Audience and human nature in the poetry of Milton and Dryden/Milton ve Dryden'in siirlerinde izleyici ve insan dogasi

Interactions, Spring, 2007 by Hasan A. Al-Zubi

The Controversy between Dryden's Restoration preference for rhyme and Milton's dislike of "the invention of a barbarous Age, to set off wretched matter and lame meter" (The Verse 210) reflected the tension of the style appropriate for the elevated subject of Milton and the style suited for the more contemporary, often aristocratically pleasing, subjects of the Restoration poets. As John D. Cox notes in "Renaissance Power and Stuart Dramaturgy: Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden": "If Milton paid any attention to any of the poems celebrating the Restoration, he could not have failed to notice that they often embodied what to him must have seemed the literary equivalent of the king's lascivious lifestyle-namely a mode of praise that deliberately recalled courtly adulation before the Civil War" (337).

In fact, Milton's implication that modern poets such as Dryden would write for "Custom" and select their subjects accordingly is an indictment which reflects Milton's view of the lengths to which Court poets of the Restoration would go to create styles to please the Court audience. The poems and prefaces to many Restoration dramas which clearly and obsequiously praised benefactors and patrons were antithetical to the Puritan poet who dedicated his works to God. They also demonstrated that the fancy of Charles II often dictated the content and form of Restoration dramas and literature.

In 1660, Charles had expressed a desire for an English rhymed play (Cox 343) which may serve as a partial explanation for Dryden's "The State of Innocence". The obsession of the Court with the rhymed heroic play was noted by Andrew Marvell in "On Paradise Lost" which prefaces the second edition of the epic. In his poem, Marvell rather sarcastically expressed the fear that "jealous I was that some less skillful hand [...] Might hence presume the whole Creation's day/ To change in Scenes, and show it in a Play"(209-10). Yet, amidst his own characterization of Milton as the great English poet of the sublime, and the charges of overzealous Restoration use of rhyme, Dryden published "The State of Innocence" as an operatic performance of the Fall of Man in 1677. (3) More specifically, "The State of Innocence" is a musical stage adaptation of John Milton's epic poem Paradise Lost. However, it has never been performed because "the scenery and special effects like 'rebellious angels wheeling in the air, and seeming transfired with thunderbolts' over 'a lake of brimstone rolling fire' were too expensive for the King's company for which Dryden was working, and too technically demanding for their Theater" (Wikipedia). The success of the opera as a recreation of Milton's sublime epic is questionable, yet the failures of style of "The State of Innocence" reflect the Restoration concerns which inform the piece. The expression of "The State of Innocence" in rhymed couplets, and the focus upon Lucifer as the figure of power, create a drama which is far from the sublime style and subject of the original. The subtlety of Satan's self-delusion, and the expressive nature of Adam and Eve's speeches deriving from the blank verse of Milton's epic are lost in "The State of Innocence."