Architecture

The post-Civil War years ushered in an era of unprecedented and widespread theatre building in the country. By 1880, according to the most often quoted estimate by the critic William Winter, there were approximately five thousand theatres in thirty-five hundred cities and towns across America. Disparate forces – evolutionary and revolutionary, internal and external – abetted the proliferation of theatres and were responsible for an extended period of growth that lasted more than fifty years. In the immediate postwar years, the now united country was on the verge of enormous change. The steady flow of population pushing west predicted the time when the geography of the country would extend from the east to the West Coast. When the Gold Rush of 1849 propelled the sleepy California territory into a state the following year, it was even more imperative that the country be united. Fortunately, the means to accomplish this event were at hand or in the process of being developed.

When Congress passed the Pacific Railroad Act and the Homestead Act in tandem in 1862, the spectacular growth of the country was assured. Thousands of miles of railroad track were being added each year and would meet in 1869 in a remote area in Utah to unite the country from coast to coast. The population followed the railroad and “cities sprang up where nature once reigned.” History repeated itself again and again in the westward push as settlement became town and town became city along the route of the railroad.

Orientation

The years between the conclusion of the Civil War and the end of the twenties represented a golden age of popular entertainment in America. In particular, the increased leisure time, improved transportation, and rapidly developing cities of the period helped spur the growth of a kind of performance that largely faded away later in the twentieth century, for the most part replaced by mass media. Live popular entertainment – amusements aimed at a broad, relatively unsophisticated audience – came to include a dizzying array of types, from the circus to vaudeville, the diorama to the amusement park. Most were European and already centuries old, but they were given a characteristic twist by American showmen.

Popular entertainment is difficult to separate neatly into categories or, in many cases, even into discrete periods or clearly separate types. Part of the reason for confusion is that there were so many relatively anonymous entertainers, who borrowed acts or parts of them without attribution. An example of this – often lateral – movement may be found in the words of a twentieth-century performer, Mae Noell, who came from a popular entertainment family. Her parents, she has written, performed in at least a dozen different kinds of entertainment during their long careers in show business, specializing in towns “too small for real theatre, nickelodeons or Chatauqua.”

Introduction

In 1870, playbills did not credit a “director” or designate a work as being “staged by” someone. Yet, as we know, vast numbers of shows were mounted and, human nature being what it is, we cannot reasonably suppose that a group of artists and artisans, lacking a leader, would coalesce by itself into a satisfying performance and open on time. Even in 1870 someone had to cast, call the rehearsals, instruct the crews, interpret the play, and pace the production.

In 1945, playbills routinely named directors, whereas producers issued them with separate contracts. Reviewers knew, or believed they knew, what directors had contributed. Actors courted them, believing they could bestow stardom, or at least a job. Indeed, by 1945 some directors viewed themselves as seminal artists, using the labor of others as the raw material for fulfilling the grand vision of an auteur.

The evolution from anonymity to adulation, a slow process of reassembling variously assigned directorial tasks into a job description separable from other theatrical chores, is the subject of this chapter. The discussion will dwell on the participants in that evolution, sometimes examining their best-remembered work but more often their responses to economic, social, or technological changes that affected the production process. If plays of enduring value are not mentioned often, it is because, as George S. Kaufman put it tersely, “Good plays have a way of being well directed.” That is, they direct themselves. Conversely, a weak script needs very fine direction to make it work.

The body of work known as Milton's sonnets comprises twenty-five poems: twenty-three fourteen-line sonnets (five in Italian, eighteen in English); one fifteen-line canzone in Italian; and one English 'tailed' sonnet (the twentyline 'On the New Forcers of Conscience'). The first ten sonnets, including the five Italian ones plus the canzone, were published in Milton's Poems of 1645. These and the rest, save for those addressed to Fairfax, Cromwell, Vane, and the second one to Cyriack Skinner - apparently omitted for political reasons but included in the Trinity Manuscript - appeared in the Poems of 1673. Setting aside debates concerning the sonnets' dating and sequence, we shall focus here on some eleven of Milton's English sonnets, and on specific individuals or groups addressed or mentioned in them.

The public, topical, even heroic sonnet; the sonnet praising or counselling a friend, threatening or mocking an enemy; the sonnet marking a point or problem in the poet's own career - all these were recognized and accepted variations of the genre in sixteenth-century Italy, but were most unusual in mid-seventeenth-century England when Milton turned to them in conscious imitation of such models as the Italian poets Delia Casa and Tasso. For English readers, the sonnet was concerned with human love and sometimes, as in Donne and Herbert and one or twomemorable occasions in Spenser, with divine love.

Milton idealizes the reader, and to this idealization his many readers have often consented. In part this follows from the idealization of himself that so drove Milton's endeavours from an early age. His careers as teacher, pamphleteer, civil servant, and poet were all founded in his passion for learning - a college friend teased him about his 'inexcusable perseverance, bending over books and studies day and night', and he was later proud to recall 'that from my twelfth year scarcely ever did I leave my studies for my bed before the hour of midnight' (YP i: 337, 4: 612). Such learning he encourages his readers to share. Later literary and educational tradition made much of this legacy by giving Paradise Lost a central place in the canon, and finding in the epic a valuable store of cultural capital. But Milton exalts the reader in another still more compelling way: by setting his learning aside and, out of respect for individual reason, asking readers to experience wholly their being in the world in relation to the divine. Here his success is more difficult to chart, but finds expression in the rich diversity of responses to his works over the last four centuries.

Intellectual historiography as it has commonly been practised is devoted to the formidability of tradition. It seeks to identify enduring suppositions - world-pictures, cosmological principles, models of nature, mind, time, and God - and to view their elasticity over great expanses of cultural history. It does not shy away from apparent examples of radical change. Indeed, some of these examples are its stock subjects - the seeming break between Christianity and antiquity, the rise of scientific empiricism, the self-proclaimed specialness of the various romanticisms. But, armed with concepts such as the 'unit ideas' of Arthur O. Lovejoy and the 'reoccupied positions' of Hans Blumenberg, intellectual historians have generally preferred to craft stories about gradual renovation and substitution rather than rupture and novelty. It is telling in this respect that in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, a work of tremendous scope and originality, and probably the most distinguished contribution to intellectual history in recent years, Blumenberg should keep returning to the oddly provincial point that the idea of progress does not derive from a secularization of Christian history: for a historian of ideas, the challenge of modernity is to get straight on its tradition. It can sometimes seem, in the light of this discipline, as if the course of Western thought were the internal conversation among fifty or so intellectuals dedicated to solving each other's problems while doomed to pass on new versions of them. This vision of thinking as the grandest of human games, self-generated and self-regulating, is responsible for a marked decline today in the authority of classical intellectual history. At the extreme of this suspicion, in the popular new Marxisms, the entire project of intellectual history, the boundary that constitutes its subject matter, appears wishful. Intellect is too flimsy and extravagant, too uneconomical, to have so grim and massive a thing as a history. Ideas are the forms ideology takes when forgetful of its purpose, and intellectual history dissolves into the forces at work in history at large.

When the Archangel Michael in Paradise Lost foresees the church attacked from without by persecution and from within by 'specious forms' so that 'truth shall retire / Bestuck with slanderous darts' (12.534-6), he summons along with the figure of Truth a picture of St Sebastian stuck full of arrows: who, however, did not die of those wounds but had to be executed repeatedly. Milton's epic is similarly susceptible to recurrent volleys; and his figure of Woman brought to life in Eve has been a primary target, with similar resurgent vitality.

Thirty years ago, a largely 'masculinist' critical consensus thought that Milton conformed to a traditional reading of the biblical Eve as inherently trivial, vain, and inclined to fall, thus denying Milton's assertion of eternal providence. Since then much work has been done - by Joan Bennett, Francis Blessington, Barbara Lewalski, Mary Ann Radzinowicz, Stella Revard, James Turner, Irene Samuel, Kathleen Swaim, Joan Webber, and Joseph Wittreich, to name a few - showing how Milton shatters this stereotype. More recently in the vanguard of attack have been feminists offended by Milton's partial acceptance of Pauline tradition concerning the subordination of wives and the misogynous diatribes he allows some of his dramatis personae. 'Resistant' readers writing from the point of view of gender - for example, Jackie DiSalvo, Sandra Gilbert, Christine Froula, Marcia Landy, Mary Nyquist, Patricia Parker, and Maureen Quilligan (178), some of whom admire Milton in other ways - challenge what Nyquist calls 'Western bourgeois or liberal feminism'; Nyquist interrogates the 'historically determined and class-inflected discourse of “equal rights” ' (99), shows that Milton's contemporaries of both sexes offered less genderspecific interpretations of Genesis, and finds that Milton's contractual interpretation of God's provision of meet help, contrasted with Rachel Speght's view of Adam as a 'passive recipient' of divine grace, serves 'an individualism paradigmatically masculine' (114-15).

On 10 August 1637 a pious young Cambridge graduate called Edward King was drowned in the Irish Sea when the ship carrying him to Ireland to visit his family struck a rock off the Welsh coast and sank. The author of some rather undistinguished Latin verses, King had intended to take Holy Orders and pursue a career in the church, but in 1637 he was still a fellow at Milton's old college, Christ's, which he had entered when Milton was in his second year. He was evidently a well respected and popular figure in the University community, so much so that when the news of his death reached Cambridge a group of his friends and colleagues decided to organize a volume of memorial verses in his honour. Although Milton does not appear to have been a particularly close friend of King's, he was nevertheless invited to contribute to the collection. Published in 1638 under the title Justa Edouardo King naufrago, the volume contained thirty-six poems in all, twenty-three in Greek or Latin followed by thirteen in English. Milton's contribution, the last in the collection, was Lycidas.

Matters of occasion

On first encountering Milton's Ludlow Masque - often referred to as 'Comus' - one might begin by considering what kind of text it is. A masque is a special kind of commissioned work, spectacular and 'multi-media' in presentation, and inevitably collaborative. It cannot be treated simply as its writer's 'poem' or a play. This kind of entertainment developed at the Jacobean and Caroline courts up to the time of the English Civil War. Ben Jonson (as poet until the early 1630s) and Inigo Jones (as designer) were the genre's most innovative exponents, though there were others. It was for masques that proscenium arch stages and movable scenery were first introduced in England. Masques were usually performed during the winter festive season after Christmas, or occasionally at other times, and they often represented the spectacular highpoint, involving huge expense. They featured younger courtiers as the 'masquers', who personated symbolic figures - often chaste goddesses, if it was a ladies' masque, or martial heroes, if it was a lords' masque - and whose function, apart from representing virtue, was to dance. They did not, at least until the arrival of Queen Henrietta Maria, usually speak, or sing: that was left to the servants.

The Renaissance is a period of heightened genre consciousness in literary theory and poetic practice, and Milton is arguably the most genreconscious of English poets. His great epic, Paradise Lost, is preeminently a poem about knowing and choosing - for the Miltonic Bard, for the characters, for the reader. One ground for such choices is genre, Milton's own choice and use of a panoply of literary forms, with their accumulated freight of cultural significances shared between author and audience.

Critics have long recognized and continue to discover in Milton's poem an Edenic profusion of thematic and structural elements from a great many literary genres and modes, as well as a myriad of specific allusions to major literary texts and exemplary works. Almost everyone agrees that Paradise Lost is an epic whose closest structural affinities are to Virgil's Aeneid, and that it undertakes in some fashion to redefine classical heroism in Christian terms (Bowra; Di Cesare; Hunter; Steadman 1967). We now recognize as well how many major elements derive from other epics and epic-like poems. From Homer's Iliad: a tragic epic subject - here, the death and woe resulting from an act of disobedience; a hero (Satan) motivated like Achilles by a sense of injured merit; and the battle scenes in heaven. From the Odyssey: Satan's wiles and craft and Satan's Odysseus-like adventures on the perilous seas (of Chaos) and in new lands. From Hesiod's Theogony: many aspects of the war in heaven between the good and evil angels. And from Ovid's Metamorphoses: the pervasiveness of change and transformation - diabolic and divine - in the Miltonic universe (Blessington 1979; Mueller; Aryanpur; Steadman 1968, 194-208; Hughes 1965; Revard; Harding 1946; Lewalski 1985, 71-6; Martz)

In 1671, when Milton published Paradise Regained, he had another piece printed along with it in the same volume. The title-page read: 'PARADISE REGAIN'D, A POEM In iv Books. To which is added Samson Agonistes'. Although Milton is reported to have composed his brief epic during the four years that had passed since the publication of Paradise Lost in 1667, no one knows when he wrote his tragedy. In Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained we hear the voice of the poet, a strong presence, pursuing 'Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme' (PL 1.16), sharing with his readers his prayers for inspiration (PL 3.1-3) and his judgements of the poem's actions. In Samson Agonistes, however, we make no contact with that authoritative voice except in the preface, entitled 'Of that Sort of Dramatic Poem which Is Call'd Tragedy', an 'epistle' to the reader requesting that his dramatic poem (which he did not intend to have performed on stage) be read in the context of Aeschylus', Sophocles', and Euripides' works, recognizing the power of ancient Greek tragedy to inscribe central truths.

It has been suggested that Milton chose the genre of drama for Samson Agonistes in order to let a wide range of readers share in the rich paradoxes and dilemmas of his poetic vision of human experience without requiring of every reader a 'fit' understanding of his religious and intellectual beliefs (Hale, 193; cf. PL 7.31). Nevertheless, Milton's preface indicates that in the tragedy we will find ourselves in the same Christian humanist world of the epics - the world as viewed by the philosopher Cicero and 'the Apostle Paul himself - and that, in submitting ourselves to this tragedy, we will enter an experience graver, more moral, and to our greater spiritual growth than even that of Paradise Lost or Paradise Regained; for, however we are able to receive it, the tragedy will work directly on our innermost selves, addressing the roots of sin and suffering in us.

In Book 8 of Paradise Lost, Adam recalls his first experiences on waking into life:

It is surprising to hear the newly created Adam speak so 'readily'; we might have expected him to take more time in finding words with which to express himself. We might even say that Adam takes speech and language for granted, but he is right to do so - precisely because they are granted to him. Unlike his descendants, Adam has no need to acquire language laboriously. In a word, Adam's language is natural, not conventional.

The Reformation was an important part of England's national identity in the seventeenth century and an important part of Milton's identity. While England defined itself as a Protestant nation over against the largely Roman Catholic Continent, Milton defined himself over against Protestant opponents at home, turning his antipapal rhetoric first against prelates in the Church of England, whom he called 'more Antichristian than Antichrist himselfe' (YP i: 850), and later against the Scots Presbyters.

Milton did not consider Luther's break with Rome to be the important watershed in western history it is now regarded, and usually he did not speak of the Reformation. In his prose tracts, however, he repeatedly writes of 'reformation', by which he means the work of returning the English Church - and the English nation - to the purity and simplicity of the Gospel. Milton views the work of reformation as a recurring task. In The Reason of Church-Government, for example, he refers to the plight of Old Testament prophets 'that liv'd in the times of reformation', to a 'more perfect reformation under Christ', and to the reforming message of the Lollards and Hussites who had anticipated Luther (YP 1: 799, 757). England's role in the modern reformation is for Milton a point of particular pride, and he firmly believes that England has been chosen to complete the Reformation, in which he feels called to participate.

On 2 January 1646, at the age of thirty-eight, John Milton printed his first collection of verse: Poems of Mr John Milton, both English and Latin, Compos'd at Several Times. Printed by his true Copies. Poems 1645, as it is usually known, is a carefully structured volume of extraordinarily rangy and rich poems. It begins with a section of English verse, which modulates through the opening On the Morning of Christ's Nativity - how better to begin? - to the sombre elegiac mode of Lycidas. En route from Christian beginnings to mortal endings readers are treated to some rather wobbly undergraduate jokes in the poems On the Death of the University Carrier, some flighty musings in L'Allegro and Il Penseroso, and an odd youthful stub, The Passion, which breaks off before it actually musters enough energy to describe the crucifixion, its purported subject, with a prose note: 'This subject the author finding to be above the years he had when he wrote it, and nothing satisfied with what was begun, left it unfinished.' There is a separate mini-sequence of Sonnets, English and Italian. A central section contains A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle ('Comus'), which is followed by a separate collection of Latin poems introduced by its own separate title page.

The controversy about Milton's Satan provides an opportunity to inspect the relationship between a literary text and critical reaction to it. This is instructive because it shows how literature works (or has worked), and how it should not be expected to work.

A word, first, about the generation of Milton's Satan. There is very little in the Bible about Satan. In Christian Doctrine Milton collects all the available biblical evidence in a few sentences. It amounts to little more than that Satan is the author of all evil and has various titles (YP 6: 349-50). As Kastor has shown, it was not until about AD 200 that official Judaism began to absorb popular concepts of Satan. From then on appearances of Satan in literature, sub-literature, and theology multiplied. Scores of literary Satans evolved, and some of them - notably those created by Du Bartas, Andreini, Grotius, and Vondel - possibly influenced Milton. However, no convincing single source for Milton's Satan has been found.