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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
In the long history of Milton commentary a single axiom has survived for generations as a critical touchstone in the formal analyses of his longer poems. Stated simply it reads: Milton was not a dramatist and his poems are not dramatic. Recently Anne Ferry, Jackson Cope, and Douglas Bush have briefly discussed the danger of treating the terms “drama” and “dramatic” as catchalls. Their mild reproofs of contemporary critics require, I suggest, not just forceful reiteration but a theoretical and historical analysis of the dramatic axiom's use and its effect on Milton criticism. The pertinent questions are: (1) what do Milton's critics mean by “dramatic,” and (2) how do their various definitions control the scope and direction of their criticisms?
1 Although the axiom has gone through many permutations, one of the simplest of these has appeared often enough to warrant its designation as a corollary to the central statement. Stated simply it reads: Milton could not write dramatic poetry but Shakespeare could; Shakespeare is a better poet than Milton. Sometimes the corollary appears as an erthymeme, sometimes as a syllogism, sometimes as an apparently casual statement, but regardless of its form, it is habitually used as a counter to pro-Milton sentiment. See James Nelson, The Sublime Puritan: Milton and the Victorians (Madison, Wis., 1963), for a brief study of the nineteenth-century comparison of Milton and Shakespeare.
2 Anne Davidson Ferry, in Milton's Epic Voice (Cambridge, Mass., 1963), makes the point that the search for dramatic structure has gotten out of hand. The very fact that she has to argue that Paradise Lost is a narrative poem indicates the extent to which the dramatic axiom has permeated Milton criticism. See especially her pp. 10–12. Jackson Cope in The Metaphoric Structure of Paradise Lost (Baltimore, 1962), p. 20, notes that “paradoxically, while drama studies have been developing in a direction which moves away from the traditional conception of plot-as-imitation based upon the reading of Aristotle as a naturalistic critic, nondramatic studies, at the same time, have often been introducing dramatic development as a basic criterion of literary structures.” Douglas Bush states, in “The Isolation of the Renaissance Hero,” in Reason and the Imagination: Studies in the History of Ideas 1600–1800, ed. J. A. Mazzeo (New York, 1962), pp. 184–185, that “unlike Bentley and his contemporaries, modern critics have not judged the end of the poem by traditional principles of epic theory, have not measured its conformity to the critical dictum that epics should end ‘prosperously.‘ Instead they have interpreted the ending in the light of the dramatic character of the poem, reading it in relation to the actions and speeches of characters elsewhere in the poem. This method of arguing the mood of the conclusion grows from the eagerness of many modern critics to emphasize the dramatic character of Milton's poem, an approach which has produced helpful revaluations of his methods and intentions. Yet it is possible that there has been too much emphasis on the dramatic character of Paradise Lost.”
3 De Poetica, trans. Ingram Bywater, in Introduction to Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York, 1947), p. 626.
4 See, e.g., Reuben Arthur Brower, “The Speaking Voice,” in The Fields of Light (New York, 1951), pp. 19–22. See also Joseph Wiesenfarth, Henry James and the Dramatic Analogy (New York, 1963), pp. 1–43.
5 For a discussion of the extensions of the adjectival form “dramatic” see Ronald Peacock, The Art of Drama (New York, 1957). Peacock remarks that the “word ‘dramatic’ has a natural meaning in relation to any events of a sudden, surprising, disturbing, and violent kind, or to situations and sequences of events characterized by tension. … It is commonly held that conflict makes drama, but surprise, and particularly tension, are the truer symptoms. … When the imagery of art incorporates such features we ascribe to it ‘dramatic’ quality, and clearly this process is not confined to drama and theatre alone” (pp. 159–160). See also Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago, 1961), who observes: “if to be dramatic is to show characters dramatically engaged with each other, motive clashing with motive, the outcome depending upon the resolution of motives, then this scene [from Joseph Andrews] is dramatic. But if it is to give the impression that the story is taking place by itself, with the characters existing in a dramatic relationship vis-à-vis the spectator, unmediated by a narrator and decipherable only through inferential matching of word to word and word to deed, then this is a relatively undramatic scene” (p. 162).
6 Alexander Pope, “Postscript to the Odyssey,” in Milton Criticism, ed. James Thorpe (New York, 1950), p. 349.
7 Ikon (Ithaca, N. Y., 1955), pp. 192, 186.
8 Paradise Lost and the 17th Century Reader (London, 1947), p. 111.
9 “Recent Criticism of Paradise Lost,” PQ, xxviii (1949), 42.
10 The Burning Oracle (London, 1939), p. 110.
11 Some Graver Subject (London, 1960), pp. 75, 203.
12 Putnam Fennell Jones, “Satan and the Narrative Structure of Paradise Lost,” in IF By Your Art (Pittsburgh, 1948), p. 23.
13 Poets and Playwrights (Minneapolis, Minn., 1930), pp. 286–287. For a more recent expression of the same sentiment see John Peter, A Critique of Paradise Lost (New York, 1960), pp. 165–166.
14 Answerable Style (Minneapolis, 1953), pp. 11, 122.
15 Ben Jonson, Works, ed. Herford and Simpson (Oxford, 1941), vii, 209. “… though their voyce be taught to sound to present occasions, their sense, or doth, or should alwayes lay hold on more remov'd mysteries.”
16 Enid Welsford, The Court Masque (Cambridge, Eng., 1927), p. 318.
17 Eugene Haun, “An Inquiry into the Genre of Comus,” Essays in Honor of Walter Clyde Curry (Nashville, Tenn., 1954), p. 237.
18 E. M. W. Tillyard, Studies in Milton (London, 1951), p. 88.
19 Gretchen Ludke Finney, “Comus, Dramma Per Musica,” SP, xxxvii (1940), 500.
20 Cleanth Brooks and John E. Hardy, eds., Poems of Mr. John Milton with Essays in Analysis (New York, 1951), p. 187.
21 Thomas B. Macaulay, Essay on Milton (Boston, 1904), p. 16.
22 W. W. Greg, Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama (London, 1906), p. 396.
23 Samuel Johnson, Lives of the English Poets, ed. George B. Hill (Oxford, 1905), p. 169.
24 William Hazlitt, Complete Works, ed. P. P. Howe (London, 1930), v, 230.
25 B. A. Wright, “Comus,” TLS (27 Oct. 1945), p. 511.
26 Kenneth Muir, John Milton (London, 1955), p. 41.
27 Thomas Warton, as cited by L. C. Martin in Thomas Warton and the Early Poems of Milton (London, 1934), p. 20.
28 Johnson, p. 168.
29 Warton in Martin, p. 20.
30 Johnson in his Dictionary defines the masque as “a dramatick performance, written in a tragick style, without attention to rules or probability.”
31 Hazlitt, p. 230.
32 Leigh Hunt's Literary Criticism, ed. L. H. and C. W. Houtchens (New York, 1956), p. 560.
33 Greg, p. 399. See also Ethel Seaton, “Comus and Shakespeare,” E&S, XXXI (1945), 68.
34 Dorothy L. Sayers, Further Papers on Dante (New York, 1957), p. 156; W. B. C. Watkins, An Anatomy of Milton's Verse (Baton Rouge, La., 1955), pp. 99–100; Knight, pp. 65–66; Maynard Mack, ed. Milton (New York, 1950), p. 9.
35 David Wilkinson, “The Escape from Pollution,” EIC, x (1960), 36, 39, 41.
36 Macaulay, p. 19.
37 Muir, p. 41.
38 Merritt Hughes, ed., John Milton: Complete Poetry and Selected Prose (New York, 1957), p. 88.
39 Charles Williams, The English Poetic Mind (Oxford, 1932), p. 114; George W. Whiting, Milton and This Pendant World (Austin, Tex., 1958), p. 25; Adams, p. 34; Rosemond Tuve, Images and Themes in Five Poems by Milton (Cambridge, Mass., 1955), p. 113.
40 Brooks and Hardy, p. 188.
41 Samuel Johnson, The Rambler (London, 1796), iii, 162.
42 Around Theatres (London, 1953), pp. 527, 528.
43 Walter Savage Landor, The Works and Life of Walter Savage Landor (London, 1876), iv, 489, 491.
44 “Milton and Dryden: A Comparison and Contrast in Poetic Ideas and Poetic Method,” ELH, iii (1936), 90.
45 “The Dramatic Structure of Samson Agonisles,” PMLA, xxxv (1920), 382. See also Christopher Ricks, Milton's Grand Style (Oxford, 1963), p. 49.
46 “Samson Agonistes Again,” PMLA, xxxvi (1921), 362. Baum notes that “given manageable situations Milton is capable of great dramatic power,” but “given intractable material, he could not mold it into a genuinely dramatic shape” (p. 358). E. M. W. Tillyard, Milton (London, 1950), p. 343.
47 The Frontiers of Drama (London, 1945), p. 27.
48 Four Stages of Renaissance Style (New York, 1955), p. 230. The idea is taken up again by Roy Daniells, in Milton, Mannerism and Baroque (Toronto, 1963), who argues that Milton “has realized with complete success that Baroque quality which critics refer to as tension of opposites, as ambiguity or paradox” (p. 215). See also George Williamson, Milton & Others (London, 1965), p. 86.
49 William Riley Parker, Milton's Debt to Greek Tragedy in Samson Agonistes (Baltimore, 1937), p. 53.
50 David Daiches, Milton (London, 1957), p. 244; F. T. Prince, ed. Samson Agonistes (Oxford, 1957), p. 115. See also A. S. P. Woodhouse, “Tragic Effect in Samson Agonistes,” UTQ, xxviii (1958), who argues that Johnson was wrong because Manoa, Dalila, and Harapha are in a sense both the precipitant causes of change in Samson and mirrors in whose glass we can mark the significant stages of progress in Samson's movement back to God (p. 211), and a reply in M. R. Ridley, Studies in Three Literatures (London, 1962), p. 126: “attention is throughout centred upon the main character, and the other characters are no more than so many mirrors to reflect light upon him from different angles.”
51 Geoffrey and Margaret Bullough, eds. Milton's Dramatic Poems (London, 1958), p. 48.
52 Ibid., p. 61.
53 Arnold Stein, Heroic Knowledge (Minneapolis, 1957), pp. 183, 194.
54 George Steiner, The Death of Tragedy (New York, 1961), p. 31; T. S. K. Scott-Craig, “Concerning Milton's Samson,” RenN, v (1952), 46. Scott-Craig identifies this structure as a “progressive orchestration of the major themes of Calvinist scholasticism.” See also George Coffin Taylor, “Shakespeare and Milton Again,” SP, xxiii (1926), 197–198; Ernest Gohn, “The Christian Ethic of Paradise Lost and Samson Agonistes,” SN, xxxiv (1962), 264; and Dick Taylor, Jr., “Grace as a Means of Poetry: Milton's Pattern for Salvation,” TSE, iv (1954), 59–60.
55 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in Coleridge on the Seventeenth Century, ed. Roberta Florence Brinkley (Durham, N. C., 1955), pp. 606–607.
56 Daiches, p. 228; Williams, p. 146; Steiner, p. 32.
57 Albert Cook, “Milton's Abstract Music,” UTQ, xxix (1959), 382, 383.
58 Prince, pp. 140–141. See also Sister Miriam Clare, Samson Agonistes: A Study in Contrast (New York, 1964), p. 42.
59 Revaluations (London, 1936), p. 64–65.
60 See Isabel MacCaffrey, “The Meditative Paradigm,” ELH, XXXII (1965), 404.
61 Johnson, Lives, I, 188.
62 See Ants Oras, Milton's Editors and Commentators from Patrick Hume to Henry John Todd (London, 1931), p. 147.
63 The Poetical Works of John Milton, ed. Henry John Todd (London, 1842), iii, 202.
64 Quoted in John Jordan, Thomas de Quincey, Literary Critic (Berkeley, Calif., 1952), p. 66.
65 Daiches, p. 228.
66 W. Menzies, “Milton: The Last Poems,” E&S, xxiv (1938), 89.
67 Louis Martz, “Paradise Regained: A Meditative Combat,” ELH, xxvii (1960), 224.
68 Menzies, p. 91.
69 E. M. W. Tillyard, Milton (London, 1930), p. 316. Landor, in the “Second Conversation” with Southey, declares that nothing short of Southey's friendship would induce him to read the poem a third time because “in the animal body not only nerves and juices are necessary, but also continuity and cohesion.” He completes his attack by observing that “Milton is caught sleeping after his exertions in Paradise Lost, and the lock of his strength is shorn off; but here and there a prominent muscle swells out from the vast mass of the collapsed” (Works, iv, 489). F. W. Bateson, in “Paradise Regained: A Dissentient Appendix,” in The Living Milton, ed. Frank Kermode (London, 1961), declares that there are only fifty great Unes in the poem (p. 140).
70 Todd, Poetical Works, p. 205. See also Douglas Bush, English Literature in the Earlier Seventeenth Century (New York, 1952), who says that “Paradise Regained, like the book of Job may be called a closet drama with a prologue and stage-directions. … In interior drama—almost interior monologue with an objectified tempter—everything, including rhythm, must be pitched in a more subdued key” (p. 391).
71 Stein, Knowledge, pp. 204, 207, 209, passim.
72 W. P. Ker, Form and Style in Poetry, ed. R. W. Chambers (London, 1928), p. 183.
73 “Milton and the New Criticism,” SR, lix (1951), 15. See also Burton O. Kurth, Milton and Christian Heroism (Berkeley, 1959), who talks of Milton's “dramatic picture of the Divine Plan” (p. 133) and Watkins, who declares that Milton “has a fine though limited dramatic instinct. When not too deeply involved in defending his own truth, he delights in the actor's, even more than the orator's role—itself a kind of acting” (p. 125).
74 “Architectonic Structure in Paradise Regained,” UTSE, xxxiii (1954), 37, 38.
75 “Theme and Pattern in Paradise Regained,” UTQ, xxv (1956), 173.
76 Martz, p. 232.
77 Muir, p. 166.
78 A. E. Dyson, “The Meaning of Paradise Regained,” TSLL, iii (1961), 202.
79 Ibid., p. 204.
80 Ibid., p. 205.
81 E. L. Marilla, “Paradise Regained: Observations on its Meaning,” SN, xxvii (1955), 185.
82 W. W. Robson, “The Better Fortitude,” in The Living Milton, p. 136.
83 Ibid., p. 134.
84 Knight, p. 82.
85 Northrop Frye, “The Typology of Paradise Regained,” MP, liii (1956), 234.
86 “Theme and Structure in Paradise Regained,” SP, lvii (1960), 189.
87 P. 186. Mrs. Lewalski treats the dramatic problem at greater length in Milton's Brief Epic (Providence, R. I., 1966), in the second part of her book, entitled “Theme and Dramatic Action.”
88 The reason for the historical development of the term's polemical connotations may be bound up in the fact that there is no balancing adjective that stands in relation to “narrative” as “dramatic” stands in relation to “drama.” The word “dramatic” has a colloquial range that is a major source of its power as a polemical counter. A word such as “narrativistic” might be applicable, by analogy with dramatic, as a polemical expression, but it would clearly not have the sanction of popular usage.