Another Spenserian, William Browne, was a protégé of the Pembrokes. Browne’s Inner Temple Masque of 1614 has its affinities with Comus – the Circe myth, moly, freedom and the Fall. Milton’s ‘Epitaph on the Marchioness of Winchester’ appears to echo Browne’s ‘Epitaph on the Countess Dowager of Pembroke’.3 Browne was very consciously in the Protestant patriotic tradition. He praised Ralegh, Essex and Drake, and was very anti-Spanish. Browne never had a good word for James I, still less for his favourites and courtiers; but he lavished praise on both Elizabeth and Prince Henry. The latter’s death in 1612 cut England off from the Continent.4 Browne’s ‘freeborn Muse’ scorned patronage. One of his characters ‘had as quickly all things past forgotten / As men do monarchs that in earth lie rotten’.5 Browne praised Spenser and Sidney, Drayton, John Davies and Wither; he was a friend and political ally of Selden and Sir Benjamin Rudyerd.6 Browne was a fierce critic of ‘the clergy’s crimes’.7
Another poet who saw himself in the Spenserian succession was George Wither, friend of William Browne and John Selden, protégé of the third Earl of Pembroke and Elizabeth of Bohemia. He has many striking affinities with Milton. He criticizes dumb dogs and the scholastic curriculum of the universities, the effete luxury of the court and its unpatriotic foreign policy.1 Wither believed in liberty of private judgment on individualistic grounds, though not for papists. We shall encounter Wither later as one who shared some of Milton’s positions.2 They part company only in their poetry, though even here it may be that Wither’s early poems are under-rated.
More than half of Milton’s lesser poems are addressed to individuals – relations, friends, girl-friends – and they reveal ‘a writer with a distinctly social tone’.3 The sonnets to young Lawrence and one of those to Cyriack Skinner are invitations to a convivial evening. Much of Milton’s Cambridge poetry had been social too, written for a group. The Latin elegies, the poems about Guy Fawkes Day, and perhaps the English Epitaph on the Marchioness of Winchester, were also written with a university public primarily in mind. It may be that On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity, L’Allegro and II Penseroso and others were circulating in manuscript before Milton went down from the university. Otherwise it is hard to understand how he came to be asked to contribute a poem to the second folio of Shakespeare, edited by Ben Jonson. In 1632 Milton’s poem was anonymous: when it was reprinted in 1640 it was signed I.M. His light verses, like those of his nephew John Phillips, appeared in anthologies with titles like A Banquet of Jests, Wits Recreations and Wit Restor’d.4 That the only time Wordsworth got drunk should have been in Milton’s room at Christ’s may not have been as totally unfitting as the later poet thought.
It is right to emphasize the jovial and sociable side of Milton because it has been overlooked, at least in the popular legend. But he was more than a mere cheerful extrovert. Nobody any longer equates him with his own Il Penseroso, but there are hints in The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce that Milton thought of himself as ‘inclined to melancholy’, ‘of a pensive nature and course of life.’5 His aspirations were already polemical and outward-looking as well as literary and personal. In 1633 he told a friend that ‘to defend and be useful to his friends, or to offend his enemies’ was ‘that which all mortals most aspire to’.6
In many ways Milton developed slowly, but by the time he returned to England in 1639 to face the Revolution, he had been jolted out of the traditional orthodoxies of his class and generation. He had abandoned a clerical career: he had strong if unspecific liberal Puritan predilections; he believed that he might become a major poet in the English language. He already had a mind, I suspect, more open than most of his peers to change, to novelty, to improvement, to heresy. At all events, that is the way he went.
I suggested that we should read Comus and Lycidas in the light of the growing alienation from Charles I’s court of large numbers of English intellectuals (though not only intellectuals). It is in this light too that we should regard Milton’s elevated conception of the poet’s role in society. He, no less than the preacher, could ‘imbreed and cherish in a great people the seeds of virtue and public civility’. So Milton believed that, though church-outed, he still had a message for the people of England.
‘Ease and leisure were given thee’, he told himself, ‘for thy retired thoughts out of the sweat of other men.’ It was therefore his duty to society, to the church of God, especially in this time of national crisis, to use his talent and ‘the honest liberty of free speech’ to contribute what he could to the betterment of society, by way of repayment for what he had received. He was prepared to undertake ‘the meanest under-service if God by his secretary Conscience enjoin it’.1 It was one approach to an advocacy of lay preaching, different from that of the ‘mechanic preachers’ with whom Milton’s enemies were soon to associate him.
Milton’s idea of poetry was firmly opposed to that of Charles I and his courtiers, just as his idea of chastity was poles apart from Henrietta Maria’s ‘Platonic love’. The epic poet, Milton had told Diodati in Elegy VI, must be as pure as the priest who rises to face the angry gods – an anger which our sins have provoked. Listen by contrast, to Charles I rebuking Sir John Denham for writing poetry: ‘When men are young and have little else to do, they might vent the overflowings of their fancy that way; but when they were thought fit for more serious employments, if they still persisted in that course, it would look as if they minded not the way to any better.’2 The difference between that point of view and Milton’s could hardly be more complete, though Charles’s is the attitude more usually associated with the vulgar idea of Puritanism. Milton’s attitude is not of course unique. George Wither, that good Spenserian, saw himself as no less a dedicated poet than Milton.1 Ben Jonson spoke of ‘the impossibility of any man’s being a good poet without first being a good man’, words that Milton was to echo in 1642.2
What we have then is a reaction of disgust from the flippancies, obscenities and trivial wit of the court and Inns of Court poets, the Randolphs, Carews, Sucklings, combined nevertheless with a conviction of the power of true poetry. A healthy patriotism depends on having a healthy country which one can love, Milton told an Italian friend in September 1638.3 As poet and scholar no less than as Puritan, Milton felt a deep need for liberation from Laudianism. Idolatry is a short summary of what he detested: regarding places as holier than people; interfering with the strongly-held convictions of Christians about how they should and should not worship God; use of financial and corporal punishments in spiritual matters; all the sordidness of church courts progging and pandering for fees. No free and splendid wit could stand it. Milton’s brief period of support for Presbyterianism sprang perhaps from the idea that because Presbyterians opposed Laud they also shared Milton’s hatred for ecclesiastical interference with freedom of expression, whether religious or literary. He even urged Parliament to open a state theatre for public ‘recreation and instruction’.4
The point at which religion and culture met was the censorship. It is difficult for us to grasp to-day how severe this censorship was in the early seventeenth century, and it is even more difficult to establish its consequences for literature. But something can be conveyed. Glynne Wick-ham suggested that ‘the decadence in Jacobean and Caroline dramatic writing’ was ‘due in far greater measure to the censorship … than to any particular failing in the writers themselves’.5 Among those who suffered from censorship were Chapman, John Davies of Hereford, Donne, Drayton, John Fletcher, Fulke Greville, Ben Jonson, Massinger, Middleton, Wither; Francis Bacon, Robert Burton, Camden, Sir Edward Coke, Nicholas Ferrar, Joseph Hall, Thomas Hariot, Sir Walter Ralegh, John Selden, Archbishop Ussher, Peter Heylyn. Laud was said to have refused licences to print Luther’s Table Talk, Bishop Jewell’s Works, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, Bishop Bayley’s Practice of Piety. He blue-pencilled even writers like William Chillingworth