Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Milton's reworkings and transformations of classical texts and conventions are well known. But Milton's ties were also to the English past, though he became disillusioned with the English people after the failure of the Revolution. While he felt part of a cosmopolitan literary community that reached on to the European continent and into the ancient past, he wrote with a strong sense of his immediate English literary past. Like classical literature, English literature constituted a field to be negotiated; to be valued, but also evaluated. The recent English literary tradition – the literature of post-Reformation England – stretched from Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser through Ben Jonson and John Donne to the Cavalier poets like Thomas Carew and Robert Herrick. In his treatment of classical texts and conventions, Milton felt compelled to judge them from his position as a Christian even as he was attracted to and incorporated their glorious achievements. In a similar way, Milton engaged in critical dialogue with English literature, not all of which conformed to his Protestant values. Milton was influenced by a broad range of English texts. Despite his puritan suspicion of theatrical performance, we see the legacy of Renaissance drama (particularly Marlowe's Dr Faustus and revenge tragedy) in the portrait of Satan in Paradise Lost , and sense the presence of Shakespeare in the ... log in or subscribe to read full text