“Higher Argument”: Paradise Lost 1665–1669fallen “On evil dayes... / In darkness, and with dangers compast round.”^11 For a
time at least Milton had ample reason to fear, not only that his song might be
drowned out by the “barbarous dissonance” of the Restoration court’s Bacchic
revelers, but also that those revelers might kill and dismember him as the Bacchantes
did the archetypal bard, Orpheus.
As he planned his heroic subject in the later 1650s Milton set himself in compe-
tition with the great classical and vernacular epic poets of the past – Homer, Virgil,
Dante, Ariosto, Tasso, DuBartas, Spenser. He had also to take account of efforts by
his English royalist contemporaries to claim and redefine the heroic mode for their
own time. William Davenant’s Gondibert, with a prefatory address to and laudatory
response by Hobbes, held forth that work as the ideal modern heroic poem, modeled
both on Tasso and on the continental heroic drama.^12 Imitating five-act tragedies,
Davenant projected a five-book epic divided into cantos, though he completed and
published only half the work, explaining that he was then in prison expecting ex-
ecution (for attempting a mission for Charles II). If, as report has it, Milton helped
accomplish his release,^13 the likelihood increases that Milton came to know
Davenant’s experiment in epic. Davenant devised a plot with wholly fictional Chris-
tian personages, located in a foreign country, Italy, where wonderful deeds and
situations might seem more credible. But he avoids one major source of epic won-
der, the supernatural, asserting that the classical supernatural is incredible, that rep-
resentations of the true God and his angels are profane or even blasphemous, and
that bardic claims of poetic inspiration are dangerous. Both he and Hobbes link
such claims with the “enthusiastic” Puritan sects. He also defends his use of four-
line stanzas in alternate rhyme as “more pleasant to the reader in a work of length.”^14
The plot explores love and ambition, with the hero, Duke Gondibert, torn be-
tween the duties of the active life – courts, warfare, stag hunts, uprisings, knightly
activities, and the responsibilities of an heir to the throne – and the attractions of
retirement: true love and the joys of learning in the House of Astragon. The work
has affinities with the royalist literature of pastoralism and retirement in the late
1640s and 1650s, by Herrick, Vaughan, Fanshawe, and Walton among many oth-
ers.^15 But the fact that Davenant did not complete his poem after his release suggests
that he could not imagine the ending: if Gondibert is at times a figure for the
royalists (or Charles II) it was not clear in 1651 whether they would continue in
retirement or might again rule.^16 Also, the absence of supernatural personages means
that the reader is given no reassurance of an ultimate purpose behind events. The
Davenant–Hobbes manifesto and the example of Gondibert set Milton a challenge
to produce a more worthy modern heroic poem on quite different principles. That
challenge was reinforced as Dryden’s heroic plays began to be produced and pub-
lished, defining as norms for the heroic genres royalist politics, the pentameter
couplet, and exotic subjects dealing with the conflict of love and honor. In 1667
Dryden observed that heroic plays are flourishing “from the countenance and ap-
probation they have received at Court.”^17