“The So-called Council of State” 1649–1652posed sanctity is mere “Stage-work” (530): like many tyrants he wears a “Saints
vizard,” and his staged prayers resemble and sometimes echo those of Shakespeare’s
Richard III (361–3). And his book, in its theatrical “garb” and “dress,” seems to be
a work of poetry, not politics:
The Simily wherwith he begins I was about to have found fault with, as in a garb
somwhat more Poeticall then for a Statist: but meeting with many straines of like dress
in other of his Essaies, and hearing him reported a more diligent reader of Poets, then
of Politicians, I begun to think that the whole Book might perhaps be intended a
peece of Poetrie. The words are good, the fiction smooth and cleanly; there wanted
onely Rime, and that, they say is bestow’d upon it lately. (406)^172This sentiment seems strange coming from a poet, but it is glossed by Milton’s
earlier reference to the “easy literature of custom” (339). That category would
include facile court genres that are the product of feigning and mere elegance, not
the bardic poetry Milton aspired to, which is the the product of “industrie and
judicious paines” and inspiration. Milton underscores the difference by subjecting
the king’s metaphors to a literary critic’s analysis, to uncover what that bad poet
unwittingly reveals of himself through them. Most telling is the absurd, indeed
incestuous, sexual metaphor the king develops in claiming that his reason is as
necessary to the “begetting, or bringing forth” of any act of parliament as the sun’s
influence is to any production in nature:
So that the Parlament, it seems, is but a Female, and without his procreative reason,
the Laws which they can produce are but windeggs.... [C]ertainly it was a Parlament
that first created Kings.... He ought then to have so thought of a Parlament, if he
count it not Male, as of his Mother, which, to civil being, created both him, and the
Royalty he wore. And if it hath bin anciently interpreted the presaging signe of a
future Tyrant, but to dream of copulation with his Mother, what can it be less then
actual Tyranny to affirme waking, that the Parlament, which is his Mother, can nei-
ther conceive nor bring forth any autoritative Act without his Masculine coition. Nay
that his reason is as Celestial and lifegiving to the Parlament, as the Suns influence is to
the Earth: What other notions but these, or such like, could swell up Caligula to think
himself a God. (467)Milton would have readers see the king’s “idle” book and his own strenuous trea-
tise as exemplars of two kinds of poetry and two kinds of authors. The king’s book,
patched up of facile and unacknowledged borrowings, pretense, and foolish meta-
phors, promotes indolent, credulous reading: it is itself an idol and it promotes
idolatry. Milton’s, like worthy poetry, promotes diligent effort, rigorous judgment,
and difficult interpretation as the only means to gather up some shards of Areopagitica’s
dismembered truth.
In line with this, and most damaging of all, Milton convicts the supposedly saintly