but Milton positions it in an entirely different moment, in another act of the will, one more analogous with the goings-on in the Garden:

There, on the highest pinnacle, he set
The Son of God, and added thus in scorn:
“There stand, if thou wilt stand; to stand upright
Will ask thee skill. I to thy Father’s house
Have brought thee, and highest placed: highest is best.
Now shew thy progeny; if not to stand,
Cast thyself down. Safely, if Son of God;
For it is written, ‘He will give command
Concerning thee to his Angels; in their hands
They shall uplift thee, lest at any time
Thou chance to dash thy foot against a stone.’”
To whom thus Jesus: “Also it is written,
‘Tempt not the Lord thy God.’” He said, and stood;
But Satan, smitten with amazement, fell.

The examination of an act of will is the territory of the novel; I do not know if there is a novel that does not deal, in at least some small way, with in this murkiest of human capacities. I hope I do not abstract to the point of meaninglessness when I say novels are always about following the actions of some person or persons, like Adam and Eve, who could do otherwise.

T.S. Eliot made essentially the same distinction as Vendler in his 1921 essay in the TLS on the metaphysical poets of the seventeenth century, and for him the situation is chronological:

The difference is not a simple difference of degree between poets. It is something which had happened to the mind of England between the time of Donne or Lord Herbert of Cherbury and the time of Tennyson and Browning; it is the difference between the intellectual poet and the reflective poet. Tennyson and Browning are poets, and they think; but they do not feel their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose. A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility. When a poet’s mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience; the ordinary man’s experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The latter falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes.

That “forming of new wholes” is a way of describing the notoriously impenetrable “conceits” that appear in verse by the so-called metaphysical poets, John Donne, George Herbert, Richard Crashaw, and Andrew Marvell totemic among them. The term was coined and the group was named by the irascible cataloger Samuel Johnson, who wrote that in a conceit “the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together.” Another, far less sexy way of putting it would be that a conceit is metaphor constructed from two apparently incompatible elements. For its detractors, that incompatibility is a failure of the poem to meet the mimetic expectations placed on poetry to conjure the thing that is obviously the sweet smell of the rose while at the same time not it at all. For Eliot, the conceit was “a mechanism of sensibility which could devour any kind of experience.”

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Metaphor is an intensifier. When used in verse, there are two basic elements at work, what is executed on the page and what occurs in the reader. A rose is lovely and so is our beloved; when we think of the two together something unlike the two separately is gained. The metaphor itself is neither the subject nor whatever is invoked in addition to it—the beloved and the rose—but rather a third thing created when the two are yoked together as a new, whole experience had within.

For Johnson, poetry was “the art of uniting pleasure with truth, by calling imagination to the help of reason.” A well-metered poem that does not lean on metaphor, or perhaps eschews it entirely, if one could imagine such a thing, will be pleasurable in the English language. English verse was designed to be so. But there is something of the look of the unreasonable to the conceit. However, the reputation they gained far precedes; they are simply poetry of the second order, images that must be thought to be felt. The satisfaction of that third element in the combination of the two is achieved not by the confluence of feelings but by the unfolding of reason.

The oft-used example of conceit occurs in Donne’s “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning,” on the loss of a spouse, and how there is no break between souls joined in holiness, like precious metal:

Our two souls therefore, which are one, 
            Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
            Like gold to airy thinness beat.

This is a lovely bit of language. The idea takes not only a moment of thought but a knowledge of natural science, a novel kind of knowledge that would’ve excited contemporary readers. One can hammer metal and though it may get thinner and thinner it will not cleave in two. It’s unexpected, but sensical.

His poem “The Ecstasy” opens with a pretty dizzying palimpsest of conceits in the same theme: the two subjects here are sat together like a pillow and a bed, like a full river resting on the bank, like a violet and its stem; two parts of a whole.

Where, like a pillow on a bed
           A pregnant bank swell’d up to rest
The violet’s reclining head, 
           Sat we two, one another’s best.

Do these, when taken together, work? I would argue this is a first-order metaphor that works like a second-order. None of these metaphors is mismatched, but working out exactly what they are takes a bit of parsing that makes the experience of the poem go from bafflement to rigor to, finally, the amazing sense of cohesion. It’s a feeling of unity that William James will call conversion.

Then the next four lines:

Our hands were firmly cemented
           With a fast balm, which thence did spring;
Our eye-beams twisted, and did thread
           Our eyes upon one double string;

This will—dare I say, should—cause an initial visceral reaction of disgust at the thought of two sets of eyeballs strung together on a thread like beads. It is certainly not as lovely an image as beds or rivers or flowers. But it’s pure second order—one is not meant to feel this at all but to understand, from their own experience, that when with a true kindred spirit, as with two who are one another’s best, the eyes are fixed outward, looking in the same direction. C.S. Lewis would use the same image to describe friendship in The Four Loves, writing that “we picture lovers face to face but friends side by side; their eyes look ahead.”

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Metaphor is, also, high artifice, and the conceit its purest form. The mania for genuine feeling, for the first order, of the nineteenth century would damn the metaphysical poets until the renaissance of artifice wrought by modernism, with all its faults. Even still, poetic conceits remain haunted by their reputation of being abstruse and inaccessible, and though perhaps admired in the twentieth century were untouched and unused by any modern admirers. Our loss. These endeavors not only access the interior life but create in verse a third order, neither thought nor felt but the marriage of the two, experience devoured.

Eve, dear Eve. Who wouldn’t fall in love? As she makes the decision not to eavesdrop on Raphael and Adam while they’re discussing the stars so as to grant her husband the heroic opportunity later on to answer all of her sweet little questions. The wooing scene between these first parents is so funny as to be almost played for laughs: Eve comes to consciousness and immediately finds herself taken with her own reflection in a lake. She’s quite content there, until a voice (presumably God’s) sends her to Adam, “fair and tall indeed” but “less fair / less winning soft, less amiably mild.” Unimpressed, she turns around, ready to get back to her lake. Adam calls out, makes a proposal-like plea, and, she tells him, “I yielded.” This moment is but one crumb in a cyclical trail of crumbs in Paradise Lost: Is Eve free—or even in charge—because she is the agent making all of the decisions about her submission to Adam? Or is her decision to be supplicant to be understood as a straightforward statement of her inferior position?

Eve deserves better. Milton’s women, and not only Eve, are so alive on the page; they can be witty, comely, unruly, sensual, wily, contradictory—in a word, irresistible. Such rendering does not happen by mistake, though one must stand firm in the face of temptation to present Milton as engaged in any effort on behalf of women. I have watched transfixed in seminars as well-meaning young scholars contorted themselves into complicatedly bad arguments that Milton is a feminist. Sometimes evidence is to be taken at face value; “he for God / she for God in him” says enough. But the women are too irresistible to leave alone: the Lady of Comus, Eve of Paradise Lost, Dalila of Samson Agonistes, each is their own contained theory about the female experience, often measured against the power of men. Milton’s tract arguing in favor of divorce granted on the grounds of incompatibility, for all of its problems, is a radical and finely crafted document on the subject.

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Milton was married thrice. His first wife, Mary Powell, was a teenager when she (was) married (to) the thirty-something Milton in 1642. This went badly almost immediately. The accepted conjecture is that the political situation in England created painful tension between Milton and Mary’s father (a royalist), and Mary ran away from her new husband within the first month or so. Though she eventually would return and remain his wife until her death while giving birth to their third daughter in 1652, this was not, it seems, a nice marriage. There was another woman, about whom little is known besides the fact that she is credited with being the muse who inspired his 1643 tract The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce: Restor’d to the Good of Both Sexes, From the Bondage of Canon Law. His subsequent marriages were both perhaps happier relationships: Katherine Woodcock would die by childbirth after a couple of years, and his “third and best wife” was Elizabeth, thirty-one years his junior.

This all to illustrate that while it is difficult to conjure a John Milton particularly sensitive to the nuance of gender relations, there is little room for doubt that he was for much of his life preoccupied with the inner lives of the women around him—probably against his preference. His friendships (all with men) were largely positive and, in being so, placid. Who can blame him for coming up with an easily sketched, admirable, and very boring Adam? He was too busy working out what do to about Eve.

At first sight, she is untamed, with “her unadornèd golden tresses” all “dishevelled, but in wanton ringlets waved / as the vine curls her tendrils” and worn as a “veil down to her slender waist.” Theologically loaded, those ringlets. They suggest that woven into Eve’s fabric is the thread of sin, and we can know as much from that beguiling, wanton hair—and her fabric, of course, cut from the same cloth as Adam’s. The word shows up again in the climactic scene when Satan appears as a serpent, “his torturous train / curled many a wanton wreath in sight of Eve, / to lure her eye.” Is there in this the treacherous villainy of womankind or redemption? She did not choose to listen to Satan and share around that apple—she simply could not do otherwise. Milton’s Calvinist sympathies slot in neatly. Calvin wrote in his Institutes: “God not only foresaw the fall of the first man, and in him the ruin of his posterity; but also at His own pleasure arranged it.” The Fall is not about a fundamental shift in humanity’s relationship with God as it is about the unfolding of events that must, and were always going, to happen; innocence lost so that it can be regained. In this way Eve is but a handmaiden to Adam and to God, setting up the circumstances for salvation, neither empowered nor belittled. (In a way, much the same could be said of Satan.) And thus in the great, blundering catastrophe of the Fall, Milton created a perfect wife.

The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce is a blistering document, written when Milton was in his early thirties and newly married for the first time. His argument about divorce is essentially thus: For the state to grant divorce simply because a couple doesn’t get along (today called “no-fault”) is not only a more justly liberal policy, but the right and Christian thing to do. I cannot make excuses for Milton in this tract. He is petulant and angry. But the project to rigorously articulate a spouse to whom one feels spiritually close stays with him for decades, and at the moment of their deepest failure the first couple is closer than ever. Eve promises Adam that if they are together there is no leaving Eden: “with thee to go / is to stay here.” Paradise was never about doing the right thing. It is a happy fall. This is an epic, not a tragedy.

Adam and Eve leave the Garden hand in hand, “providence their guide.” Was it not always to be? It matters no more which of them is in charge. She’s done the critical damage, but by her “the promised seed shall all restore.” Would Milton believe that after everything she’s done, Eve deserves to be happy? Well pleased, but answered not.

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A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle, or Comus, is the one that you don’t want to have to explain to your parents. It’s the one with the girl who, while walking alone in the wood one night, meets with god of vice Comus, Dionysus’s cup-bearer and ringleader to a horde of animal-headed revelers. After coercing her to his banquet table, Comus casts a spell on the girl, called “the Lady,” that sticks to her chair. She is saved, sort of, by her younger brothers, her virtue preserved. The whole thing is structured vaguely in three parts: the scene in the woods wherein we are introduced to Comus; the meat of the narrative in the form of conversation between the Lady and Comus; and the final fantastic leg in which the British water-nymph Sabrina is summoned to unstick the Lady, and there are some not-very-good songs in conclusion.

The masque form could be rather tidily situated historically as embryonic opera, though something would be lost in not taking it as its own genre. For one, a masque was written with specific people in mind—in this instance, the three Bridgewater children, fifteen-year-old Ann and her younger brothers, John and Thomas. Milton’s friend Henry Lawes was the children’s tutor. (The poet composed a sonnet to the musician “whose tuneful and well-measured song first taught our English music how to span words with just note and accent.”) Lawes contributed the musical score (in the centuries following there would be efforts to remold them, such as an adaptation by Handel). The “libretti,” so to speak, of these songs are confounding in that they end the masque, and are made of some pretty blandly mawkish stuff. It’s almost as if just at the very end Milton remembers he’s meant to be trying to please a crowd.

Dated 1634, Comus was commissioned by the Bridgewater family, who lived in, yes, Ludlow Castle, and the commission was meant to be in honor of the Earl of Bridgewater’s new position as the Lord of Wales.1 As such, it would seem that Milton set out to make this project as much not about the earl’s promotion as possible. Scholarship in the early nineteenth century would draw what remains today a contested connection with the Castlehaven scandal, the tabloid headline of the 1630s; the Earl of Bridgewater’s wife’s brother-in-law was found guilty of ongoing sexual crimes committed against his wife and servants. It is imaginable that in the aftermath of this Bridgewater could’ve asked for “something chaste,” to which Milton responded with a psychosexual fantasia.

Comus is also a self-referential abundance. One needn’t read that closely to find him alluding to himself, though rather than narcissism I read this as a craftsman working with material that he has shaped and tested and knows is reliable. L’Allegro (the long poem making up half of a diptych with Il Penseroso) is in the mouth of Comus the character: “Come knit hands, and beat the ground / In a light fantastic round” echoes with the Happy Man’s “Come and trip it as ye go / On the light fantastic toe,” which echoes then back to Comus calling on the moon to “trip the pert fairies and dapper elves” as he rouses his fiendish party.2

There is also the reuse of a “prolusion” from his time at Cambridge, a prolusion being a popular seventeenth-century exercise in rhetoric for undergraduates, a bit of oration composed in Latin and performed in front of peers, arguing for an assigned position—in this case, “whether Day or Night is more excellent.” His argument is in favor of Day, for reasons including how “Day lays bare all crimes.” Comus rehearses the inverse argument in this famous bit:

What hath night to do with sleep?
Night hath better sweets to prove,
Venus now wakes, and wakens Love.
Come let us our rites begin
’Tis only daylight that makes sin

And so the opening argument is posited and Milton is ready to write himself into the action. It is well accepted that the name of this masque’s protagonist, the Lady, is a reference to what the poet’s Cambridge classmates at Christ’s College took to calling him: “the Lady of Christ’s.” This was not a kind-spirited nickname.

Thus the real reason we have all been gathered at Ludlow Castle to watch a nobleman’s children perform a drama wherein two young boys must protect their sister from emotional and physical coercion to give her virginity to a god: Milton is going to tell us what to think about chastity. He has Comus initially speak in couplets at first, a contrivance that dies off as the masque progresses but comes up in the the Lady’s speech later on. In the way that Milton often uses formal signifiers to indicate to his reader when and where to pay attention, the Lady’s couplet gives us a thesis:

Thou canst not touch the freedom of my mind
With all thy charms, although this corporeal rind
Thou has immanacled, while Heav’n sees good.

The mind is the thing to protect and keep; the body, no matter the holiness of whose, is a vulnerable and unreliable husk. Remember, she is stuck to her chair, the position of which asks one to think rather explicitly about Comus’s designs on her person. It’s one of Milton’s creepier ideas. Possibly he just couldn’t see it. Any reader of Milton will recognize this way he has, when he gets going, of turning into himself. He forgets the poem and the reader, and in this case his patrons, and it is just him and his own mind, his hang-ups and obsessions, his own philosophy. Not only is this a moral battle but a fight or two from college still left to win. No other poet of the period would’ve been able to resist at least a little play with this premise, but no. Creepy? What? Nevermind that. There is too much at stake.

This dual intensity and inwardness, counterintuitive in a man his whole life preoccupied by the perception of his greatness, could easily be the wellspring from which the Miltonic quality is born. He does remember himself at the end, perhaps after a bit of a nudge from Lawes, with those songs in which the “Attendant Spirit” presents the three brave children to their father and mother in the audience, and we’re back again to couplets, and now they’re full of flowers and Elysian dew.

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