REWRITTEN TO AFTERTIMES: ADAPTATIONS OF JOHN MILTON’S POETRY, 1674-1767 By JOHN LUKE RODRIGUE Bachelor of Arts in English Nicholls State University Thibodaux, Louisiana 2004 Master of Arts in English Pittsburg State University Pittsburg, Kansas 2007 Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate College of the Oklahoma State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY May 2013 REWRITTEN TO AFTERTIMES: ADAPTATIONS OF JOHN MILTON’S POETRY, 1674-1767 Dissertation Approved: Dr. Edward Jones Dr. Jeffrey Walker Dr. Andrew Wadoski Dr. David D’Andrea ii Name: JOHN LUKE RODRIGUE Date of Degree: MAY 2013 Title of Study: REWRITTEN TO AFTERTIMES: ADAPTATIONS OF JOHN MILTON’S POETRY, 1674-1767 Major Field: ENGLISH Abstract: Post-Romantic Milton criticism often sees a dichotomy in the poet’s thought. On the one hand, he is considered a champion of modern values, such as the freedom of worship and the freedom of speech, and a strong proponent of open-mindedness and restless intellectual inquiry. On the other, his religious-moral system is often considered brutally restrictive in its emphasis upon human sinfulness and depravity and for its insistence on self-control and obedience to God as the pathway to salvation. Little attention, however, has been paid to how the eighteenth century contributed to this dichotomy, and, in particular, how musical adaptations of the eighteenth century acted as “staged criticism” that regularly highlighted the paradox in Milton’s thought that one must be constrained in order to be free. In the century, five adaptations of Milton’s poetry appeared on the British stage: Comus, L’Allegro ed Il Penseroso, Samson, Paradise Lost: An Oratorio, and Lycidas. These adaptations consistently create an aura of religious and moral authority around the poet, celebrating him as a national literary hero and a representative of true “British” values, such as piety, liberty, and temperance. In doing so, adaptations exploited Milton’s reputation as a defender of British values while also ignoring, erasing, or soft-pedaling around those facets of his thought that could not be easily appropriated into a broadly-defined notion of “Britishness.” They also simplified Milton’s religious ideas, converting his mature poetry from their rigorous theological inquiries into musical acts of devotion that espouse moral orthodoxy and a comforting soteriology. The picture emerging of the poet in these adaptations is one of Milton as the poet of discipline. Thus, well before the Romantics made a rebel out of Milton, the eighteenth century made a conservative “extremist” out of him through their simplified renderings of his religious thought, and they did so despite avidly professing an unwavering fidelity to the “spirit” of his works and thought. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION ..................................................................................................................... 1 CHAPTER I: THE STATE OF INNOCENCE AND MILTON’S REPUTATION .................. 19 CHAPTER II: DALTON AND ARNE’S PATRIOT UR-TEXT, COMUS............................. 42 CHAPTER III: HANDEL AND JENNENS’S L’ALLEGRO ED IL PENSEROSO ................ 87 CHAPTER IV: ADAPTING SAMSON AGONISTES TO ORATORIO ................................ 123 CHAPTER V: STILLINGFLEET’S PARADISE LOST: AN ORATORIO ............................ 169 CHAPTER VI: WILLIAM JACKSON’S LYCIDAS ............................................................. 201 CONCLUSION ...................................................................................................................... 228 NOTES AND REFERENCES ............................................................................................... 238 iv INTRODUCTION THE POET PRESENTS HIMSELF AND THE POET REPRESENTED John Milton was a man who cared deeply about what others thought of him. His career as a prose controversialist often demanded meticulously-crafted self-personae, and in response to his various opponents and attackers, he regularly responds with defenses of himself that offer far more information than the rhetorical situations call for. Answering the charges of lewdness leveled at him in the early 1640s, Milton begins the second half of The Reason of Church- Government (1642) with a lengthy account of his education and of how he came to choose poetry as his calling, a topic he touches on again in An Apology against a Pamphlet (1642). He would later again defend himself through autobiography in the wake of reactions to his Defensio Pro Populo Anglicano (1651). At other times, Milton needed little provocation to talk about himself; his presence in his poetry amounts to a stylized self-portrait that is hard to ignore. In the strongly- autobiographical eleventh and twelfth sonnets, one detects his peevishness and hurt feelings over reactions to his divorce tracts. Milton’s attitude is especially acidic in Sonnet 12, in which he complains that his well-meant intentions “to prompt the age to quit their cloggs / By the known rules of antient libertie” met only a “barbarous noise” of “Owles and cuckoes, asses, apes and dogs” (1-4). This is what he gets, he supposes, for casting “Pearl to hogs; / That bawle for freedom . And still revolt when truth would set them free” (8-11).1 Two decades later, the 1 defensive explanation of Paradise Lost’s blank verse as “ancient liberty recover’d to heroic poem from the troublesom and modern bondage of rimeing” (250) reaffirms Milton’s view of himself as a liberator, a title he rightly deserves. Finally, if Milton believed himself a prophet or vates— and the invocations of Paradise Lost suggest he did—he was at the very least prophetic in his aim to write something that “aftertimes . should not willingly let . die” (The Reason of Church- Government 810). If this is what Milton thought of himself, or, more accurately, what he wished others to think of him, what did “aftertimes” actually think? More than 120 years after Milton’s death, William Blake certainly believed him an author of something deserving preservation across generations, but he also considered Milton a divided identity, a woefully misguided religious thinker who prostrated himself before a tyrannous God called “Reason” and “a true poet and of the Devil’s party without knowing it” (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Plate 5). He was also the key character in Blake’s Milton (1810), in which the eponymous poet returns to earth to correct his errors by (curiously) entering into Blake’s heel (1:49-50). Blake clearly believed Milton was a prophet, but he also felt the legalistic rationality of Milton’s God and his mature poetry’s constant insistence on self-control and obedience did not match his reputation as Great Britain’s sublime poet-champion of liberty. In Milton, Blake thus chose to rewrite the poet’s religion to make it fit with his revered status as a revolutionary liberator. This was not the first time an artist took it upon himself to force Milton into a more flattering mold. Blake’s focus on Milton as the key figure in one of his major “prophetic” poems and the Romantics’ general habit of using Milton’s thought as the grindstone upon which they sharpened their own illustrate the remarkable recuperation of the poet-pamphleteer’s reputation from its nadir following the Restoration in 1660. Of course, they cannot take sole credit for this recovery. It began at least more than a century before Blake began to redefin Milton criticism in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1792-93). Moreover, the dichotomy he sensed in Milton’s work was present from the late seventeenth century on, though he was certainly more aware of it and 2 addressed it in a radically new manner that has made his iconoclastic interpretation of Milton difficult to ignore more than 200 years later. Put simply, the question revolves around a perceived tension between Milton’s strident, lifelong defense of intellectual and religious freedom and his insistence in Paradise Lost (and the other mature works) that observing the limits set on human aspiration, human intellect, and human behavior paves the way for salvation. On the one hand, there is the Milton of Areopagitica, the restless intellectual and the liberator who warns against close-minded complacency that leads to one becoming “a heretick in the truth” (543). For Blake, this Milton, identified with Satan as an opponent to God’s tyranny, is the “true Milton,” the poet of original or “Satanic” energy and poetic creation. On the other, there is the “false Milton,” the misguided religious thinker who embraces the fetters of rationality and obedience.2 This Milton believes God is always to be obeyed and bullies readers into the same realization, forcing them recognize and never forget it, no matter the temptations to think otherwise. Many will recognize this Milton from Stanley Fish’s landmark book Surprised by Sin (1967) and his later work, How Milton Works (2003). In the former, Fish insists that two primary patterns exist in Paradise Lost—“the reader’s humiliation and his education,” which take place to make the reader “fall again exactly as Adam did and with Adam’s troubled clarity” in order to “give [Milton’s] audience a basis for moral action” (xiii, 1). From Fish’s perspective, Milton not only bullies readers into obedience; he hoodwinks them into it by subtly tempting them to reenact Adam’s fall through reading the poem. Although one may attribute this dichotomy to Blake, its origins reach back to Milton himself and to the critics, scholars, and publishers of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But when telling the story of Milton’s “afterlife,” one becomes entangled in a web spreading much further than essays, commentaries, and handsome editions with annotations and illustrations. In many ways, the century and a half from 1688 to the early nineteenth century can be called the high-water mark for Milton as a cultural commodity in England, for he enjoyed a vogue in high culture circles and in more “popular” ones that celebrations of his 400th birthday in 3 2008 could not equal. Milton was in the papers read by an educated middle-class, and he was present in a stunning quantity of books with academic and intellectual aspirations.