Of Man's First Disobedience, and the Fruit of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal taste Brought Death into the World, and all our woe.'
So begins the greatest epic poem in the English language. In words remarkable for their richness of rhythm and imagery, Milton tells the story of man's creation, fall and redemption – 'to justify the ways of God to men.' Here, unabridged, and told with exceptional sensitivity and power by Anton Lesser, is the plight of Adam and Eve, the ambition and vengefulness of Satan and his cohorts.
Music: Jenkins, Marais/Saint-Colombe
John Milton
1608–1674
John Milton, after Shakespeare the greatest English poet, was born in Bread Street in Cheapside on 9 December 1608, the son of a prosperous scrivener, a Puritan and musical composer. At St Paul’s school he distinguished himself as a scholar and poet. In 1625 he entered Christ’s College Cambridge, where he seems to have been chastised by his tutor, and was certainly rusticated for a short time in 1626. After his return he went through the university course with credit, achieving his M.A. in 1632. Archbishop Laud’s rule deterred the young Puritan from taking orders; and at Horton in Buckinghamshire, to where his father had retired, he settled with the distinct purpose of making himself a poet by study and self-discipline. His poetical genius had already been attested by the noble Hymn on the Nativity and At a Solemn Music perhaps L’Allegro and Il Penseroso, as well as much admirable Latin verse; and at Horton he produced if not L’Allegro and Il Penseroso, at least Comus and Lycidas.
Comus was written at the instance of the musician Henry Lawes to celebrate Lord Bridgewater’s assumption of the wardenship of the Welsh Marches, and was performed at Ludlow in 1634. Lycidas was evoked by the loss at sea of his friend Edward King in 1637. These four works were, of themselves, sufficient to place him in the first rank of English poets. In 1638–39 he paid a fifteen month visit to Italy, where he was cordially received by the Italian literati. His return was saddened by tidings of the death of his friend Diodati, whom he celebrated in Damon, the finest and the last of his Latin poems. He settled in St Bride’s churchyard, afterwards, in Aldersgate Street, and devoted himself to the education of his siste’s children, the two young Phillipses.
Paradise Lost as a mystery or miracle play gradually dawned upon his mind; but the Civil War long silenced Milton’s mind except for an occasional sonnet. The tracts which he now poured forth (three in 1641 and two in 1642, all on church government) are as truly lyrical inspirations as any of his poems.
In June 1642 he married Mary Powell, daughter of an Oxfordshire squire, a debtor of his father’s. After a trial of matrimony she went back to her friends, under promise to return at Michaelmas, but stayed away four years. Milton’s Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce was published in 1643, and enlarged in 1643–44. He replied to his opponents, mainly the Presbyterians, in three supplementary pamphlets, and a threat of prosecution by a parliamentary committee occasioned in November 1644 his most famous prose–work, Areopagitica, a Speech for the Liberty if Unlicensed Printing.
In 1645 he was reported to be taking serious steps to carry out his views on divorce by paying his addresses to ‘a very handsome and witty gentlewoman’, when the absent wife thought it time to return; and by September his household was re-established in the Barbican. His wife’s parents and eight brothers and sisters took up their abode with Milton for a year. She bore him three daughters, and died in 1652. He lost his father in 1647. Meanwhile, other pupils, mostly sons of friends, had been added to his nephews, and to the world Milton seemed to be a schoolmaster; but his defence of the execution of Charles I. (January 1649), The Tenure of Kings, was followed by his appointment as ‘Secretary of Foreign Tongues’, whose duty it was to draft diplomatic correspondence with foreign powers, then carried on in Latin…
