Historicizing Milton: spectacle, power, and poetry in Restoration England

Abstract

Although Milton's three major poems, Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes, appeared well into the Restoration era, they have long been regarded as belonging philosophically to the earlier 17th century. The canonical view is of as a relic in the Restoration - either belated humanist or belated Puritan. Addressing this long-standing anomaly of literary history, Historicizing Milton shows how Milton's major poems respond specifically and powerfully to royalist spectacles of the 1660s and 1670s, spectacles that were intended as displays of divinely approved monarchical power. Laura Lunger Knoppers traces such public spectacles as the execution of the regicides, the exhumation of Cromwell, the punishment of fifth monarchists and the coronation triumph of Charles II. Drawing on a range of sources, including letters, diaries, newspaper accounts, sermons, royal proclamations and parliamentary accounts, each chapter in Historicizing Milton reconstructs the discourses that interpreted and contested spectacles of power and punishment. Knoppers argues that Milton's poems are part of this oppositional discourse and that his revisions of such key terms as martyrdom, treason, joy, glory and conquest challenge the spectacles by which the monarchy constituted and conveyed its power. Questioning the nature of earthly spectacle altogether, rewrites display as inner witness before God alone. His radically iconoclastic art creates a mode of anti-spectacle, not only exposing but also redefining and appropriating the spectacles of state.

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