Introduction: Milton

The age of Milton is an era of extreme religious and political polarization, revolving around
reforms in the English Church commonly known as Puritanism.

Civil War (1642-l651) broke out in England as a result of the clashes between Charles I and
Parliament. The Civil war was the focal point of the century: it ended with the victory for the
Roundheads (Cromwell’s supporters) over the Cavaliers (the king’s supporters). Despite some
opposition from several more moderate members of Parliament, Charles I was beheaded in 1649,
the monarchy was abolished and a Commonwealth was created in which State and Church
became one.

The Commonwealth Republic

The term Commonwealth was used by the reformers to denote the form of government they
wished to establish. The Commonwealth Republic that was created lasted from the execution of
Charles I in 1649 to the restoration of the king (Charles II) in 1660.

During this period England was subjected to the severe rule of the Puritans whose religious spirit
would admit no tolerance. A gloomy atmosphere enveloped English society.

Not content with the work of the Commonwealth Parliament, Oliver Cromwell, the great Puritan
leader abolished Parliament (1653) and rules as “Lord Protector”. What resulted was a
dictatorship. Towards the end of this period it became obvious that Oliver Cromwell’s son and
successor, Richard, was incapable of ruling as Protector with the same competence as his father,
who had died in 1658.

Restoration

(Monarchy restored)Tired of Puritan rule, Parliament recalled Charles I’s son (who had escaped
to France) back to England. The people too were tired of the severe despotism of the Puritans
and welcomed the return of the monarchy in the person of Charles II. The return of the monarchy
under Charles II is referred to as the Restoration.

Milton’s life

John Milton (1608 – 1674) is the literary personality of the 17 th century. His great learning and
poetic ability found expression in his work, Paradise Lost. Milton was born into a London
family. After studying at St. Paul’s, he entered Cambridge where he first began to develop his
literary talents writing poetry on sacred themes in Latin, Italian and English. After finishing his
university he began private study of Greek and Latin Literature. For two years (1637 – 1639),
Milton travelled abroad, mostly in Italy, where he met Galileo. On his return to England, he
thought of writing an epic on the Arthurian theme. His literary ambitions were interrupted by the
events of the Puritan revolution, of which he was an ardent supporter. During this period his time
was spent on writing political pamphlets and talking part in political activities. He engaged in a
tireless defence of religious, civil and domestic liberties taking an active part in the
Commonwealth by becoming Cromwell’s Latin secretary. After the Restoration however, his
public life was finisced and, following a period of imprisonment, he retired to private life where
he wrote Paradise Lost.

Milton and the Puritan age

The Puritan age was a period in which the fantasy and imagination of the Tudor and early Stuart
times was gradually burning itself out under the pressures of the puritying religious reformers. A
new epoch of enlightenment and scientific discovery was developing in which the ambiguity,
sophistication and ornament of the Tudors and the sensual and intellectualised wit of the
metamphysicalpoets was out of place. A new attitude was gradually growing in the literary scene
that called for clarity, discipline and balance. The undisciplined individualism, characteristic of
the way social and political problems were faced up till the time of the early Stuarts, was
gradually giving way to a sense of order and of behaviour based on common sense and
rationality for the common good. In this sense Milton was a man of the age: a committed
interrupted for more than twenty years his great literary dream of writing an epic.

Milton: A learned man

Milton was a learned man with a very extensive knowledge of Greek, Latin and their respective
literatures. His Italian poems, l’Allegro and Il Penseroso (1632), written on his return to his
father’s home, we see more clearly his temperament which was that of a lonely man with a
propension towards contemplation and solitude. In all his early works, his learning is well in
evidence as is his capacity to synthesize or blend together classical mythology, English folklore,
and medieval romance. It was only in the early part of his literary career that Milton expressed
the lighter side of his character. He even wrote two masques, Arcades (1633) and Comus (1634),
for the local aristocracy which, although written along the lines of the Jonsonian masque, contain
something of the freshness and aristocratic grace of the Elizabethians.

A committed Puritan

Milton was uncompromisingly concerned with moral truth and justice and for this reason he
identified himself with the Puritan cause. His political leanings were towards an oligarchic
republic that would lead to the creation of the “community of saints” that was so dear to the
Puritans. Milton was no blind fanatic. He had no problem about condemning the Puritans when
they took measures requiring all books to be censored. For this reason he wrote
his Areoitica (1644) in defence of the freedom of the press. Milton, therefore, was no orthodox
Puritan.

His acute sense of justice and of freedom of the individual also prompted him to deal with
theological matters when his unfortunate experience of marriage led him to write The Doctrine
and Discipline of Divorce (1643). He used the Bible as his authoritative source to justify the
abolition of the existing marriage laws.

Divorce Tracts
Milton's divorce tracts refer to the four interlinked polemical pamphlets—The Doctrine and
Discipline of Divorce, The Judgment of Martin Bucer, Tetrachordon, and Colasterion—written
by John Milton from 1643–1645. They argue for the legitimacy of divorce on grounds of spousal
incompatibility. Arguing for divorce at all, let alone a version of no-fault divorce, was extremely
controversial and religious figures sought to ban his tracts. Although the tracts were met with
nothing but hostility and he later rued publishing them in English at all, they are important for
analysing the relationship between Adam and Eve in his epic Paradise Lost. 

The broader context lay in the hope that Parliament would reform England's virtually nonexistent
divorce laws, which was unusual for a Protestant country. Having inherited Catholic canon law,
England had no formal mechanisms for divorce (as in Catholicism, marriages could
be annulled on the basis of preexisting impediments, like consanguinity or impotence, or
separations could be obtained).[5] However, divorce may have been unofficially condoned in
cases of desertion or adultery.[6] On the whole, England remained "the worst of all worlds,
largely lacking either formal controls over marriage or satisfactory legal means of breaking it".[7]

During his period of political activity he dedicated very little time towards real literary
production. He wrote a few sonnets, some of which reflected his attitude towards certain
contemporary events such as One the Late Massacre in Piedmont. However, his removal from
public life after the Restoration gave him the possibility of settling down and writing the great
epic he knew he had the qualities for and for which he had so long prepared himself.

Milton’s blindness
Milton's eyesight had been steadily declining for years, most likely the result of untreated
glaucoma. By February 1652, he had gone completely blind. At a time before Braille, recorded
books or any of the technologies that assist visually impaired people today, blindness was like an
intellectual death sentence. Milton was determined not to let that happen. He dictated his
business correspondence to a transcriber for as long as he could, and insisted that his daughters
read to him. Milton composed a poem to explain his feelings.
Even when John Milton was a young boy he enjoyed staying up late into all hours of the night to
read books by candlelight alone. Later in life he began to experience severe headaches. Caused
by the candlelight reading? Eyestrain perhaps? What about a life full of writing? I guess that it
was only destined for Milton to love reading the way that he did. His father was a scrivener,
which meant it was his job to be able to read and write. Milton’s actions eventually caught up
with him and resulted in loss of eyesight. Milton was completely blind by the year 1652.
However, the precise cause of his blindness is unknown. We can only speculate. However, an
alternative to how Milton lost his sight is that he worked so tirelessly for the Puritan and Oliver
Cromwell cause he wrote himself blind. Milton wrote a series of pamphlets advocating for
radical politics, some of his better-known topics being divorce and freedom of speech. GOOD
THING these ideas are no longer radical. As Milton spent so much of his time defending his
beliefs of divorce, freedom of speech, and populism he steadily lost his eyesight until he was
totally blind. But truthfully, it could have just been glaucoma.

"When I consider how my light is spent,

Ere half my days in this dark world and wide,
And that one talent which is death to hide
Lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, lest He returning chide;
"Doth God exact day-labor, light denied?"
I fondly ask. But Patience, to prevent
That murmur, soon replies, "God doth not need
Either man's work or His own gifts. Who best
Bear His mild yoke, they serve Him best. His state
Is kingly: thousands at His bidding speed,
And post o'er land and ocean without rest;
They also serve who only stand and wait.""

With his personal life in shambles, Milton's political fortunes began to go south as well. The
reformation that Milton helped to shepherd in did not last long. Following a protracted political
struggle after Oliver Cromwell's death, Charles II returned to London and took the throne;
Cromwell's body was soon exhumed and publicly defiled in a number of nasty ways. Those who
had assisted in the earlier regime were suspect. Milton was arrested in 1659 and briefly
imprisoned for a few months. After friends intervened to secure his release, Milton was forced to
move out of London and into semi-exile in the country. In 1663, he married his third wife,
Elizabeth Minshull.

Milton and Galileo:

30-year-old Milton visited 77-year-old Galileo in Florence. Galileo had been found guilty of
heresy by the 1633 Inquisition, for writing that the Earth revolves around the Sun. When Milton
met him, Galileo was blind and sequestered under house arrest. His meeting with the brave
scientist who had fallen victim to censorship, a censorship that Milton denounced, made a
profound impact on the English man of letters. In Paradise Lost, Milton was moved to describe
Satan’s shield as the surface of the moon, spotted and imperfect with rivers and mountains, as
seen through Galileo’s telescope from Fiesole.
A meeting on a summer’s day in 1638 was a cultural collision that sets Milton comfortably into a
Florentine context. Both men were imprisoned in an age when there was little tolerance for
radical thought. Both men refused to allow even blindness, at the end of long and difficult lives
in which their ideals had been shattered, stop them from dictating work in support of radicalism.
Interestingly enough, there is more of the Middle Ages in Milton than in Galileo’s cosmos, but
this speaks to Galileo’s raw challenge of Catholicism and Milton’s acceptance of the puritanical.
A few years after Galileo’s death, in 1644, Milton published Areopagitica, his defence of free
speech. It was in this work that he mentions his journey to Italy and says: “There it was that I
found and visited the famous Galileo grown old, a prisner to the Inquisition, for thinking in
Astronomy otherwise then the Franciscan and Dominican licencers thought. And though I knew
that England then was groaning loudest under the Prelaticall yoak, neverthelesse I took it as a
pledge of future happines,