Audience and human nature in the poetry of Milton and Dryden/Milton ve Dryden'in siirlerinde izleyici ve insan dogasi

Interactions, Spring, 2007 by Hasan A. Al-Zubi

Abstract: This essay compares Milton's epic poem Paradise Lost to its operatic version "The State of Innocence" by John Dryden. The comparison evokes historical, ideological and personal contrast; as well as differing views of audience, drama, and heroism. Milton wrote in blank verse, and expressed the danger of passion and appetite in Paradise Lost, viewing Christianity as the structure and mythology of life. Dryden, on the other hand, preferred rhymed verse and wrote for a restoration Hobbesian audience that saw human nature as inherently malignant and determined by base appetites. Whereas Dryden's "The State of Innocence" is secular and intended to please a restoration aristocratic audience, Milton's Paradise Lost is religious, and was not intended for the stage. It expresses an elevated subject and evokes "sublime" ideas in the audience. The paper concludes that Dryden's play "The State of Innocence" is an ironic play of Milton's idea of the innocence of human nature in Paradise Lost, and is far from the sublime ideas of Paradise Lost.

Keywords: Restoration ideology, rhymed verse, blank verse, religious ideology, Hobbesian philosophy, heroic drama.

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It seems almost unbelievable that John Milton (1608-1674) and John Dryden (1631-1700) both lived and wrote during the tremendous period of upheaval in seventeenth-century England. In some sense, the two poets, whose styles and lives were so different, might have as well been of different eras and periods of English literary history altogether. Milton was the stalwart religious poet whose dream of a civil government was briefly realized in the rule of Cromwell, and then diminished by the Restoration of Charles II. Dryden's life spanned the experiment of Cromwell's government and he was a rising star among the Court wits of the Restoration (1) when Milton died in 1674. To compare the great epic poem of one with its dramatic interpretation written by the other is a task which resonates with historical, ideological, and personal contrast.

Serious and worthwhile consideration of Milton's Paradise Lost and Dryden's dramatic opera "The State of Innocence" involves analyzing the two works as the artistic reflections of two poets with differing views of audience, drama, and heroism. For Milton, Paradise Lost and his Restoration heroic play "Samson Agonistes" were religious, and not expressed through performance, but in association with the sublime ideas presented in the works. The heroism of Milton's characters in his poetry was the quiet and stalwart act of individual faith in God. In the context of the Restoration, Dryden's audience was a Court dominated by a king who restored the monarchy and the aristocratic values of high living which were shunned by Milton and other Puritans associated with Cromwell. The Hobbesian beliefs of Dryden's Restoration audience saw human nature as inherently malignant, and ruled by base appetites. The acceptance of the unrestrained play of the passions was seen as hedonistic by the conservative remnants of Protestant rule that associated heroic virtue with individual restraint. In the end, the lavish and conspicuous flourishes of heroism evidenced in the heroic dramas of the Court differed greatly from the godliness of human nature depicted through Milton's Christian heroes of "Samson Agonistes" and Paradise Lost.

Milton's opposition to the Restoration staging of heroic drama is evidenced in his play "Samson Agonistes," published in 1671. In "Milton, Dryden, and the Ideology of Genre," D. M. Rosenberg explains Milton's creation of a play "never intended for the stage"(2) as a direct challenge to the conventions of Royalist dramas performed during the reign of Charles II. Heroic dramas performed for the Court generally involved scenes and scripts promoting outward demonstration of classical heroism associated with Augustan Age. Dryden's Indian Emperor and The Conquest of Granada were ambitious plays of monarchy, honor, love, and Imperial conquest. Set within exotic locales and permeated with sexual intrigue which mimicked that of Charles' Court, the dramas were performed by the king's players for a coterie of aristocrats who had recently been reinstated in England. The typical heroic drama was, in contrast to "Samson Agonistes;" the latter being a religious drama with little secular overtones of empire or civil honor associated with the Court of Charles II. Because Milton did not attribute to "Samson Agonistes" the "status" of the secular Restoration stage, with its exterior pomp of rhymed speeches and complex mechanical props, the heroic quality of the play approached a more significant interior dimension of meaning. In fact, the heroism of Samson derived from his action against pagan dragon worshippers whose loose behavior recalled that of the Court of Charles II. In light of the governance of England by the Puritans and Cromwell, the Court of Charles II may as well have been the Court of Dagon, with Milton as the Samson who sought to tear it down. As Rosenberg explains: