Abstract
John Milton was exceptional among his contemporaries for resisting to the end the inevitability of a Stuart Restoration. As late as April 1660, only weeks before Charles II’s landing at Dover, he published his revised version of The Readie and Easie Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth. The work concluded with a plea which distinguished God’s history from the perverse history unfolding at that very moment:
What I have spoken, is the language of that which is not call’d amiss the good Old Cause: if it seem strange to any, it will not seem more strange, I hope, then convincing to backsliders. Thus much I should perhaps have said though I were sure I should have spoken only to trees and stones; and had none to cry to, but with the Prophet, O earth, earth, earth! to tell the very soil it self, what her perverse inhabitants are deaf to. Nay though what I have spoke, should happ’n (which Thou suffer not, who didst create mankinde free; nor Thou next, who didst redeem us from being servants of men!) to be the last words of our expiring libertie. But I trust I shall have spoken perswasion to abundance of sensible and ingenuous men: to som perhaps whom God may raise of these stones to become children of reviving libertie; and may reclaim, though they seem now chusing them a captain back for Egypt, to bethink themselves a little and consider whether they are rushing; to exhort this torrent also of the people, not to be so impetuos, but to keep thir due channell; and at length recovering and uniting thir better resolutions, now that they see alreadie how open and unbounded the insolence and rage is of our common enemies, to stay these ruinous proceedings; justly and timely fearing to what a precipice of destruction the deluge of this epidemic madness would hurrie us through the general defection of a misguided and abus’d multitude.l
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Notes
Quotations from Milton are from The Poems of John Milton, ed. John Carey and Alastair Fowler (1968), and
Milton, Complete Prose. In a slightly altered form this chapter appeared in Essays in Criticism, 30 (1980), 124–50.
Its title alludes both to Ian Donaldson, The World Upside Down (Oxford, 1970) and to Hill, World Turned Upside Down.
For a recent summary of the debate, Christopher Hill, Milton and the English Revolution (1977), pp. 428–48, 481–6.
Externality is a defining characteristic of the physical world and can be considered a function of our visual experience: sight is the most important sense, for example, Adrian Stokes, The Quattro Cento (1932), pp. 156–8.
John Carey, ‘Sea, Snake, Flower, and Flame in Samson Agonistes’, MLR, LXII (1967), 395–9.
The Works of Sir Thomas Browne, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (1928), vol. I, p. 57
Henry More, Divine Dialogues (1743), vol. I, p. 249
Ralph Cudworth, The True Intellectual System of the Universe (1678), pp. 878–9.
David Masson, The Life of John Milton (1880–1894), vol. VI, pp. 673–4 and Hill, Milton and the English Revolution, pp. 428–48.
Frances A. Yates, Theatre of the World (1969), pp. 112–35
John Ogilby, The Entertainment of His Most Excellent Majesty Charles II (1662), figures opposite pp. 13, 43, 111, 139
E.H. Gombrich, Art History and the Social Sciences (Oxford, 1975), pp. 18–21, 48–9; Robert Whitehall, Urania (Oxford, 1669), pp. 1–7.
8 Robert Boyle had written ‘I esteem the World a Temple’, Some Considerations touching the Usefulness of Experimental Naturall Philosophy (Oxford, 1663), p. 57; imagery of pulling down, in contrast to rebuilding, had been used to oppose the Restoration, for example, ‘It is a time of breaking and pulling down all worldly Constitutions’, The Armies Vindication of This Last Change (1659), p. 20.
W.R. Parker, Milton: A Biography (Oxford, 1968), pp. 1090–1, 1142–3.
Gerald Langbaine, An Account of the English Dramatic Poets (1691), pp. 308–9, 375
William Joyner, The Roman Empress, A Tragedy (1671), sigs. A2a, A3a, A4a, pp. 38, 59.
John Wilson, Andronicus Comnenius (1664)
John Caryll, The English Princess (1667)
Edward Howard, The Usurper (1668), adaptations of Corneille’s Roman plays, and works by Dryden and Robert Howard.
Cf. Mary Ann Radzinowicz, Toward ‘Samson Agonistes’: The Growth of Milton’s Mind (Princeton, 1978), pp. 167–79 and passim; an intelligent and comprehensive account of the work and its place in Milton’s development.
Matthew Griffith, The Fear of God and the King (1660), p. 9
Thomas Mayhew, Upon the Joyfull and Welcome Return of His Sacred Majestie (1660), p. 8
Samuel Pordage, Poems upon Several Occasions (1660), sig. B2b.
John Dover Wilson, ‘Shakespeare, Milton and Congreve’, TLS, January 16 1937, p. 44
Ralph Davis, The Rise of the English Shipping Industry in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (1962), pp. 228, 230, 316
Carew Reynel, The True English Interest (1674), pp. 6, 10 (‘where a Nation Imports by its voluptuousness more than it Exports, it must needs come to ruine’)
James Harrington, The Oceana and Other Works (1737), p. 468.
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© 1984 Nicholas Jose
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Jose, N. (1984). Samson Agonistes: The Play Turned Upside Down. In: Ideas of the Restoration in English Literature, 1660–71. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-06635-3_8
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