History is full of epic conflicts between mighty opposites: the Greeks vs the Trojans, Ali vs Foreman, Batman v Superman.... Today, in the last of our World Book Day polls, we pit two literary giants against each other: William Shakespeare and John Milton (OP). Stepping up to the lists on their behalf are two heroic challengers - former SPS Head of English, Mr Venning, and current SPS Head of English, Mr Hager. Let battle commence ...
John Milton
Fide et Literis
No Pauline could possibly be more Pauline than John Milton.
Fide: his conviction of faith was intense, and highly personal. He concealed his heretical beliefs sufficiently to enable him to publish widely and be promoted to high office.
Literis: he acquired a comprehensive knowledge of languages and literature remarkable for his age, even for someone with the benefit of the best possible education at St Paul’s and Cambridge. He felt so ignorant after his graduation from the latter that he devoted a large portion of his life to private study, including a Grand Tour which took him through Europe, including Catholic Italy where he met Galileo and attended papal mass at St Peter’s, and which stopped short of carrying on to Ottoman-controlled Greece only when political developments at home required his return.
Milton had from an early stage determined to write an epic poem in English, and his hoovering up of knowledge was dedicated to that end. Early plans to write on King Arthur were overtaken by the autocratic rule of King Charles. He was promoted to the post of Secretary for Foreign Tongues (Foreign Secretary) in Cromwell’s Commonwealth government because his learning and facility of expression made him the supreme choice for that role if regicides were to convince Europe of their civilised motivation. His sight and his political aspirations failed simultaneously and he devoted his bitter period of disgrace and humiliation under the Restoration to dictating (like Homer), in immaculate blank verse the story of Man’s fall, in twelve books (like Vergil): Paradise Lost. The unsurpassed achievement is an intensely personal document: we are all offered the chance of paradise, and all fail; human solidarity and love, and conviction of the ultimate salvation possible, have to lead us through the ensuing wilderness.
Milton was reluctant to publish before his educational programme was completed, but Lycidas shows how his early sophistication, lyrical control and ability to reinterpret the classical tradition for contemporary significance were unparalleled. His life’s work was to employ the best of the past to the service of the present. The variety of his accomplishment is astonishing, much of it hidden to modern readers by the number and complexity of the languages in which he wrote. His control of the sonnet and other short forms; his masterly dramatic adaptations of the Royalist masque, Comus, and the Aristotelian tragic form, Samson Agonistes; prose polemics in favour of a free press and easy divorce: these are a measure of his wide accomplishment.
He can be difficult: not just for the multi-layered references in his diction and images, but also for the savagery of his conviction that enemies should be exterminated (On The Late Massacre in Piedmont), by suicide terrorism if necessary (Samson Agonistes). But when did Paulines ever recoil from difficulty?
It is inconceivable that Paulines would not vote for Milton; as inconceivable as Londoners voting for Brexit.
Mr Venning
William Shakespeare
'If ever there was a poet who was not confined by tunnel vision it is Shakespeare', argues AD Nuttall. His is a 'vertiginous world' which explodes the notion of immediate cause and effect, and allows its readers to explore the complexity, ambiguity and multiplicity of human experience. We know what Milton thought about things—his rejection of the doctrine of the Trinity or his moral support of the killing of Charles I—but we have no idea what Shakespeare thought—decisively—about any major question. He is elusive. He is, for John Keats, the perfect exponent of the essential quality in literature or men of genius: negative capability; he is the ‘chameleon poet’, whose effacing of the self allowed him to explore all aspects of the human condition: ‘light and shade’, ‘everything and nothing’. Jonathan Bate argues that ‘the form of Shakespeare is plural’. He understood that identity is itself ‘play’, that there is no essential self. He can be all things to all men in a way that Milton never could, and never will.
Seven years after Shakespeare’s death, his works were collated and published in a lavish folio volume; at the time, no English playwright had even been posthumously honoured in such a grand manner. His reputation grew entirely out of the quality of his work; almost nothing was known of his life for nearly two centuries, yet his genius was perceived to be so great that James Boswell (biographer of Samuel Johnson) declared that he would 'now die in peace' having touched in 1794 what he believed to be a manuscript written in Shakespeare’s own hand. David Garrick, the famous actor, built an actual temple to him in the grounds of his house and countless others have worshipped at the metaphorical shrine of the ‘Bard of Avon’. His renown is such that he has become known simply as ‘the bard’ in popular consciousness: he is the writer, not just a great writer.
To try to pick out his best work is foolish. Offering up a King Lear, someone will counter with a Hamlet. His sonnets are masterful, his plays so vast in their scope that he has demonstrated a command of history, comedy, tragedy and everything in between. Polonius’ famous inability to characterise a play in Hamlet is often taken as indicative of the universality of Shakespeare’s genius. Are his major works plays, or are they ‘poem unlimited’?
Milton’s Paradise Lost is one of the great achievements in literature, but Shakespeare’s plays have been called 'the outward limit of human achievement: aesthetically, cognitively, in certain ways morally, even spiritually'. Even allowing for the hyperbole of Harold Bloom, this is pretty impressive. Milton’s greatness is literary, but Shakespeare’s is that and something more. He has entered into mythology; conspiracy theories have arisen to prove that he could not have existed, that his genius is too great for a man of his humble origins. And he is popular. His plays have been reimagined for young and old for centuries and his words have entered into our vernacular. We are steeped in Shakespeare, and he continues to inform the way we look at the world.
Shakespeare did not attend St Paul’s, and he still wrote the greatest works of literature in existence. Just think what he would have done if he’d had the start in life that Milton had.
Mr Hager
Many thanks to Mr Venning and Mr Hager - and to everyone who's participated in this epic week of polls, whether by their generous contributions to the debate or simply by voting: we hope it's been fun. Now, to vote for Shakespeare or to vote for Milton - that is the question. You decide ...
Update: and you did - a conclusive (but mathematically weird) result of 76% for Shakespeare and 27% for Milton. Caviare to the general, of course ...
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