Copyright by Joseph Aaron Moore 2015 The Dissertation Committee for Joseph Aaron Moore certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Milton Aspiring: Belief, Influence, and Shakespeare Committee: John Rumrich, Supervisor Eric Mallin, Co-Supervisor Hannah Wojciehowski Douglas Bruster Stephen Dobranski Milton Aspiring: Belief, Influence, and Shakespeare by Joseph Aaron Moore, B.A., M.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin August, 2015 Dedication for Deborah Tolley Moore In memory of Joseph Donald Moore, 1943-2009. Acknowledgements My chief intellectual debt is to John Rumrich, whose work on Milton engaged my interest in the critical conversation and who, alongside the engaging and shrewd Eric Mallin, presided over this dissertation. This work also benefits from the presence of other great teachers: Hannah Wojciehowski, Douglas Bruster, Stephen B. Dobranski, Cara Cilano, Don Bushman, James McGowan, and the greatest influence on my style and approach to writing, Mark Boren. As with any work of this breadth and pitch, in preparing this manuscript I have incurred great debts far beyond my ability to express or recognize them. Resigned to that, I hope to work toward repayment in the future by giving time and attention so generously to my own colleagues and students. v Milton Aspiring: Belief, Influence, and Shakespeare Joseph Aaron Moore, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2015 Supervisor: John Rumrich Co-Supervisor: Eric Mallin Abstract: Over the last several hundred years, literary criticism has paid generous attention to the works of John Milton and his greatest and, in space and time, closest predecessor, William Shakespeare. However as Alwin Thaler observed almost a century ago, “strangely enough . it has neglected the relationships between them.” Exploring the literary, ideological, and political reasons for that neglect, this dissertation searches out the ways that Shakespeare influenced Milton and, more specifically, how that influence contributed to the young Milton’s self-fashioning of the poetic identity he desired for himself: to be the vates poet of the English people. The influence of Shakespeare on the young Milton exemplifies a certain version of imitation that G.W. Pigman III has termed “dissimulative,” expanding on common notions of influence, particularly when authors with seemingly disparate approaches to their art still draw from one another in a way that is intentionally difficult to detect, however powerful. Each of the four chapters offers a reading of one of Milton’s early poems alongside one or more germane works by Shakespeare never before been read in the context of Milton’s early poetic development. Chapter 1 explores the two authors’ competing metaphysical notions of time by reading Milton’s mid-winter birth poem, On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity, hereafter referred to as the Nativity Ode, alongside vi Shakespeare’s play set around the “Festival of the Epiphany,” Twelfth Night: Or, What You Will. Chapter 2 explores the two authors’ competing notions of language, how it works and what it should do, by reading Milton’s A Masque to be Presented at Ludlow Castle, hereafter referred to as Comus, alongside Love’s Labour’s Lost and Measure for Measure. Chapter 3 explores the young Milton’s notions of poetic fame, the proper social role of the poet, and opposing approaches to employing poetry as a means to immortality by reading Lycidas alongside a selection of Shakespeare’s sonnets. The final chapter states a never-before suggested claim about Milton’s early verses “On Shakespeare,” namely that the young poet’s work contains layers of irony: while praising and imitating, Milton is also obliquely criticizing his latest and greatest predecessor. vii Table of Contents Introduction: The Probem of Being Milton .............................................................1 Chapter 1: "Time Will Run Back": Milton's Shakespeare and the Nativity Ode ...........................................................49 Chapter 2: "Fantastic" Shakespeare: A Reading of Young Milton's Tempter .................................................................74 Chapter 3: "Our Corrupted Clergy": Poetic Aspirations in Lycidas.................................................................................97 Chapter 4: "Too Much Conceiving": A New Reading of Milton's "On Shakespeare" ...................................................125 Conclusion: Milton's Late Becoming ..................................................................154 Bibliography ........................................................................................................175 viii INTRODUCTION: The Problem of Being Milton Although much has been made in literary histories of the link between Milton and Spenser, we need to insist on the relative unimportance of that link. Milton was not unduly perturbed, surely, by the example of The Faerie Queene. Milton perceived the problem of being Milton: it was that he came after Shakespeare. (Fletcher 142-43)1 Everywhere in Milton studies, references to Shakespeare are either conspicuously cursory or altogether absent. As Alwin Thaler observed almost a century ago, “[s]cholarship has always delighted to render unto Shakespeare and Milton individually the tribute which is their natural due. Strangely enough, however, it has neglected the relationships between them” (139). Notwithstanding the work of Thaler, who noted that Shakespeare made “deep impression upon the heart” of Milton’s “poetic fancy in youth” (39), this critical hole still gapes wide open.2 Such is the territory this project sets out to explore. In her lengthy biography of Milton, Barbara K. Lewalski hardly mentions Shakespeare at all; the roughly 700-page volume deals with Milton’s first poem printed 1 Exploring the link between Milton and Shakespeare, I find the link between Milton and Spenser plays a prominent role in the early development of Milton’s poetry less for his style and more for his ideas about the social role of the “true poet” as one with prophetic powers. It was not so much Spenser’s poetic style Milton followed; it was Spenser’s outlook on what poetry should do and how the poet should live that motivated Milton to call Spenser, as reported by Dryden, his “original.” Shakespeare, however, was Milton’s English predecessor with the most intimidating level of talent. 2 Scholars often point out, in the words of David Hawkes, the “remarkable fact that both the towering geniuses of early modern English literature, Shakespeare and Milton, were the sons of usurers,” and both became usurers themselves, “capitalists living at the dawn of capitalism” (28). 1 in English, 16 lines entitled “On Shakespeare” (41), in a single paragraph.3 Writing on “Milton and his Precursors,” Harold Bloom notes that Milton’s “highly deliberate and knowingly ambitious program necessarily involved him in direct competition” with other poets, listing “Homer, Virgil, Lucretius, Ovid, Dante, and Tasso,” and “[m]ore anxiously, it brought him very close to Spenser” (163). But he ignores Shakespeare. Discussing the language of L’Allegro and Il Penseroso, Alan Rudrum observes that “for the most part Milton’s language in these poems is derivative, from Shakespeare principally,” but he says little else about the matter, save that “indeed a good exercise would be to see how many [Miltonic] words and phrases we can refer to Shakespeare” (27-28). In his book of essays about the two poets, Fredson Bowers never writes a word concerning the relation between them. James Holly Hanford mentions Shakespeare four times in his Milton biography, each time in passing; for example, he notes that Milton’s Satan is the “conscious and determined villain, reminding us of Shakespearean characters—Macbeth, Iago, Richard III” (186). However, he goes no further. In books with titles that include both poets’ names, a general tendency keeps the two separate, sectioned off from one 3 Lewalski joins the chorus of scholars who claim Milton “explicitly claims the Bard as his model” (41). However, like most who broach the topic of the relation between these two literary giants who were also near contemporaries, she says remarkably little. Reading “On Shakespeare,” Neil Forsyth noticed the poem “shows a great respect, as the context requires, for Shakespeare, but also a certain need to establish distance, for this newly arriving poet to carve out some space for himself” (30-33). He ultimately argues that in his youth, Milton was influenced by Shakespeare, but that while we still see traces of Shakespeare in the poet’s later works, he ultimately grew out of it. Hawkes notes in passing that “On Shakespeare” expresses Milton’s “lifelong iconoclasm.” Yet no one, so far as I know, has rendered a close reading of “On Shakespeare” that pays attention to this iconoclastic tendency noted by Hawkes, or to the creation of distance noted by Forsyth. Such will be the intention of Chapter 4: “‘Too Much Conceiving’: A New Reading of Milton’s ‘On Shakespeare.’” All citations of Milton’s poetry will refer to Kerrigan, Rumrich, and Fallon’s The Complete Poetry and Essential Prose of John Milton. New York: Modern Library, 2009. 2 another almost entirely.4 Perhaps Thaler is right to note the “strangeness” of this critical omission; indeed, this gap calls attention to itself, provokes a lot of curiosity,