Who'd win in a fight? John Milton and William Shakespeare
December 9, 2008, is a date that publishers, literary scholars and probably a few others have been looking forward to: it's Milton's birthday. On this day in 1608 he was born in the City of London. Four hundred years later, he is born again in exhibitions, conferences, biographies, the latest scholarly edition of his complete works, and evena live, day-long reading of Paradise Lost, courtesy of the English faculty at Cambridge University.
No Milton in Love, though. No Royal Milton Company. No literary pilgrims traipsing up to Bread Street, where he grew up, to lay wreaths or get some spurious kick of heritage. No Hollywood high-school comedy based on "Comus". (There is the promise of this, however, reasonably categorised by IMDB as drama, fantasy and "horror".)
In other words, in what an academic might call his "cultural afterlife", Milton has had little to do with the kind of excesses that have made Shakespeare into a heritage industry. This is down in part, maybe, to the biographical facts – Shakespeare was in showbusiness, and Milton was in the Latin Office of the Cromwellian Protectorate – and to the nature of the "high Christian seriousness" on which the latter's reputation has depended. And thanks to which it has now, perhaps, declined.
Whether in art, life or afterlife, the temptation to compare Milton with Shakespeare has been a persistent one. Seriousness, tainted by cultural guilt, partly explains this. Mere drama (you know: Hamlet, King Lear...) is usually thought to occupy a lower place in the aesthetic pecking order than epic. Milton the pamphleteer, the advocate of a free press, the republican, provides a canonical counterweight to Shakespeare, the spokesman for everything and nothing, whose personal views hide behind his dramatis personae. "Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties", Milton argued in Areopagitica. "How now? A rat? Dead, for a ducat, dead!", wrote Shakespeare in Hamlet, after crossing out "brown cow". No wonder it was Milton whom Wordsworth felt "shouldst" be living in 1802, to see England turned into "a fen / Of stagnant waters".
If that's the sort of invidious comparison that appeals to you, you might wish to ask yourself, along with the Princeton professor Nigel Smith: is Milton better than Shakespeare? Here's how Smith celebates the undiminished currency of Milton's political writings and the "contradictory energy" of his verses:
"However much we celebrate Shakespeare's grasp of humanity or poetry, his troubling displays of power, and his wonderful and delightful exposure of sexual identity, however much great acting companies, actors, and actresses produce staggering performances of his plays, Milton's interrogations of free will, liberty, and the threat to it are more riveting. No student of Milton has left Paradise Lost without feeling such an admiration, indeed an ardour of admiration."
The rest of Smith's introduction can be read here; but so much for seriousness. There are still things for most of us to find out about the birthday boy. For example: the new Oxford biography of the younger man points out how near Bread Street was to a certain theatre, the Blackfriars indoor playhouse, where some of Shakespeare's plays received their first performances. Milton's father became involved in the theatre's business at one point. The City of London was a small place, of course, and ... could there be a personal as well as poetic significance to the fact that one of Milton's earliest poems was a tribute to "my Shakespear"?
No Milton in Love, though. No Royal Milton Company. No literary pilgrims traipsing up to Bread Street, where he grew up, to lay wreaths or get some spurious kick of heritage. No Hollywood high-school comedy based on "Comus". (There is the promise of this, however, reasonably categorised by IMDB as drama, fantasy and "horror".)
In other words, in what an academic might call his "cultural afterlife", Milton has had little to do with the kind of excesses that have made Shakespeare into a heritage industry. This is down in part, maybe, to the biographical facts – Shakespeare was in showbusiness, and Milton was in the Latin Office of the Cromwellian Protectorate – and to the nature of the "high Christian seriousness" on which the latter's reputation has depended. And thanks to which it has now, perhaps, declined.
Whether in art, life or afterlife, the temptation to compare Milton with Shakespeare has been a persistent one. Seriousness, tainted by cultural guilt, partly explains this. Mere drama (you know: Hamlet, King Lear...) is usually thought to occupy a lower place in the aesthetic pecking order than epic. Milton the pamphleteer, the advocate of a free press, the republican, provides a canonical counterweight to Shakespeare, the spokesman for everything and nothing, whose personal views hide behind his dramatis personae. "Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties", Milton argued in Areopagitica. "How now? A rat? Dead, for a ducat, dead!", wrote Shakespeare in Hamlet, after crossing out "brown cow". No wonder it was Milton whom Wordsworth felt "shouldst" be living in 1802, to see England turned into "a fen / Of stagnant waters".
If that's the sort of invidious comparison that appeals to you, you might wish to ask yourself, along with the Princeton professor Nigel Smith: is Milton better than Shakespeare? Here's how Smith celebates the undiminished currency of Milton's political writings and the "contradictory energy" of his verses:
"However much we celebrate Shakespeare's grasp of humanity or poetry, his troubling displays of power, and his wonderful and delightful exposure of sexual identity, however much great acting companies, actors, and actresses produce staggering performances of his plays, Milton's interrogations of free will, liberty, and the threat to it are more riveting. No student of Milton has left Paradise Lost without feeling such an admiration, indeed an ardour of admiration."
The rest of Smith's introduction can be read here; but so much for seriousness. There are still things for most of us to find out about the birthday boy. For example: the new Oxford biography of the younger man points out how near Bread Street was to a certain theatre, the Blackfriars indoor playhouse, where some of Shakespeare's plays received their first performances. Milton's father became involved in the theatre's business at one point. The City of London was a small place, of course, and ... could there be a personal as well as poetic significance to the fact that one of Milton's earliest poems was a tribute to "my Shakespear"?
http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2008/dec/09/milton-shakespeare-anniversary
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