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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2018
One of the works said to have been in Milton's mind when he wrote Paradise Regained is Book n of The Faerie Queene. According to Edwin Greenlaw, ‘the three days of temptation of Guyon concludes a series of incidents that pretty certainly influenced Paradise Regained— Mammon's proffer of riches, worldly power, fame; the three days without sleep or food, followed by exhaustion; the angel sent to care for Guyon after the trial is over; even the debates between Mammon and Guyon, which parallel Christ's rebukes of Satan.’ These likenesses seem real enough, and the evidence has support from the wellknown passage on Guyon in Areopagitica. Still I should like to suggest here—and I have not seen the idea mentioned elsewhere—that Milton's poem was also influenced, and more strongly perhaps, by the first book of The Faerie Queene, Spenser's Legend of Holiness.
A good place to begin the argument is with the fact that Books i and n of The Faerie Queene themselves have many similarities of structure and episode—a fact which so admiring a reader of Spenser as John Milton would surely have noticed.
1 Edwin, Greenlaw, ‘ “A Better Teacher Than Aquinas,” ‘ SP, xiv (1917), 205.Google Scholar
2 See Hamilton, A. C., ‘ “Like Race to Runne“: The Parallel Structure of The Faerie Queene, Books 1 and n,’ PMLA, LXXIII (1958), 327–334.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
3 Woodhouse, A. S. P., ‘Nature and Grace in The Faerie Queene,’ ELH, xvi (1949), 194–228.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
4 Spenser's World of Glass: A Reading of'The Faerie Queene’ (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1966), pp. 32-33.
5 Ibid., p. 4.
6 The Faerie Queene, i.i.54. Citations from Spenser in my text are to The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser, ed. J. C. Smith and E. de Selincourt (London, 1937).
7 Paradise Regained, iv.560-581. Citations from Milton in my text are to John, Milton, Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y., Hughes (New York, 1957).Google Scholar
8 Anaphora is an iterative device, called by Puttenham the Figure of Report: it ‘is when we make one word begin, and as they are wont to say, lead the daunce to many verses in sute’ ( George, Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, ed. Gladys Doidge, Willcock and Alice, Walker [Cambridge, 1936], p. 198 Google Scholar). Anaphora (or epanaphora) is defined by Henry Peacham as ‘a forme of speech which beginneth diuerse members, still with one and the same word’ (The Garden of Eloquence [1593], A Facsimile Reproduction with an Introduction by William G. Crane [Gainesville, Fla., 1954], p. 41). Peacham's examples make it clear that a phrase or a clause, as well as a single word, may be repeated. Spenser seems to have been fond of this device. A quick glance through the minor poems reveals the following instances of its use: Daphnaida, 11. 239-245, 460-462; Colin Clouts Come Home Again, 11. 492-536; Amoretti, Sonnet LVI; and AM Hymne of Heavenly Love, 11. 188- 262.
In regard to the ‘So downe he fell’ passage, John Upton in 1758 noted that ‘the same kind of repetition is made at the fall of Babylon, of which this dragon is a type. See Revelation 14.8; “Babylon is fallen, is fallen.” See too Isaiah 21.9.’ (The Faerie Queene, Book One, ed. Frederick Morgan Padelford, p. 304, in The Works of Edmund Spenser: A Variorum Edition, ed. Edwin Greenlaw and others [Baltimore, 1932-49].) Spenser's stanza is closely imitated by Phineas Fletcher in The Purple Island (1633) in a stanza (xn.59) describing the combat between Christ and the dragon.
9 Milton's Brief Epic: The Genre, Meaning, and Art of'Paradise Regained’ (Providence and London, 1966), pp. 354-355.
10 Northrop Frye notes that Christ is conventionally depicted as a dragon killer (The Return of Eden: Fife Essays on Milton's Epics [Toronto, 1965], pp. 119-120).
11 Williams, p. 31.
12 Pauline, Parker, The Allegory of'The Faerie Queene’ (Oxford, 1960), p. 74.Google Scholar
13 Miss Pope points to the many references in Paradise Regained indicating that Christ is ‘a lawful prince warring to regain his patrimony from an unlawfully established tyrant’ ( Elizabeth Marie, Pope, ‘Paradise Regained': The Tradition and the Poem [Baltimore, 1947], p. 119 Google Scholar).
14 The Return of Eden, p. 125.
15 Spenser's World of Glass, p. 14.
16 H. S. V.Jones has an interesting theory that Book I of The Faerie Queene is Spenser's Book of Wisdom as well as his book of Faith and Truth. He compares Una with Sapience of An Hymne of Heavenly Beautie: the relation is ‘similar to that which the man-Christ bears to the God-Christ’ (A Spenser Handbook [New York, 1930], pp. 159-160). The man-Christ of Paradise Regained, who is perfect reason, understands that true wisdom is ‘Light from above, from the fountain of light’ (iv.289).