“Cambridge... for Seven Years” 1625–1632upon college personages and situations. Milton registers surprise and some ironic
pleasure in his role and in the “new-found friendliness” of his fellows, but there is
irony in his inordinate praise of them as “men eminent for their learning, the very
flower as it were of the University” (CPW I, 267–8). Also, despite his defense of
such recreation as essential “relaxation or breathing space” (I, 271) amid the rigors
of study, he shows some ambivalence about this playacting, as he distinguishes
sharply between his present role and his true nature: “I have put off and for the
moment laid aside my usual habit, and if anything I may say is loose or licentious,
put it down to the suggestion, not of my real mind and character, but of the needs
of the moment and the genius of the place” (I, 277).
His oration for the festival, Prolusion VI, “Sportive Exercises on Occasion are not
inconsistent with philosophical Studies,” is an inventive parody and satire of univer-
sity scholastic exercises.^53 It is in two parts. First a mock oration argues the good uses
of play against nay-saying, “crabbed and surly” masters; it mixes jocularity and irony,
marshaling a phalanx of witty ancients – Homer, Socrates, Cicero, Pericles, Erasmus’s
Praise of Folly, and even Jove. Then the Prolusion proper deflates that argument with
a pastiche of undergraduate humor: vulgar jokes about decaying teeth, burping,
farting, foul-smelling breath; jibes at particular students and college officials by name,
punning on elements of the festival banquet (Sparkes, Bird, Goose, Furnise); and
jests about the collegians’ frustrated sexual urges to play the “father” in town. Issues
of identity fraught with some anxiety surface in Milton’s witty jokes about the irony
of his change of title from “Lady” to “Father,” a title assuming sexual experience; it
is not hard to imagine the taunts that fastened the nickname “The Lady of Christ’s”
on a slender, refined, defiantly chaste, highly intellectual and artistically inclined
adolescent. But he responds here with a bold, passionate, class-inflected but remark-
ably advanced gender critique. Rejecting what he takes to be his fellow students’
false criteria of masculinity emanating from their low, and lower-class, experience
(rough physical labor, brothel-going, denigration of the arts), he constructs himself
by contrast as one whose culture and taste in no way undermine his masculinity:
But, I ask, how does it happen that I have so quickly become a Father?... Some of
late called me “the Lady.” But why do I seem to them too little of a man?... It is, I
suppose, because I have never brought myself to toss off great bumpers like a prize-
fighter, or because my hand has never grown horny with driving a plough, or because
I was never a farm hand at seven or laid myself down full length in the midday sun; or
last perhaps because I never showed my virility in the way these brothellers do. But I
wish they could leave playing the ass as readily as I the woman... Hortensius also, the
most eminent orator after Cicero, was called by Torquatus Dionysia the lyre-player.
His reply was, “I would rather be Dionysia indeed than a man without taste, culture,
or urbanity, like you, Torquatus.” (CPW I, 283–4)This defensive but trenchant analysis probably reveals more about Milton than do
speculations about his possible disabling repressions, unresolved Oedipal complex,