Key Themes and Ideas

The Pastoral

Primarily concerned with images of an idealised country life and work. Involves figures of shepherds + tells stories of their humble but happy lives. Concerned with the purifying and gladdening effects of physical labour.

Pastoral, normally classical. But can be associated with Christian ideals of purity and innocence. Depicts people living in harmony with the natural world, and achieving simple satisfaction through their day-to-day work.

Pastoral protagonists = self-sufficent and morally elevated - A + E

Innocence and piety reflected in the amount of gardening work that they do. Labours they take obediently undertake which places them closer to God = peaceful, mild and loving; they live in union with nature.

Milton adds religion to traditionally Pagan mode. Pastoral as part of the religious discourse. However, it's wild pastoral imagery. GofE = unruly jungle and a 'Labyrinth' of vegetation. Imagery surrounding the scene is of obscurity, darkness, mist and dankness.

Harmonious growth and orderliness is not easily identifiable in the 'midnight vapor' of Eden.

Worship

Shifts meaning throughout the book. A + E lead a humble life, labouring in the GofE following God's commandments. Live with an awareness of God watching them + shape all actions in way that is complaint with his precepts. Worshipping God according to Christian ideals of worship- being obedient to him, loving each other + working hard for their daily bread.

Things change when S enters the GofE. Encourages the humans' fall by tempting Eve to breach God's law. Convincing Eve of his false worship of her. False worship is a forceful tool used by Satan to induce Eve to sin

After eating the apple- starts praising the Tree of Knowledge. Admiring the tree as it if was a God, a deity. Beginning of Eve's downfall- returning to Animistic beliefs.

Animism = not only humans have a soul but plants and animals are all spiritual beings worthy of worship. Seen as tribal and savage

Couple experience a sinful sexual awakening. Abandon religious worship altogether. No room for religious worship at the end of Bk 9- irreversibly lose their innocence and goodliness.

Temptation and Sin

Eve tempting Adam to separate- uses rhetorical devices and he yields. A surrenders to E temptation

E's sin when S succeeds in tempting E to the forbidden fruit.

E tempts A again to eat the fruit and breach Gods main commandment.

Separation

Physical and emotional. Couple's physical parting in the beginning of the book. A wary of the idea as sees potential danger in Eve leaving A , but eventually he yields.

E spiritual separation from God after eating the forbidden fruit. Thinks she is in the divine position of an all-knowing goddess. She is a god-like figure + abandons her love for God = separation from Christian tradition.

A + E separate emotionally - relationship breaks down. Turn to spiteful accusations + not much is left from their previous 'State of Mind...full of peace.' Followed by A + E separation from God they are expelled from Paradise.

The Sublime

Feeling that combines both admiration and fear in the presence of a force that is magnificent and mighty. Often powers of nature or spiritual phenomena that evoke the sublime feelings in its beholders.

Sublime through God and S's influence over  A + E.

• G sublime power as spiritual force that produces a mixture of emotions. Admire and worship him as he's the superior force. Creations are awe- inspiring and wondorous. But they fear consequences of their disobedience + terrified of breaking his laws. 

They love God for the incomprehensible greatness of his creations and they fear God's punishment at the same time.

• S's = elements of the sublime. E does not resist S's temptation is because she is blinded by his sublime disguise. Unfamiliar but magnificent in its strangeness. 

                                         

• Tree of knowledge - inexpressible power, wondorously capable of giving a sense and deeper knowledge to any creature that eats its fruit. 

Eve is mesmerised by the tree's grandeur and supernatural characteristics. E seems to praise the tree because of the powers that are beyond her understanding. 

E spiritually elevates the tree + is in awe and inspired by it. Almost seen as Godlike. 

Milton's sublime is negative.

Characters- An Analysis

Adam and Eve- Love, Marriage and the Power Dynamics

The first and only man in the text: 'Growth, Sense, Reason' have 'all summ'd up in Man'. Emphasis on the male and the masculine in the text.

Adam- the Protective an Loving Husband

A tries to protect E from the temptation God warned the couple about. Tries to persuade Eve not to leave his side when she wants to work alone:

"....leave not the faithful side/
That gave thee being, still shades thee and protects." 

Adam's protective attitude and considers 'guarding' Eve as his responsibility and is 'safest' when she is near.

A believes in traditional gender roles + gendered distribution of duties. He appreciates Eve for taking on domestic responsibilities- 'for nothing lovelier can be found/ In Woman, than to studie houshold good' 

Adam is a loving husband who uses 'healing words' in 'his care and matrimonial love'.

He recognizes and admires Eve's celestial qualities. He puts emphasis on Eve's coming second after himself. A treats E as an equal in terms of her human superiority over God's other creatures

Eve- the Independent and Austere Wife

E very different to Adam in her values. Speaks to A first, letting him know of her wish to sepeate and carry on gardening in different areas of the GofE.

Eve dislikes her husband's attempts at her independence:

"With sweet austeer composure thus reply'd"

Eve is 'austeer' which is unlike 'mild' Adam. Milton wanted to introduce a degree of doubt about Eve's celestial qualities even before Eve is tempted by Satan.

The Married Couple

Role reversal taking place. Traditional female sphere (care, domesticity, docility) is embraced by Adam, the figure of a husband. Whilst masculine traits (austerity, independence and mobility) are found in Eve.

Adam is 'the Patriarch of mankind' which is highly empowering, masculine identity- implies Adam's authority and leadership. Adam has enough authority to decide whether to give permission to Eve.

Eve suddenly 'submiss' and finds it difficult to take up the opportunity that has arisen with Adam's permission. Clear submission as Eve refrains from speaking until Adam has finished.

Tasting the Forbidden Fruit

E experience the first feelings of jealousy as she imagines 'Adam wedded to another Eve' and sees this vision as 'a death to think'.

Eve also seems to realise her own inferiority. Sees it not as natural and right but as something imposed on her and limiting her freedom:

"In Femal Sex, the more to draw his love,/
And render me more equal and perhaps/
A thing not undesireable, somtime"

A is their erotic awakening soon afterwards. A experienced 'carnal desire enflaming'. Symbolise the end of their innocence in Paradise and the embracing of carnal pleasures, which seemed base and beastly.

A + E discover shame and seek to cover their intimate body parts with fig leaves. Regard nakedness as 'obnoxious and unseemliest'.

At the end, they are quite equal as Adam submits to E's right of speech before he speaks. Eve wins her equal status- but it does not serve her any good. The consequences of the shift are ruinous and the couple:

"spent the fruitless hours, but neither of them self-condemning/
And of thir vain contest appeer'd no end.

Humanised Satan 

First-person insights into S reasoning help to provide justification for his actions and render him a fuller, rounder character who is disturbingly sympathetic.

His coming to Earth is concealed by mists and vapours rising- Satan comes 'in mist/ Of midnight vapor.' This image is not only obscuring and unsettling the scene, but it also seems to portray the character of Satan as one who is lost and uncertain.

Satan's Soliloquy 

Encouraged to see S as a damned soul, a troubled individual who tries to justify his ways. S talks with painful admiration about the greatness and perfection of the Earth and all of God's creation, including humans.

Destructive power and disposition of Satan.  He is a lost soul, punished by God, unable to partake in any natural pleasures offered by the Earth, and he is only satisfied by acts of destruction, which he laments.

Commits this transgression of denying his submission to God. Suffers the eternal punishment of being excluded from the joys and enjoyments of both Heaven and Earth. Sense of being wronged gives way to envy and destructive desires. Pleasure to 'destroy' stands in contrast with God's constructive pleasure to create forming a clear binary opposition.

Humanisation

Listen to views and motives- hear his spiteful and wronged voice.

• arch-villain Satan himself, the fallen angel who turned his back to God and uses his infernal powers to destroy God's beloved creations, humans
• Animalistic appearance of the serpent that Satan deceitfully employs in order to enter the GofE + tempt Eve in disguise 
• Humanised self , the emotive self, self which seems to stand behind S 1st soliloquy 

S capable of an array of human emotions and feelings 

Triune God- consists of God, his son Jesus and the Holy Spirit. Christian triune God consists of the celestial spirit of God the Father, the humanised God a well as the Holy spirit -represented as a dove.

God?

Transcedent. Deeds are carefully observed and noted by his omniscent figure. Everything in Paradise revolves around God and his commandments- humble life of A + E

God the Maker and the Almighty 

Referred to as 'Maker' and 'the Almightie'. To A, God is his loving 'Lord' and both A and E refer to God with respect and devotion. S explicitly undermines God's authority + status in Paradise. E visibly attracted to the idea of her divine self as she falls for S's rhetoric. 

Shift in her attitude towards G. Idea of goodliness and the divine loses its focus and becomes elusive. Eve sees herself almost like a deity, also refers to 'Gods' - possible return to polytheism + withdrawal from the Christian tradition. Removes God the Maker from the position of authority. 

E thinks that G is not a loving Lord and carer but 'our great Forbidder'. Does not cease to watch the couple with the help of 'all his spies' by which Eve means the angels.  Lost her faith not in God's existence but his authority and sincerity of intentions. 

God is compared to Satan, with his guile and destructive purposes. 

End of Bk 9 = fortifies the notion of God's power over Paradise. A + E suffer from the results of going against God's commandment and are evidently punished. Experience shame and guilt for the 1st time in human history + their relationship crumbles as they argue endlessly and fruitfully, full of the infernal spite. 

Paradise Lost: A Reading Guide

The historical-political context

• Marriage and the right of man to seek divorce, in an unhappy marriage was something that Milton worried about after his first wife, Mary Powell abandoned him. 

• Milton appealed to parliament in a prose treatise called 'The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce' to allow a man to divorce his wife and remarry on grounds of intellectual incompatibility resulting in loneliness of desertion. 

• Milton wrote 4 highly unorthodox, divorce tracts 

• According to English canon law - complete dissolution of marriage bond allowing the parties to remarry if there was threat of polygamy or incest or if one person entered the marriage because they were forced

• Milton argued that marriage was to alleviate loneliness in fit companionship therefore it is unchristian an uncharitable to allow a marriage if the conditions are not met

• Presence of marriage in paradise- politicizes Eden

• A + E marriage = ideal married state where wife is obedient intellectual helpmeet to her husband but also ideal human household where masculine principles of rationality and hierarchical liberty must hold sway  

• A + E split the ideal spiritual and intellectual union they shared

• Fall becomes a type of divorce = dissolution of the ideal union between man and God, man and wife

• In earlier divorce tracts, Milton was snobbish towards those who entered marriage solely for the purpose of enjoying legitmised sexual intercourse 

• Milton stated that the act of procreation when enjoyed for its own sake 'a quintessence of an excrement' BUT narrator celebrates A + E's prelapsarian sexuality

• Love is founded not in lust but 'reason, loyal, just and pure.'

• Before the Fall, A + E enter 'Handed' but after inflamed with a sudden lust, Adam'seize' Eve by the hand dragging her 'nothing loath' into a 'shady bank' 

• In PL, the Fall and the loss of liberty entails debase human desires

• The resulting slavery of the rational faculties to sensual appetites and passions leave humanity in a state of naked shame divested of 'native righteousness' 

Grotesque in King Lear

"strange, fantastic, ugly, incongruous, unpleasant, or disgusting...often used to describe weird shapes and distorted forms. In art, performance, and literature, however, grotesque may also refer to something that simultaneously invokes in an audience a feeling of uncomfortable bizarreness as well as sympathetic pity" 

 G. Wilson Knight, "King Lear and the Comedy of  the Grotesque,"  the point is made that not only are tragic pathos and ridiculous nonsense intermingled most clearly in the storm scenes with Lear, Edgar in his role of 'poor Tom', and the fool, but that even the barbarously cruel events of the play are not devoid of a kind of comedy that these days we would call 'black'

'Go thrust him out at gates, and let him smell His way to Dover' is Regan's comment after Gloucester's eyes are put out.


The effect of the grotesque here is to screw even tighter the cruelty and tragedy: one's reaction to Regan's remark would not be so intense were it not expressed in the form of a witticism. And how are we to react, if not with a maximum of pity and with a sense of the comic which only increases the piteousness to the brink of the unbearable, to the blind Gloucester' s mock death? 


Shakespeare's greatest achievement was to experience the comedic elements of the play while not crossing the line of bathos 

Absurdism

This was a term coined in the 1960's as a style of theater.

Their work expressed the belief that human existence has no meaning or purpose and therefore all communication breaks down 

Logical construction and argument gives way to irrational and illogical speech and to its ultimate conclusion, silence.

Absurdism is reflected in many pieces of work but in theater it aimed to how man's reaction to a world apparently without meaning  and man as a puppet controlled or menaced by invisible outside forces . eg. Samuel Beckett's 'Waiting for Godot'

• Broad comedy mixed with horrific or tragic images
• characters caught in hopeless situation forced to do repetive and meaningless actions
• dialogues full of cliches, wordplay and nonsense
• plots that are cyclical or absurdly expansive
• a parody of dismissal of realism and the concept of the 'well-made play'

Absurd drama, by its very nature, subverts logic. It deflates the normal and celebrates the unexpected. Being anti-rationalist, it exhibits how rational thought, just like language, defies meaning, while nonsense offers more liberty for an exploration of the infinite and indescribable. Hence, in such plays, not only actions, but also motives behind them are incomprehensible.

Likewise, in King Lear, several scenes can be termed absurd such as 

• Gloucester‘s blinding
• Gloucester's suicide
•  Cordelia‘s death
•  madness of Shakespeare‘s characters - real and feigned 
• Love test 
• The Fool
• Storm scene

Anne Paulucci ― "Realism holds a smooth mirror up to nature which distorts and exaggerates familiar things in order to shock us into a new evaluation of experience. The crazy mirror of the Absurd breaks up familiar pattern and forces us to accept a new dimension and a new type of communication" 

Myth of Sisyphus- Push a boulder up a hill and rolls back down as a punishment. It's an eternal punishment and constant struggle - metaphor for life

Random AO4 for Lear

Nature

• Appears 50 times- highly polysemic
• Mother Nature
• Human Nature- instinct/individual personality. Related to your identity- clothing/ sumptuary laws/stripping of clothing and restoration of clothing 
• Natural - bonds between parent and children
• Bastards- unnatural children
• Natural fools
• Crowns of flowers with weeds- duality. External human nature/ similar to a Fool's cap

Emblem of Map

• Map represents his kingdom- demarking his land and power
• Map making increased during this time due to increased global discovery
• Initially the land is fertile, plentiful but there's a destruction of the land/withering away= represents the loss of his power. The earth is 'empty and bleeding' (Jan Kott) 

Gods

• They are either there but are benign- In 'King Leir (source material), the Gods were obliging but in Lear they're notable for their absence
• Or not there at all
• Absurdism - left to struggle - sense of recklessness and constantly moving but to nowhere
• Compassion is shown in the servants 

Religion and Suffering

• For Lear his suffering to the absolute limit of suffering - irreligious as no salvation or no hope
• Humanism- Dollimore: 'experimental play' - Lear is late in WS's work 
• Play revolves around 0 therefore a tragedy of nothing
• 1530's break from Rome = Protestanism = cataclysmic and discord
• Erasmus- Praise of Folly which corresponds with KHVIII = Humanist thinker - man is at the centre
• Medieval belief system is shattered and redefines relationship between God and man
• L starts and ends the play as King= circular structure but nothing happens seen through the symbol of 0
• Hope which is seen in the source material of 'King Leir' is lost
• Reconciliation of 4.7= false sense of security and sets up a greater tragedy    

                                      Othello - tragedy of deception/race

                                      Hamlet- tragedy of revenge

                                      Macbeth- tragedy of ambition 

• People with power and how they handle this power eg. Richard III
• Most negative ending of any of the tragedies- bleak
• Normally 1 tragic hero dies - 1 person who can take over in order to represent the future. But Edgar's speech is so depressing that there's no feeling of hope

This is the disease which occurs when the hierarchy is destroyed. 

Job is like Lear but is denied any divine compensation- hints of a Christian redemption - Cordelia is showcase through Christian imagery but this hope is dashed. 

Orthodox Christian journey 

SIN - SUFFER - REPENT - REDEMPTION

Many critics argue that there is no redemption however it can be argued that there are slivers such as the new found humility of Lear that redeems him from his former arrogance. Or Cordelia's forgiveness. 

Revenge Tragedy

Features

• 'Revenge is a wild kind of justice; which the more man's nature runs to, the more ought law to weed it out' 
• Senecan/Blood tragedy 
• Motivated by revenge/codes of honour
• Violence/Blood
• Supernatural
• Set in different countries- Spain/Italy which are associated with corruption,sin and lust
• Corruption- political/social 
• Machiavelli/Malcontent
• Grotesque comedy- tragic events and gruesome
• Revenger dies and causes them to become morally corrupt
• Madness

Genre

• Aristotle/Seneca
• Aspects of revenge tragedy
• Morality play tradition
• Emerging trend of domestic tragedy eg. Othello
• Tragedy of the state = Hamlet and King Lear but The White Devil is one of sex and lust