Milton and the Early Modern Culture of Devotion: Bodies at Prayer 113871027X, 9781138710276

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations and Standard Editions
Introduction: “Pathetical Prayers”
1 Dressing the Devotional Body
“A Linnen Sock over It”: Material Bodies in Church
Inventorying Dress
“The Ghost of a Linen Decency”
Shifting Bodies in Milton’s Mask
2 “Stale and Empty Words”: Consuming Prayers in Eikonoklastes
Subjects and Audiences in Liturgical Prayer
Prayer in the King’s Closet
“Wholesome Words” and Manna
Feeling and Eating Prayers
3 Hymns, Sighs, and the Materiality of Prayer in Paradise Lost
Prayer in Hymns
Singing Prayers
Prayer in Sighs
Sighs, Groans, and Agency
4 “As One Who Pray’d”: The Iconoclastic Prayer of Samson Agonistes
Samson’s Posture
Samson’s Rhetoric
Samson’s Violent Prayer
Epilogue
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Milton and the Early Modern Culture of Devotion

Milton and the Early Modern Culture of Devotion: Bodies at Prayer analyses the representation of public and private prayer in John Milton’s poetry and prose, paying particular attention to the ways seventeenth-­ century prayer is imagined as embodied in sounds, gestures, postures, and emotional responses. Naya Tsentourou demonstrates Milton’s profound engagement with prayer, and how this is driven by a consistent and ardent effort to experience one’s address to God as inclusive of body and spirit and as loaded with affective potential. The book aims to become the first interdisciplinary study to show how Milton participates in and challenges early modern debates about authentic and insincere worship in public, set and spontaneous prayers in private, and gesture and voice in devotion. Naya Tsentourou is Lecturer in Early Modern Literature at the University of Exeter, Penryn. She has research interests in Milton and religious lyric, as well as Shakespeare and the history of emotions. She has co-edited the collection Forms of Hypocrisy in Early Modern England (forthcoming with Routledge) with Lucia Nigri.

Routledge Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Literature For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com.

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Milton and the Early Modern Culture of Devotion Bodies at Prayer

Naya Tsentourou

First published 2018 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2018 Taylor & Francis The right of Naya Tsentourou to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Tsentourou, Naya, author. Title: Milton and the early modern culture of devotion: bodies at prayer / Naya Tsentourou. Description: New York: Taylor & Francis Group, 2017. | Series: Routledge interdisciplinary perspectives on literature; 83 Identifiers: LCCN 2017018039 Subjects: LCSH: Milton, John, 1608–1674—Religion. | Prayer in literature. Classification: LCC PR3592.R4 T74 2017 | DDC 821/.4—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017018039 ISBN: 978-1-138-71027-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-18620-7 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

Contents

Acknowledgments List of Abbreviations and Standard Editions Introduction: “Pathetical Prayers” 1 Dressing the Devotional Body “A Linnen Sock over It”: Material Bodies in Church 24 Inventorying Dress 30 “The Ghost of a Linen Decency” 35 Shifting Bodies in Milton’s Mask 40 2 “Stale and Empty Words”: Consuming Prayers in Eikonoklastes Subjects and Audiences in Liturgical Prayer 56 Prayer in the King’s Closet 59 “Wholesome Words” and Manna 65 Feeling and Eating Prayers  72 3 Hymns, Sighs, and the Materiality of Prayer in Paradise Lost Prayer in Hymns 87 Singing Prayers 92 Prayer in Sighs 96 Sighs, Groans, and Agency 102

vii ix 1 23

55

86

vi Contents 4 “As One Who Pray’d”: The Iconoclastic Prayer of Samson Agonistes Samson’s Posture 119 Samson’s Rhetoric 122 Samson’s Violent Prayer 130 Epilogue Bibliography Index

115

143 151 171

Acknowledgments

I would not have been able to complete this book without bursaries and grants from the School of Arts, Languages, and Cultures at the University of Manchester; the Funds for Women Graduates; and the Schilizzi Foundation. I am grateful to these funding bodies for their financial support. My biggest thanks are to Jerome de Groot, for sharing his knowledge and time, for his generous support, but above all for always asking the right questions. I am also grateful to have benefitted from Noelle Gallagher’s input and attention to detail, as well as from Jacqueline Pearson and Sharon Achinstein’s invaluable comments and advice. Many friends and colleagues were always willing to listen, discuss, read, enquire, and encourage: James Smith, Liam Haydon, Joel Swann, Mareile Pfannebecker, Jude Riley, Eoin Price, Michael Durrant, and Lucia Nigri all made sure, each in their own special way, that I stayed on track. I owe Lucia special thanks for her energy, positivity, and friendship throughout these years. In the time it took for this book to be completed, I was fortunate enough to have had the moral support of inspiring colleagues not only at Manchester, but also at Lancaster University, and the University of Exeter at Penryn as well, and in particular Hilary Hinds, Liz Oakley-Brown, Alison Findlay, Chloe Preedy, James Kelly, Rob Magnuson Smith, Christopher Stokes, and Marion Gibson. I am also very lucky to have many friends that always cared about me, if not about the book. I cannot name them all here, but they know who they are, whether in Manchester, Liverpool, Bath, Falmouth, Santiago, Athens, or Patras. I have to name Sissy for being there for me at a crucial stage and Mary for our long calls and chats. I also owe big thanks to the Riley family for their warmth and generosity. I also wish to thank Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 for permission to reproduce in Chapter 2 content from my article ‘“Savoury Words”: Milton and the Consumption of Manna’ (Volume 56, Issue 1, 2016). Some of the ideas explored in Chapter 3 first appeared in my article “Sighs and Groans: Attending to the Passions in Early Modern Prayer,” Literature Compass (Volume 12, Issue 6, 2015), while part of Chapter 1 will appear in the edited collection, Forms of Hypocrisy in Early ­Modern England (Routledge, forthcoming), as the chapter “‘Come Buy

viii Acknowledgments Lawn Sleeves’: Linen and Material Hypocrisy in Milton’s Antiprelatical Tracts”. I am grateful to the collection’s reviewers and to the journals’ editors and reviewers for their perceptive feedback and accurate advice. I am particularly grateful to the intellectual rigour and generosity of the reviewers of this book, whose recommendations were instrumental in shaping the final product. I truly could not thank them enough, and any shortcomings are certainly mine. The editors at Routledge, Jennifer Abbott, Erin Little, and Elizabeth Levine, have been consistently positive, encouraging, and patient; I am grateful to them for their professionalism and advice throughout the process. This book is for my family. I might be far but they are always here with me at every stage and on every page.

List of Abbreviations and Standard Editions

I have retained the original punctuation and spelling of the sources I cite. Bible quotations and references are all to The Bible: Authorized King James Version with Apocrypha, ed. by Robert Carroll and Stephen Prickett (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). For Milton’s prose, I use the Complete Prose Works of John Milton, general ed. Don M. Wolfe, 8 vols. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1953–82). Paradise Lost quotations are taken from John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. by Alastair Fowler, 2nd ed. (Harlow: Longman, 2007). All references to Milton’s poems are to John Milton, Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. by Merritt Y. Hughes (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 1957, reprint. 2003). The poems of Herbert, Crashaw, and Traherne are taken from George Herbert and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Poets, ed. by Mario A. Di Cesare (New York: Norton, 1978). Complete Prose Works of John Milton, general ed. Don M. Wolfe, 8 vols (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953–82). Donne, Major Works  John Donne, The Major Works, ed. by John Carey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). EB Eikon Basilike, with selections from Eikonoklastes, ed. by Jim Daems and Holly Faith Nelson (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Editions, 2006) Hughes, CP John Milton, Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. by Merritt Y. Hughes (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1957, reprint. 2003). Mask John Milton, A Mask Presented at Ludlow Castle, in Hughes, CP. ODNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography [www.odnb.com]. OED Oxford English Dictionary [www.oed.com]. PL John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. by Alastair Fowler, 2nd ed. (Harlow: Longman, 2007). John Milton, Paradise Regained, in Hughes, CP. PR SA John Milton, Samson Agonistes, in Hughes, CP.

CPW

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Introduction “Pathetical Prayers”

There is a large difference in the repetition of some pathetical ejaculation raised out of the sudden earnestness and vigour of the inflamed soul, (such as was that of Christ in the garden,) from the continual rehearsal of our daily orisons. (Milton, Animadversions) And he who hath but read in good books of devotion and no more, cannot be so either of ear or judgment unpractised to distinguish what is grave, pathetical, devout, and what not, but will presently perceive this liturgy all over in conception lean and dry, of affections empty and unmoving, of passion, or any height whereto the soul might soar upon the wings of zeal, destitute and barren; besides errors, tautologies, impertinences, as those thanks in the woman’s churching for her delivery from sunburning and moonblasting, as if she had been travailing not in her bed, but in the deserts of Arabia. (Milton, An Apology against a Pamphlet) Prayer was too important to be left to chance. (Kaufman, “Much in Prayer”)

The memorable vitriolic exchanges between John Milton and the Bishop of Exeter, Joseph Hall, published in rapid succession in the years 1641–2, debate at length, and with considerable gusto, arguments for and against the use of set prayers in liturgy and public worship. Milton’s uncompromising defence of spontaneous and autonomous forms of devotion is a recurrent characteristic of the style that animates his antiprelatical tracts, as seen in the epigraphs above. In these tracts, he invariably presents liturgy, particularly under William Laud’s rule as Archbishop of Canterbury, as a sterile and desolate devotional landscape, “lean and dry,” and set prayer as a product for consumption, idle and worthless. Although critics have noted that Milton in these pamphlets concentrates his efforts at satirizing the bishops rather than promoting an alternative church structure (his alleged Presbyterian tendencies during this period more a matter of allegiance than of shared faith), his appeal to the zeal,

2 Introduction affections, and the “vigour of the inflamed soul” suggests a passionate antidote to what he considers the cold and impassive system of the High Church.1 The extracts above, in the importance they place on prayer’s emotional intensity, capture what this book takes as its starting and focal point: Milton’s conviction in “pathetical” prayer as a practice that dispels the boundaries between internal and external devotion, and as founded on the interdependence between body and spirit. The book aims to examine prayer not only as a spiritual but as a physiological and emotional matter, and to interpret the role of the body in prayer as well as the role of the prayer in and on the body. The ensuing four chapters demonstrate how Milton imagines devotional models that escape dualist divisions between body and mind or body and soul, and how he goes to great lengths to link spirituality with emotional identity in his quest for an authentic relationship with God. The few works on Milton and prayer have failed to acknowledge the importance of what happens to the body when it finds itself in devotion and have focused overwhelmingly either on Eikonoklastes or Paradise Lost. 2 As a result, there has been no extensive account of how Milton imagines and represents prayer and how his views are shaped by or juxtaposed with those of his contemporaries. In order to offer a comprehensive discussion of bodies at prayer in Milton, this book examines his poetry and prose in an interdisciplinary framework that builds on perspectives on Reformation theology, embodiment, and the history of emotions in order to place him firmly in the time when “prayer was too important to be left to chance.”3 One of the goals of this study is to show ways that Milton participates in a culture concentrated around what I call the anatomy of devotion: a culture that lives, understands, and writes prayer as an amalgamation of physical, theological, and literary experiences. While the political and doctrinal arguments surrounding the set vs. extempore prayer debate have attracted significant attention and continue to shape our understanding of religious practice in the seventeenth century, they cannot fully explain the seventeenth-century definition of prayer that Milton subscribes to in the two epigraphs at the beginning of this introduction: prayer as “pathetical,” as an emotional outpouring of the self that expresses and/or excites ardour. The adjective, according to the OED, appears to enter the English language from the second half of the sixteenth century, and although its current derogatory connotations are more a product of post-eighteenth-century use, the term’s associations with hyperbolically pitiable and moving language are evident from its origins in the Greek παθητικος (= capable of feeling) that became a common rhetorical term in Latin (usus patheticus). Milton’s references to prayer as pathetical exhibit a firm belief in the practice’s affective potential—­prayer as both an agent and a product of passion—which this book examines in a variety of examples from the author’s poetry and prose, and places them next to contemporary views on the embodied

Introduction  3 nature of devotion. Such views were shared not only by theologians, but natural philosophers, too, highlighting how prayer and one’s relationship to God infiltrated diverse aspects of early modern thinking. One brief example will serve here. In his Natural History of the Passions, published in 1674, the physician and early member of the Royal Society, Walter Charleton, explains the physiology of prayer in the following terms: Nor is it difficult to a man praying to Almighty God with fervency of Spirit, to observe in himself, that his blood is more and more arrested and detained within his breast the while; insomuch that his heart seems to swell, his lungs to be opprest, and he is forced frequently to interrupt his oraisons with profound sighs, for attraction of fresh aer: as if the reasonable Soul not content to devote herself alone, and pour forth her holy desires to God, laboured to make a libation also of the vital blood, for a propitiatory oblation.4 The terminology of pathology is applied to the prayerful body to establish the parallel experiences of spiritually and somatically offering one’s meditations to God: the blood in the lungs becomes in prayer the sacrificial blood offered for human atonement echoing Christ’s sacrifice. This is a “pathetical” prayer very much in the style Milton imagines and re-creates, as I intend to show, in his major characters. Charleton offers an anatomy of the devotional body that draws on theology as much as on natural science, supporting current research by Erin Sullivan, who argues that “contemporary natural philosophy and theology accommodated different varieties of embodied and disembodied experience.”5 I argue that Milton shares this vision of prayer as an embodied and affective force that circulates between the human body and the divine presence, binding individuals to their Protestant communities, their environment, and their God. According to Anna Wierzbicka, “every culture offers […] a set of ‘scripts’ suggesting to people how to feel, how to express their feelings, how to think about their own and other people’s feelings, and so on.”6 Ultimately, the book seeks to suggest ways in which thinkers like Hall, Charleton, and, predominantly Milton, can be considered to form part of and contribute to the seventeenth-century “emotional script” of Protestant prayer. This was by no means a homogeneous or uncontested “script,” and attention to the particular confessional biases in the period is crucial. The role of the body and its emotional responses in prayer was of frequent concern for sixteenth- and seventeenth-century religious groups in England, whether they ascribed to the established church or sought further reforms. As the ground-breaking work of Alec Ryrie has demonstrated, the flexible, but at the same time prescriptive, attitude to external devotion appears to have been symptomatic of various confessions,

4 Introduction rendering any clear-cut divisions between pro- and anti-body sentiments difficult and problematic.7 Milton’s opponent, Hall, for instance, would not disagree that the physical and emotional vigour of prayer is necessary and desirable. In his Modest Confutation of Animadversions, he writes that “the soul may be as much inflamed that prayes in a set form, as that which doth not: and that may be as cold that prayes extempore.” Aware that “it is not the volubility or roudnesse of tongue, that is the work of Gods Spirit primarily in him that hath this gift of Prayer, but the enkindling of the affections,” Hall is hesitant to accept that spontaneous prayer has any more claim to authenticity of emotion than set prayer, and advises against “warm[ing] our selves at a painted fire” by trusting the potentially misleading and superficial zeal of those who pray in the Spirit alone.8 As Ryrie has argued, “the question of preparation [including the appropriate use of the body] was only a curtain-raiser for the whole, bitter dispute about formality and informality in prayer,” a dispute that found Milton and Hall on opposite camps, despite their shared understanding of prayer as inspired by internal physical and emotional transformation.9 Hall’s authoritative defence of prescribed forms of devotion as aids to maintaining acceptable levels of order, decency, and piety in the church, and Milton’s fervent renunciation of all ceremonial habits as at best soporific and at worst tyrannical, are very much part of the longstanding debate over formality and spontaneity that unfolded between High Church representatives and reformers from as early as the 1570s with reference to the Book of Common Prayer. Under Edward VI’s rule, Cranmer’s 1549 edition of the BCP was to replace the prior Latin Liturgy according to the Act of Uniformity passed in the same year. Cranmer’s book, however, was deemed unsatisfactory in delivering a clearly reformed liturgy. Its prominent opponents including Thomas Cartwright and the authors of the Martin Marprelate tracts published in the 1580s, argued vehemently that the BCP failed to radically disentangle itself from the church’s previous investment in ceremonies and their residual Roman Catholic elements. Such views on the BCP, as well as those of the High Church, have been well documented by Anthony Milton and more recently by Ramie Targoff and Timothy Rosendale, who have discussed how writers such as Richard Hooker and Lancelot Andrewes sought to moderate Puritan zeal by supporting a liturgy they believed could effect internal transformation via external procedures, such as praying by the BCP.10 For example, Andrewes insisted that prayer that does not involve an external component and is not visible on the body of the petitioner offers little proof of the subject’s effort to connect with God: “when we come to pray to God the whole man must be occupied, and all the members of the body employed in the service of God … he that having prated sit[ting] still without adding his endeavour, shall not receive the thing

Introduction  5 he prays for, for he must not only orare but laborare.”11 Targoff’s work has been crucial in foregrounding the ways the official Elizabethan public worship served as a mechanism for subject formation. She has convincingly argued that participation in liturgy became an enabling process for the cultivation of personal agency, manifest in the participant’s transformation from an inert presence within the church to an active supplicant. In devotion, therefore, individuality and public life were not mutually exclusive but defined one another. Rosendale’s study is concerned with very similar binaries to Targoff’s and the role that the BCP played in their negotiation: “public and private, state and subject, order and individual come to occupy positions of mutually sustaining tension; each simultaneously enables and contests the other in a complex process of reciprocal constitution.”12 Rosendale is interested in Protestantism’s theological and political resonance for individual and national identity and argues that “Reformation discourse as a whole was not only state-­authorizing but more importantly and more fundamentally self-authorizing.”13 Targoff’s terms of the public and the private are replaced by social order and individual identity, simultaneously affirming and contradicting one another. Rosendale’s focus is on the influence that the BCP’s changing perception of signs and representation had for early modern authors, a literary scope broader than Targoff’s, and he actually contests her claims regarding outward conformity and inward belief, proposing instead that “public worship, that is, can only reliably indicate conformity of action and not belief.”14 What the two studies have in common, albeit following different methodologies and agendas, is their assertion that religious practices dictate or manipulate individual and social identities. In the words of Kaufman, referring to Calvinist Protestants, “prayers shaped worshipers as well as worship.”15 The present study, by focusing on Milton and prayer, builds on the current trends in early modern prayer and identity by shedding light on a less well-­ documented aspect of seventeenth-century private and public prayer that does not necessarily follow top-down models: that of the embodiment of prayer and how it was experienced not only as a spiritual state, but as registered physiologically and emotionally on the body. The controversy surrounding the BCP was still prevalent in the formative years of Milton’s career as a literary and political writer. Arminian in his inclinations, Charles I sought to unite his subjects by ensuring uniform parish practice throughout the kingdom. The BCP was one of the central components of the “beauty of holiness” programme of ecclesiastical reform, instigated by Laud and stemming from an anxiety that by 1630s the reformers’ rejection of the rituals and visual ornamentations of the church had denied liturgy its sacred character.16 In Laud’s own words, responding to the charge of high treason shortly before his execution by the Parliament in 1645, “with the Contempt of the Outward Worship of God, the Inward fell away apace, and Profaneness began

6 Introduction boldly to shew it self.”17 For Laud, external, physical forms of faith, such as episcopal vestments and the use of the BCP, were necessary conditions to uphold the inward belief and participation in God’s worship. Uniformity was essential if the believers’ spiritual commitment, as well as the social rank and recognition of God’s representatives, were to be secured.18 Sharing Laud’s vision, Charles’s decision to impose the BCP on the Scottish Kirk in 1637, and in return, the Kirk’s rejection of it and resistance to conformity, culminated in the Bishops’ Wars, 1639–40, evidence of the widening gap between the king’s desire for ecclesiastical uniformity and his subjects’ suspicion of such desire as dangerously close to the Roman Catholic worship of the recent past.19 For the Presbyterian Scots and the radical Protestants, praying by the book partook of the ceremonial ostentation that the king and the archbishop’s Arminian sensibilities imposed on the English church. 20 Milton’s comment in the epigraph from the Apology above ridicules the set prayers that accompanied the rite of women’s churching, and it exposes the absurd, for Milton, habit of sticking to the letter by upholding and rehearsing ceremonies that were historically significant but completely irrelevant in the contemporary context and devotional experience. 21 Such blind faith in custom could only be considered as idolatrous for those seeking to free the church from Catholic traditions. As a result, when the Civil Wars started, for political and military purposes the BCP turned into “the badge of the royalist party” while theologically it was perceived by its enemies as an idol.22 It was so defined in the act of its abolition by its substitute, the Directory for the Public Worship of God in 1645, which claimed that the BCP “was made no better than an Idol by many Ignorant and Superstitious People.”23 Nevertheless, as studies of parish response to radical reformation have shown, episcopacy and the BCP were more readily denounced in theory than in everyday practice, as they served to instil the church-goers with a sense of communal and national identity.24 The once-dominant model of Protestant withdrawal from set forms and institutions and cultivation of an inward, textual-based, and solitary inspection of the Word has been effectively revised by critics who have demonstrated that sacramentalism did not disappear in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but it continued to influence the expression of devotional and poetic identities, especially in relation to the Eucharist. 25 Milton’s own poetry has been shown to creatively recycle ceremonial tropes and church rites, with prayer as an example of his “creative iconoclasm”; a notion Chapter 2 revisits with reference to Eikonoklastes. 26 As each chapter of this book shows, in his representation of prayer, Milton frequently departs from the Pauline and Augustinian dichotomy between flesh and spirit and opts for psychosomatic alternatives that integrate the visible and the invisible. 27 Achsah Guibbory’s work has been pioneering in this respect, suggesting that Milton “seems to have been at some level repelled by the

Introduction  7 dualism of a puritan ideology that would split inner and outer, body and soul,” and tracing instead occasions on which Milton seeks to recreate (the prelapsarian prayers of Paradise Lost being a good case in point) the unity and order associated with the ceremonialism of the Church of England. 28 This book is heavily indebted to Guibbory for complicating the notion of interiority in Milton and undermining the dichotomy between, on the one hand, private and inaccessible spiritual realms, and on the other, public and visible rituals. Focusing on the inner and outer workings of the human body during prayer, the current study stretches definitions of the external and the ceremonial by examining prayer as an immersive experience, one that envelopes the petitionary subject in the Holy Spirit, physically, emotionally, and spiritually, and then, in being displayed, it seeks to envelope God in the same energy. Approaching prayer as a psychosomatic performance that encompasses passions, soul, and body, it suggests that the scholarship on theological and political differences regarding public and private prayer in the period can be enhanced by attending to the physiological and emotional dynamics of the devotional body. It is the main premise of this book that prayer and the role of the body in prayer remain central concerns for Milton throughout his prolific career as a poet, a writer, and a politician. In his theological treatise, The Christian Doctrine, Milton discusses prayer in the section “Of External Worship” without privileging internal nor external forms: “it is our duty to unite them in practice, nor are they ever separated, except by the fault of the wicked” (CPW 6:557). 29 Correspondence between inward faith and its outward expression is the only requirement Milton makes of his Christian readers in a text that avoids being prescriptive about the exact nature external worship might take: “it is not necessary that our prayers should be always audible,” “prayer may be offered either alone, or in company,” “no particular posture of the body in prayer was enjoined,” “with regard to the place of prayer, all are equally suitable,” “neither is there any time at which prayer may not be properly offered” are some examples of the treatise’s flexible attitude to the particularities of prayer (CPW 6:564–8). While Milton’s systematic theology is not particularly helpful in articulating a clear role for the body during prayer, the following chapters show how the accommodating view of external devotion inherent in The Christian Doctrine also manifests in the antiprelatical tracts, A Mask Presented at Ludlow Castle, Eikonoklastes, Paradise Lost, and Samson Agonistes. I propose that these texts advocate varying degrees of embodied and emotional prayer that place Milton alongside conformist and non-conformist communities who also refuse to ascribe to prayer as purely spiritual, highlighting thus his deep engagement with the prayer culture of his period; a culture that consistently failed to put forward a definitive model of how one should pray.

8 Introduction For instance, as we have already seen, Milton and Hall, while being on opposite sides of the prayer wars that dominated the seventeenth century, share a vocabulary of hot and cold, or passionate and impassionate, prayers, and a belief in prayer not only as the final product and evidence of, but also the affective agent for, emotional sincerity. Prayer moves the body and the affections, as much as it is the result of motion in the body. This notion is echoed in the writings of many moderate English Protestants who published treatises and manuals on prayer, devotional aids whose impact on early modern readership after the Reformation is manifest in their high sales figures. 30 The Calvinist George Downame argues for the role of gesture and voice as “good means to excite and stirre up one another” and as appealing to God in demonstrating inner devotion: “where he requireth the inward worship of the soul in prayer, as honorem facti, the honour of the deed, there also he requireth the outward of the body when it may be conveniently exercised, as honorem signi, the honour of the signe.”31 Similarly, Edward Wetenhall, supporter of the church, claims that “my prayer wants their due solemnity, if not performed in a posture of worship.”32 Daniel Featly, chaplain to Archbishop Abbot and a firm Episcopalian, published in 1626 his international bestseller Ancilla Pietatis, or The Hand-Maid to Private Devotion, in which he stressed the emotional vocabulary of private prayer: “Sighs are the figures that moue Almightie God, and teares the fluent and most current Rhetoricke before him; for he that made the mouth is not taken with words.”33 The same is advocated by the Presbyterian Richard Hollinworth,who writes that “they that have the Spirit of Prayer, have sometimes (yea at all times when their Spirit is lively) deep impressions upon their heart, devout affections, foul inlargements; sighs and groans of the soul are the life and soul of Prayer, sighs and sobs, grieving and groaning are good Rhetoric in the Closet, between God and us.”34 Such emphasis on private prayer was driven by the Reformation fears of hypocrisy and Catholic ceremonialism, and the theologians above, while inclusive of the body in worship, are clear in subordinating it to the spirit: “right prayer is this,” according to the conformist Puritan John Preston, “when the regenerate part is acted and stirred up, and the flesh that hinders, is removed.”35 Featly warns that “these parts (of repentance) are not to be acted on the stage, but within the hangings. He that actes these on the stage will have the person of an hypocrite put upon him for it.”36 For the more dissatisfied reformers and dissenters, external devotion was best kept in the closet. The Puritan Oliver Heywood, for instance, seems to agree with sentiments expressed by Downame when he writes that God “will be worshipped with the outward as well as inward man; you cannot without dangerous sacriledge rob him of either,” underlining that the body in prayer is both active and passive: “there is both evidence and assistance in the bodies humble gesture; it is an help to make you humble, and 'tis a sign that you

Introduction  9 are humble.”37 Nevertheless, he also emphasizes the danger of external posture being separate from internal emotion, showing thus that a petitioner’s priorities should lie with their spirit: “an unsuitable sight and position of the body in Gods service, is a sad sign of an unhumbled soul, and hinders humiliation.”38 In fact, for Heywood, the petitioner’s agency appears subservient to the Spirit as it is the spirit that takes one “by the hand” and drives them to an authentic conversation with God: “How often doth the holy Ghost knock at your doors, stir you up, spur you forwards unto duty, and take you by the hand, offering its assistance if you'l go to God, and yet do you refuse?”39 The delicate balance between body and spirit Heywood strives for is eradicated in John Bunyan’s A Discourse Touching Prayer, published in 1663. Writing against the Act of Uniformity imposed in 1662, Bunyan juxtaposes spiritual to physical prayer, with phrases such as “vain babbling” and “lip-labour” featuring throughout his work and attesting to his adversity to the tyranny of set spoken prayers.40 It is Bunyan’s conviction that prayer should be the result of the inner workings of the spirit and not a product of external conformity: “a good sence of sin, and the wrath of God, with some encouragement from God to come unto him, is a better Common PrayerBook, than that which is taken out of the Papistical Mass-Book.”41 To advocate the inner workings of the spirit, Bunyan reports that “the best Prayers have often more groans than words,” yet this is not necessarily an outright condemnation of the body.42 According to the treatise, prayer is imagined as inscribed on the body at an emotional level: “The soul, I say, feels, and from feeling, sighs, groans, and breaks at the heart. Right prayer bubleth out of the heart when it is over-pressed with grief and bitterness, as blood is forced out of the flesh.”43 Prayer is imagined as a violent process, a violent expulsion of sighs and groans that explode from the body as blood springs from an open wound. The irrepressible physical symptoms become prayer’s text as Bunyan comments shortly afterwards: for Bunyan, the petitioners are not “Nor yet in a foolish frothy way to babble over a few words written in a paper; but mightily, fervently, and continually, to groan out their conditions before the Lord, as being sensible.”44 Prayer is a “groaning out,” a violent physical expulsion of an inarticulate sound that registers the body as the site of the experience of prayer. Bunyan insists that the language of groaning should replace hypocritical eloquence, and he seeks that to be done “as being sensible”—that is, as the petitioners having awareness of their dejected state through their senses, through their bodies. It is far from this study’s intention to offer a one-size-fits-all reading of prayer in the early modern period, and individual chapters will concentrate further on some of the religious controversies surrounding this debate: the body and material worship (Chapter 1), set versus extempore prayers (Chapter 2), sighs and groans versus eloquence (Chapter 3), and turbulent emotions (Chapter 4). Nevertheless, following Ryrie’s

10 Introduction example, this book seeks to place Milton in a context of writers that despite theological deviations appeared to share a belief in prayer as closely tied to emotional intensity. In other words, it is more interested in their connections than their differences. It argues that Milton’s representation of prayer, while it shifts between texts, does not strictly privilege neither body nor spirit, but it consistently rests on the emotional entanglement between the two to secure space for the individuals’ agency in their relationship with the divine. This is different to readings that insist on Milton as occupying one of the two sides on the body-andmind spectrum. Richard Rambuss, for instance, has claimed that Milton “de-­corporealizes” the “intense and visceral displays of devotional affect” to the point where “Milton himself hardly seems like a devotional poet.”45 David Ainsworth offers a similar interpretation: “by basing individual faith entirely upon creating a connection with the inner spirit, and linking individual believers through that intensely personalized connection with God, Milton seems to have developed an entirely inward faith.”46 The current study puts prayer at the centre of Milton studies to challenge the notion that Milton occupies a church of one and seeks only a spiritual connection with God. It proposes that, for Milton, prayer is an act expressed through, and felt on, the body. Prayer is a pouring out of the heart and is shown to exist on the very limits of conscious experience, on the verge of absence and presence, of intentionality and spontaneity. In arguing so, the book does not try to suggest that Milton re-invents prayer; it is instead concerned with placing him in dialogue with his contemporaries who negotiate the role of body and physicality in devotion. It is invested in demonstrating that Milton pushes the prayerful body to its limits, to the point where the internal and the external blend, in functions such as dressing, consuming, breathing, and destroying. Prayer for Milton is neither mainly psychological nor theological, but it becomes a lived and embodied experience. While Milton has been underserved, bodies at prayer have attracted the interest of Renaissance drama scholars, especially with regard to Shakespeare. An increasingly large number of works interested in the relationship between religion and drama, and in the ways drama influenced and was in turn shaped by the religious experience of theatre-goers, has started to take notice of prayer on stage.47 Starting with Targoff’s influential reading of Hamlet’s Claudius, critics such as Anthony Dawson, Elizabeth Williamson, and, more recently, Joseph Sterrett have shed light on the complexity of representing authentic prayers in the artificial medium of a play.48 Given Milton’s invested interest in theatre, the spectacle of prayer on stage informs my work and features in my analyses of A Mask and Samson Agonistes, but in choosing to focus on embodied rather than theatrical prayer, the book adopts a wider definition of performance that is not limited to Milton’s theatrical outputs.49 Using the emotional and body politics of prayer as analytical tools, it is

Introduction  11 particularly concerned with what pray-er (the subject and the act) does as opposed to what it stands for. 50 The following chapters examine a range of acts that tend to be both emotional and performative as they blend the boundaries between external and public address and internal passion: dressing and undressing, eating and drinking, breathing and sighing, and violently destroying. Such acts, meaningful in their simplicity, highlight that Milton’s views on prayer as pathetical take many forms while remaining faithful to the blend of body and spirit in worship. Understanding how bodies experience and perform prayer in Milton, and how prayer for Milton combines physiology and passions with spirituality, opens up wider investigations into the history of emotions and its pivotal role in enriching current knowledge of early modern religious practice. Although the field of religion and emotions is currently at an infant stage, the intersections between the two in the Renaissance have attracted much scholarly interest. 51 Susan Karant-Nunn’s The Reformation of Feeling has investigated the emotions of church audiences in early modern Germany as they were shaped by Catholic, Lutheran, and Calvinist sermons on the Passion, offering ample evidence that the Reformation signalled a shift away from the passionate identification with Christ on the Cross towards the cultivation in the laity of self-sacrificial and penitent feelings. 52 Moreover, the case for attending to the lived experience of prayer has been made successfully and cohesively by Alec Ryrie. His comprehensive examination of how one should pray in the Reformation pays close attention to the everyday “emotional landscape” that sixteenth and seventeenth century subjects inhabited and is driven by a definition of prayer as an affective process: “prayer is about longing, lifting, earnestness, and desire, and it is a matter of the spirit and the heart.”53 In addition, John Craig has demonstrated that the reformers “developed a manner of praying that both sought to attain a sense of the spirit and that displayed the presence of the spirit in fervency and sincerity” creating thus a devotional model that was far more audible, participatory, and emotional than we might think. 54 More recently, David Bagchi has made the case that the BCP, contrary to Milton’s charges against it as cold and rigid, in fact offered the parishioners a way to express and regulate their feelings by inflecting the emotionally volatile world of the Bible with optimism. 55 The current book ascribes to the empirical methodology of the aforementioned critics and extends it to one of the most important and prolific writers of the seventeenth century. Through individual case studies in each chapter, it shows that Milton shared with his early modern community an understanding of prayer as conversing with God but not necessarily with words: the relationship established was at the level of affect. While historians have paved the way for an understanding of prayer as an experience heard and felt, literary critics, focusing more on prayer as a mechanism for identity formation, have been slower in acknowledging

12 Introduction the potential of studying the physiology of the body in prayer and devotional writing.56 An exception is Gary Kuchar, who examines sighs, groans, and tears as forming the poetic language of godly sorrow. As he claims, “godly sorrow is a discourse that allows writers to theorize how the relationships between divine and mundane worlds are registered at the level of affect.”57 Sorrow, however, alongside the penitence and shame Karant-Nunn has argued, defined the emotional experience of the early modern Calvinist subjects; all paint a rather bleak picture of how bodies might have felt during prayer and what emotions they might have experienced. Richard Strier has reacted to new historicist readings of the Renaissance passions, exemplified best in the work of Gail Kern Paster and Michael C. Schoenfeldt, which tend to use humoral theory as the master-discourse of the period and in effect pathologize the subject, privileging the embodied interiority of passions. 58 According to Strier, the “new humoralism” of this critical school “produces readings that are extraordinarily and consistently conservative, readings that entirely support the rule of order, reason, and restraint.”59 Robert S. White and Ciara Rawnsley have also warned against the reductive view that emotions can be interpreted solely by the standards of Galenic medicine, suggesting instead that “specific circumstances and affective responses become more complex than such an approach can accommodate.”60 In studying prayer as a complex act, this book shares the concerns of Strier, White, and Rawnsley, and agrees with Sean McDowell, for whom “to write off the discourse of immaterial selfhood as merely a figment of the Cartesian body/mind split is to miss the varying degrees of embodiment described in the soul-body discourse of Elizabethan and Stuart England.”61 While an extensive analysis of emotion in Milton escapes the parameters of this book, investigating how Milton constructs devotional bodies foregrounds the need for more complex and interdisciplinary approaches to his work.62 Neither fully physical nor fully spiritual, devotion in the texts of Milton is shown to occupy exactly such varying degrees of embodiment. Finally, the book demonstrates that Milton, in his representation of petitions to God and his blend of external and internal devotion, departs from the sorrowful, anxious, and despair-driven rhetoric we have come to associate with new historicism and reformist identity.63 The book aims to read pathetical prayer not as a synonym for psychological torture and victimisation but as a productive force: one that participates in and exemplifies Milton’s monist theology. The case for Milton’s monism has been made by Stephen Fallon, who has argued that “spirit and matter become for Milton two modes of the same substance: spirit is rarefied matter, and matter is sense spirit. All things, from insensate objects through souls, are manifestations of this one substance.”64 Philip Donnelly has challenged Fallon’s argument by highlighting the latter’s false equation of bodies with matter and reminding us that the body is

Introduction  13 a form of, and not synonymous with, “the first matter of original creation.”65 While accepting that Fallon’s alteration between matter and body might not be helpful in eliciting the full philosophical implications of Milton’s doctrine, body and matter in prayer do approximate one another, and Fallon’s reading of “corporeal spirits” in Milton helps to explain what happens to the devotional body. According to Fallon, Milton shares William Harvey’s belief in “a soul indistinguishable from the spirits,” suggesting that “Milton closes the gap from both sides: souls are corporeal, and phenomena long thought inanimate are alive.”66 As this study shows, the closing of the gap is most evident in prayer, where the petitioner connects with their environment, their fellow human beings, and finally, their God. In departing from purely spiritual understandings of prayer and affirming its materialism as captured in dress, gestures, consumption, breath, and violent acts, this study also classifies prayer as materialist and as exemplifying Milton’s “materialist understanding of deity,” based on which, bodily matter and spirit converge.67 Milton’s text establishes that prayer does not only come from external inspiration and that the petitioner does not simply and passively experience it and return it to its creator. A materialist interpretation of prayer rejects what John Rogers has identified as the “two intellectual systems [which] forward an analogously externalist theory of agency”: “puritan providentialism and mechanistic materialism.”68 The animist materialism, or vitalism, as Rogers defines it, that Milton subscribes to is crucial for prayer because it informs and guarantees an autonomous model of devotion characterised by liberty and free will. Miltonic bodies at prayer are examined in each chapter as navigating internal and external spaces and as resisting fixed significations in the ways they are immersed in or sealed off from the external world. By acts of dressing, eating, digesting, breathing, and destructing, these devotional bodies are in a constant flux that secures individual agency in one’s relationship with the divine. The first chapter, “Dressing the Devotional Body,” explores Milton’s fascination with bodies and their materiality in the context of Milton’s 1640s antiprelatical prose and his denunciation of the Church of England ministers and their deceitful worship. While investigating Milton’s attitude to public worship, the chapter serves to highlight the appropriate behaviour Milton anticipates in one’s relationship with God and to register the role he reserves for the physical body in devotion. The first part of the chapter begins with examples of embodied religion that Milton disapproves of. Studying Milton’s tracts next to anti-episcopal pamphlets (e.g. by Thomas Stirry and Richard Overton), this part is concerned with how the materiality of clerical garments, and in particular their linen fabric, is used by Milton in his early prose to fragment and destabilise the uniformity that Laud’s ecclesiastical regime strived for. Milton’s argument against the embodied religion of the liturgical dress relies on referring to the prelates as dismembered

14 Introduction articles of worship and reducing priests to sleeves, socks, and hats, highlighting in the process the hollowness and disintegration of the unified body of episcopacy. The second part of the chapter examines these types of performance, which rely on the tyrannical hold of the material on the church audience, with reference to Comus’s transformative attire and the Lady’s faith in Milton’s Mask. Dress, here, features prominently again as the hypocritical threat of tyrannical rule, but the Lady succeeds in establishing a relation with the divine that petitioners in formalized worship are denied. Embodied in the Lady’s stage presence and speech is the perfect model of devotion that eliminates divisions between internal and external worship and elevates one’s performance in front of God to a performance requiring both. The next chapter, “Stale and Empty Words: Consuming Prayers in Eikonoklastes,” moves from a discussion of public performances of worship to a discussion of the performance of devotion in private. The materiality of bodies consists not in their garments and stage performance, but in their use, or rejection, of conventional forms and postures in prayer. The focus is on the print controversy between Eikon Basilike and Eikonoklastes, texts that may be regarded as devotional works in which Charles and Milton respectively unfold their vision of authentic prayer. The chapter argues that Eikon Basilike offers Milton the opportunity to engage with the question of how one should address God. In this respect, Eikonoklastes is not simply a destructive work but one that attempts to re-model prayer. The first part of the chapter considers Charles I and Milton’s views on the debate of set versus extempore prayers in the context of writings by Richard Hooker and Jeremy Taylor, and it shows how Milton in his Eikonoklastes dismisses the idea that set phrases can empower the subject at prayer. It argues that for Milton such a model of devotion is inadequate because providing set patterns for worship eliminates man’s agency. The second part of the chapter focuses its analysis on Milton’s metaphor of prayer as manna in Chapter 16, “Upon the Ordinance against the Common-prayer Book.” Studying Milton’s references to manna next to instances of the image in Donne, Herbert, and the prayer manuals of Jeremy Taylor and John Wilkins, I argue that consuming manna emerges in Milton’s polemical tract as an exercise in prayer and as a moral duty. In the context of Eikonoklastes, attention to nourishment by manna, and by prayers in extension, reveals a philosophy of devotion that seeks to replace Charles’s set prayers with a different model based on deep engagement with divine inspiration and reciprocal communication with God. This model is conceived in physiological and spiritual terms: the reader cannot escape the corporeality of the metaphors of manna and food and is instead alert to the demands eating places on the body as much as on the spirit, since extempore prayer materializes from the stirring of affections. Savoury words, reified in manna, create the responsibility for particular eating habits, for

Introduction  15 wise consumption, and for rejection of stale, recycled substances. They require digestion and consumption, or the individual’s active participation in their use, as opposed to their unquestioning endorsement and exploitation as divine gift. The third chapter, “Hymns, Sighs, and the Physicality of Prayer in Paradise Lost,” examines the prelapsarian and postlapsarian prayers of Adam and Eve and observes how they both share a performance that is physical and communal. The hymns of praise in the prelapsarian world are succeeded in a postlapsarian context by physical symptoms, such as sighs and groans. The first part of this chapter is concerned with the description of Adam and Eve’s prelapsarian hymns in Books IV and V of Paradise Lost and with their significance for Milton’s articulation of prayer. Even though Milton’s incorporation of the Psalms in his work has received important critical attention, this chapter is interested specifically in those qualities of the Psalms, and in singing and music more broadly, with which Milton infuses Adam and Eve’s prayers. The aim in examining these qualities is to show that Milton values in hymns a communal worship that addresses God externally, and at the same time, sincerely. The second part of this chapter focuses on the postlapsarian prayer of Adam and Eve in Books X and XI and demonstrates that the Fall does not initiate an altogether different model of worship, but reconfigures the performance of prayer found in prelapsarian Eden into a physical language with emphasis placed on air and breathing. This section argues that the penitent prayer shares the interdependence of the body and the spirit that features in the prelapsarian hymns, and that, despite differences in the prayers, their expression might not be as antithetical as we might expect. When studied next to each other, the two prayer scenes allow for continuity rather than division in Milton’s conception of prayer as performance, and this continuity conveys Milton’s suspicion of language’s potential to reach God. The chapter places the physicality in devotion next to seventeenth-century religious writers who view corporeal communication as a successful and authentic alternative to the hypocritical use of language in vocal prayers. The final chapter, “Iconoclastic Prayer in Samson Agonistes,” considers the much-debated scene in Milton’s closet tragedy in which Samson does not pray out loud in the Philistine Temple. The absence of God in this play undermines the relationship with man and exposes Milton’s uncertainty over how the petitioner might be heard by God. The theatricality that Milton reacts against, explored in the first two chapters, is manifest in Samson’s devotion, blurring the boundaries between authentic and inauthentic prayers. The physicality of prayer that is imagined in Eikonoklastes, and further realized in Paradise Lost, turns in this text into a violent destructive force that requires the annihilation of the individual. In the final scene of Samson Agonistes, external action seems divorced from internal inspiration. This chapter shows how Samson’s

16 Introduction physical performance of prayer might betray an inauthentic act of devotion. Focusing on the Messenger’s account, the chapter examines the posture, rhetoric, and violence of Samson’s final moments in order to determine why the tragedy is so unresolved in its depiction of prayer. The first part of this chapter analyses Samson’s posture at the Temple both for its pious and its theatrical potential. The second part of the chapter focuses on Samson’s final words as reported by the Messenger in order to differentiate between two possible audiences that Samson identifies in his speech. As in the case of posture, though, Samson’s rhetoric fluctuates between artifice and genuine address to God. The final part of the chapter argues that Samson does not pray prior to the destruction but through it. Whether divinely ordained or not, prayer becomes an iconoclastic force and man’s only means of violently uniting with God.

Notes 1 See Neil H. Keeble, “Milton and Puritanism,” in A Companion to Milton, ed. Thomas N. Corns (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), 124–40, and Thomas N. Corns, “Milton’s Antiprelatical Tracts and the Marginality of Doctrine,” in Milton and Heresy, ed. Stephen B. Dobranski and John P. Rumrich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 39–48. As Corns writes, Milton “is almost silent on doctrinal divisions within the church” and he “seems committed to a redefinition of the term ‘doctrine’ so as to remove it from the theoretical to the practical level” (41–2). 2 For prayer in Paradise Lost see, for instance, Mary C. Fenton, Milton’s Places of Hope: Spiritual and Political Connections of Hope with Land (Farnham: Ashgate, 2006), Anthony David Nuttall, Overheard by God: Fiction and Prayer in Herbert, Milton, Dante, and St. John (London: Methuen, 1980). For the critical reception of prayer in Eikonoklastes, see Chapter 2. 3 Peter Iver Kaufman, “Much in Prayer: The Inward Researches of Elizabethan Protestants,” Journal of Religion 73 (1993): 163–82 (165). 4 Walter Charleton, Natural History of the Passions (London, 1674), 80. 5 Erin Sullivan, “The Passions of Thomas Wright: Renaissance Emotion across Body and Soul,” in The Renaissance of Emotion: Understanding Affect in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, ed. Richard Meek and Erin Sullivan (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015), 25–44 (36). 6 Anna Wierzbicka, Emotions across Languages and Cultures: Diversity and Universals (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 240. 7 Alec Ryrie, Being Protestant in Reformation Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 97–247. 8 Joseph Hall, A Modest Confutation of a Slanderous and Scurrilous Libell, Entitvled, Animadversions vpon the Remonstrants Defense against Smectymnuus (London, 1642), 27. 9 Ryrie, Being Protestant, 203. 10 Anthony Milton, Catholic and Reformed: The Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought, 1600–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), especially Chapter 7, Ramie Targoff, Common Prayer: The Language of Public Devotion in Early Modern England (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2001), Timothy Rosendale, Liturgy and Literature in the Making of Protestant England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

Introduction  17 11 Lancelot Andrewes, Works, 11 vols. (Oxford: John Henry Parker, 1843), 5:325 [quoted in Targoff, 9). 1 2 Rosendale, Liturgy and Literature, 113. 13 Ibid., 75. 14 Ibid., 180. 15 Kaufman, “Much in Prayer,” 170. 16 See Kenneth Fincham and Nicholas Tyacke, Altars Restored: The Changing Face of English Religious Worship, 1547-c.1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), especially Chapter 6. 17 William Laud, The History of the Troubles and Tryal of the Most Reverend Father in God and blessed Martyr, William Laud, Lord Arch-Bishop of Canterbury Wrote by Himself during His Imprisonment in the Tower (London, 1695), 157. 18 Peter Lake, “The Laudian Syle: Order, Uniformity and the Pursuit of the Beauty of Holiness in the 1630s,” in The Early Stuart Church, 1603–1642, ed. Kenneth Fincham (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1993), 161–85 (165). 19 See Mark Charles Fissel, The Bishops’ Wars: Charles I’s Campaigns against Scotland, 1638–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 20 John Morrill, The Nature of the English Revolution (London: Longman, 1993), 53. For Charles’s role in the advancement of Arminianism, see Nicholas Tyacke’s chapter “Arminianism during the Personal Rule and After,” Anti-Calvinists: The Rise of English Arminianism, c.1590–1640 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987), 181–244. 21 See Jeremy L. Smith, Verse and Voice in Byrd’s Song Collections of 1588 and 1589 (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2016), 264. 2 2 Brian Cummings, introduction to The Book of Common Prayer: The Texts of 1549, 1559, and 1662 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), xl. 2 3 Anon, A Directory for the Publicke Worship of God throughout the Three Kingdoms of Scotland, England, and Ireland (London, 1645), 3. For a concise account of the reasons of its abolition, see Peter King, “The Reasons for the Abolition of the Book of Common Prayer in 1645,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 21 (1970): 327–39. 2 4 Studies of the parish include Judith Maltby, Prayer Book and People in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), Dan Beaver’s “Behemoth, or Civil War and Revolution in English Parish Communities,” in The English Revolution, c.1590–1720: Politics, Religion and Communities, ed. Nicholas Tyacke (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 129–49, Natalie Mears, “Public Worship and Political Participation in Elizabethan England,” Journal of British Studies 51 (2012): 4–25, and John Morrill, The Nature of the English Revolution (London: Longman, 1993). 2 5 See Ryan Netzley, Reading, Desire, and the Eucharist in Early Modern Religious Poetry (Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, 2011), Sophie Read, Eucharist and the Poetic Imagination in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), Regina Schwartz, Sacramental Poetics at the Dawn of Secularism: When God Left the World (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008). See also Rosendale’s chapter on Milton, and Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England c.1400–c.1580 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992). 2 6 See David Gay, “Prayer and the Sacred Image: Milton, Jeremy Taylor, and the Eikon Basilike,” Milton Quarterly 46 (2012): 1–14, David Ainsworth, “Spiritual Reading in Milton’s Eikonoklastes,” Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 45 (2005): 157–89, David Loewenstein, Milton and the Drama of History: Historical Vision, Iconoclasm, and the Literary Imagination

18 Introduction

27 28

29

30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 4 0 41 42 43 4 4 45

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), Daniel Shore, “Why Milton Is Not an Iconoclast,” PMLA 127 (2012): 22–37, Lana Cable, Carnal Rhetoric: Milton’s Iconoclasm and the Politics of Desire (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), and Laura Lunger Knoppers, Historicizing Milton: Spectacle, Power, and Poetry in Restoration England (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994). See, for instance, 1 Corinthians 9.27, Romans 8.1 and 8.13, Galatians 5.16–17, and Augustine, The City of God against the Pagans, ed. and trans. Robert W. Dyson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), Book XIV. Achsah Guibbory, Ceremony and Community from Herbert to Milton: Literature, Religion and Cultural Conflict in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 216. See also Regina M. Schwartz, Remembering and Repeating: Biblical Creation in Paradise Lost (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), and Thomas B. Stroup, Religious Rite and Ceremony in Milton’s Poetry (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1968). There has been extensive debate over the authorship of the treatise published in 1825. I accept the view that it should be regarded as a work by Milton, established now by the work, Milton and the Manuscript of De Doctrina Christiana, ed. Gordon Campbell, Thomas N. Corns, John K. Hale, and Fiona J. Tweedie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). For the authorship controversy see Barbara K. Lewalski, John T. Shawcross, and William B. Hunter “Forum: Milton’s Christian Doctrine,” Studies in English Literature 1500–1900, 32 (1992): 143–66, and the three articles by Maurice Kelley, Christopher Hill, and William B. Hunter that form part of “Forum II: Milton’s Christian Doctrine,” Studies in English Literature 34 (1994): 153–203. Ian Green, Print and Protestantism in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 250. George Downame, A Godly and Learned Treatise of Prayer (London, 1640), 117–8. Edward Wettenhall, Enter into thy Closet, or a Method and Order for Private Devotion with an Appendix Concerning the Frequent and the Holy Use of the Lord’s Supper (London, 1666), 73. Daniel Featly, Ancilla Pietatis, or The Hand-Maid to Private Devotion (London, 1626), 108. Richard Hollinworth, The Holy Ghost on the Bench, Other Spirits at the Bar: or The Judgment of the Holy Spirit of God upon the Spirits of the Times (London, 1656), 51–3. John Preston, The Saints Daily Exercise: A Treatise Concerning the Whole Dutie of Prayer (London, 1629), 9. Featly, Ancilla Pietatis, 9–10. Oliver Heywood, Closet-Prayer a Christian-Duty, or, a Treatise upon Mat. 6, 6 (London, 1671), 84. Ibid., 84. Ibid., 63. John Bunyan, I Will Pray with the Spirit, and I Will Pray with the Understanding Also, or, a Discourse Touching Prayer (London, 1663), 20. Ibid., 11. Ibid., 53. Ibid., 8. Ibid., 11. Richard Rambuss, Closet Devotions (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 134.

Introduction  19 46 David Ainsworth, Milton and the Spiritual Reader: Reading and Religion in Seventeenth-Century England (London; New York: Routledge, 2008), 14. See also John R. Knott, Jr., “‘Suffering for Truths Sake’: Milton and Martyrdom,” in Politics , Poetics, and Hermeneutics in Milton’s Prose, ed. David Loewenstein and James Grantham Turner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 153–70, who suggests that towards the end of Milton’s life, “we no longer hear of the ‘renovating and re-ingendring Spirit of God’ transforming society, rather of the Spirit illuminating the solitary believer and fortifying him with ‘inward consolations’” (168). Blair Worden, in “Milton’s Republicanism and the Tyranny of Heaven,” in Machiavelli and Republicanism, ed. Gisela Bock, Quentin Skinner and Maurizio Viroli (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 225–45, states that Milton “withdraws from politics into faith” (244). 47 See, for instance, Patrick Collinson, “The Theatre Constructs Puritanism,” in The Theatrical City: Culture, Theatre and Politics in London, 1576–1649, ed. David L. Smith, Richard Strier, and David Bevington (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 157–69, Huston Diehl, Staging Reform, Reforming the Stage: Protestantism and Popular Theatre in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), Adrian Streete, Protestantism and Drama in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), Elizabeth Williamson, The Materiality of Religion in Early Modern English Drama (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009). 48 Ramie Targoff, “The Performance of Prayer: Sincerity and Theatricality in Early Modern England,” Representations 60 (1997): 49–69, Anthony B. Dawson, “Claudius at Prayer,” in Religion and Drama in Early Modern England, ed. Jane Hwang Degenhardt and Elizabeth Williamson, 235–48, Joseph Sterrett, The Unheard Prayer: Religious Toleration in Shakespeare’s Drama (Leiden: Brill, 2012), Elizabeth Williamson, “The Uses and Abuses of Prayer Book Properties in Hamlet, Richard III, and Arden of Faversham,” English Literary Renaissance 39 (2009): 371–95. For a useful summary of this literature, see Joseph Sterrett, “Rereading Prayer as Social Act: Examples from Shakespeare,” Literature Compass 10 (2013): 496–507. 49 See P. A. Skantze, Stillness in Motion in the Seventeenth-Century Theatre (London; New York: Routledge, 2003), Timothy J. Burbery, Milton the Dramatist (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2007). Howard-Hill’s article, published ten years before Burbery’s work, had contested the claim that Milton was involved in the theatre of his time: Trevor H. Howard-Hill, “Milton and ‘The Rounded Theatre’s Pomp’,” in Of Poetry and Politics: New Essays on Milton and his World, ed. Paul Grant Stanwood (Tempe: Arizona State University, 1997), 95–120. Other attempts to read Milton’s works within a theatrical tradition include (although this is only a selection and more works will be discussed in individual chapters): Richard S. Ide, “On the Uses of Elizabethan Drama: The Revaluation of Epic in Paradise Lost,” Milton Studies 17 (1983): 121–40, John D. Cox, “Renaissance Power and Stuart Dramaturgy: Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden,” Comparative Drama 22 (1988): 323–58, John G. Demaray, Milton’s Theatrical Epic: The Invention and Design of Paradise Lost (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), Elizabeth Sauer, “Closet Drama and the Case of Tyrannical-­Government Anatomized,” in The Book of the Play: Playwrights, Stationers, and Readers in Early Modern England, ed. Marta Straznicky (Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2006), 80–98. Milton’s A Mask Presented at Ludlow Castle has been studied by many scholars of early modern court performance, the main ones including Cedric C. Brown, John Milton’s Aristocratic Entertainments (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985),

20 Introduction John G. Demaray, John Milton and the Masque Tradition: The Early Poems, Arcades, and Comus (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968), David Bevington and Peter Holbrook, eds., The Politics of the Stuart Court Masque (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), Stephen Orgel, The Illusion of Power: Political Theater in the English Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975). 50 Richard Schechner, Performance Theory (London; New York: Routledge, 2003), acknowledges the difficulty in distinguishing drama, script, theatre, and performance, but elucidates two elements particular to performance, which have helped me in my definition: “performance is the domain of the audience” and “the boundary between the performance and everyday life is shifting and arbitrary” (70). See also the same book for the distinction between theatre and ritual (130). Schechner’s work is very much influenced by Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (London: Penguin Books, 1990), where performance is defined as “all the activity of an individual which occurs during a period marked by his continuous presence before a particular set of observers and which has some influence on the observers” (22). See also Victor Turner, The Anthropology of Performance (New York: PAJ Publications, 1986). For an introduction to social and cultural performances see Marvin A. Carlson, Performance: A Critical Introduction (London; New York: Routledge, 2004), and Janelle G. Reinelt and Joseph Roach, eds., Critical Theory and Performance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006). For definitions of performance in the early modern period, see Mary Thomas Crane, “What Was Performance?” Criticism 43 (2001): 169–87. Crane’s suggestion that we should treat “discourse and embodiment, representation and experience, as mutually constitutive aspects of performance rather than assuming that discourse and representation subsume the other two” is useful for my approach to the performance of prayer as an embodied practice and not simply as symbolic of theological beliefs (171). Other useful definitions of early modern performance are found in Katie Normington, Medieval English Drama: Performance and Spectatorship (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009), Jane Hwang Degenhardt and Elizabeth Williamson, eds., Religion and Drama in Early Modern England: The Performance of Religion on the Renaissance Stage (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), and Susanne Rupp and Tobias Doring, eds., Performances of the Sacred in Late Medieval and Early Modern England (Amsterdam: Rodopi Press, 2005). 51 See for instance Bruce Ellis Benson and Norman Wirzba, eds., The Phenomenology of Prayer (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), Nico H. Frijda, Antony S. R. Manstead, and Sacha Bem, eds., Emotions and Beliefs: How Feelings Influence Thoughts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), John Corrigan, ed. Religion and Emotion: Approaches and Interpretations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), Douglas J. Davies, Emotion, Identity, and Religion: Hope, Reciprocity, and Otherness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 52 Susan C. Karant-Nunn, The Reformation of Feeling: Shaping the Religious Emotions in Early Modern Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). Karant-Nunn’s study is built on the theoretical premise of “emotional communities” that Barbara Rosenwein defines as “systems of feeling, what these communities (and the individuals within them) define and assess as valuable or harmful to them (for it is about such things that people express emotions); the emotions that they value, devalue, or ignore; the nature of the affective bonds between people that they recognize; and the modes of emotional

Introduction  21

53 5 4

55

56

5 7 58

59 0 6 61 62 63 6 4 6 5

expression that they expect, encourage, tolerate, and deplore.” Barbara Rosenwein, “Problems and Methods in the History of Emotions,” Passions in Context I (www.passionsincontext.de/uploads/media/01_Rosenwein. pdf), 11. Ryrie, Being Protestant, 99. John Craig, “‘Psalms, Groans and Dog-Whippers’: The Soundscape of Sacred Space in the English Parish Church, 1547–1642,” in Sacred Space in Early Modern Europe, ed. Will Coster and Andrew Spicer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 104–23. David Bagchi, “‘The Scripture Moveth us in Sundry Places’: Framing Biblical Emotions in the Book of Common Prayer and the Homilies,” in The Renaissance of Emotion, ed. Richard Meek and Erin Sullivan (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014), 45–64. The shaping of the self in and through prayer has been the subject of significant scholarship over the last two decades, especially with regard to the metaphysical poets, but prayer in Milton has appeared only on the margins of this debate: Philip C. McGuire, “Private Prayer and English Poetry in the Early Seventeenth Century,” Studies in English Literature 14 (1974): 63–77, Cynthia Garret, “The Rhetoric of Supplication: Prayer Theory in Seventeenth-­Century England,” Renaissance Quarterly 46 (1993): 328–57, Kate Narveson, “Profession or Performance? Religion in Early Modern Literary Study,” in Fault Lines and Controversies in the Study of Seventeenth-­C entury English Literature, ed. Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002), 111–29, Michael C. Schoenfeldt, Prayer and Power: George Herbert and Renaissance Courtship (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1991), Rambuss, Closet Devotions. Gary Kuchar, The Poetry of Religious Sorrow in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 9. Gail Kern Paster, Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespeare Stage (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2004), Gail Kern Paster, Katherine Rowe, and Mary Floyd-Wilson, eds., Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), Michael C. Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Richard Strier, The Unrepentant Renaissance: From Petrarch to Shakespeare to Milton (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 17–18. Robert S. White and Ciara Rawnsley, “Discrepant Emotional Awareness in Shakespeare,” in The Renaissance of Emotion, ed. Richard Meek and Erin Sullivan, 241–63 (241). Sean McDowell, “The View of the Interior: The New Body Scholarship in Renaissance/Early Modern Studies,” Literature Compass 3 (2006): 778–791 (787). See for instance David Houston Wood, Time, Narrative, and Emotion in Early Modern England (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), especially Chapter 5. See John Stachniewski, The Persecutory Imagination: English Puritanism and the Literature of Religious Despair (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987). Stephen M. Fallon, Milton among the Philosophers: Poetry and Materialism in Seventeenth-Century England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991). Philip J. Donnelly, “‘Matter’ versus Body: The Character of Milton’s Monism,” Milton Quarterly 33 (1999): 79–85, 79. For a useful summary of

22 Introduction this debate see Stephen Dobranski, Milton’s Visual Imagination: Imagery in Paradise Lost (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 20–22. 6 6 Fallon, Milton among the Philosophers, 116–7 and “Paradise Lost in Intellectual History,” in A Companion to Milton, ed. Thomas N. Corns (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), 329–47 (338). 6 7 John Rumrich, “Milton’s God and the Matter of Chaos,” PMLA 110 (1995): 1035–46 (1043). 68 John Rogers, The Matter of Revolution: Science, Poetry, and Politics in the Age of Milton (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), 5.

1 Dressing the Devotional Body

In one of Areopagitica’s enduring visual metaphors, Milton describes the effect of unchecked conformity to the Church’s rituals on the individual’s faith and practice: To him he adheres, resigns the whole ware-house of his religion, with all the locks and keyes into his custody; and indeed makes the very person of that man his religion; esteems his associating with him a sufficient evidence and commendatory of his own piety. So that a man may say his religion is now no more within himself, but is becom a dividuall movable […] his religion comes home at night, praies, is liberally supt, and sumptuously laid to sleep […] his religion walks abroad at eight, and leavs his kind entertainer in the shop trading all day without his religion. (CPW 2:544) His purpose being to explain how “a man may be a heretic in truth […] if he believe things only because his pastor says so” (CPW 2:543), and to alert the Parliament in 1644 to the threat of ecclesiastical uniformity and control over the licensing the press, Milton condemns reliance on external aids for devotional performance. The established Church’s “muddy pool of conformity and tradition” (CPW 2:543) is shown to permit personal absolution of responsibility for one’s own faith and discharge of salvation to the divines. The inevitable outcome of this model is an outof-body religious experience: “religion is now no more within himself, but is become a dividuall movable.” The self undergoes a split, by which the inward and outward are no longer reconciled. Religion is reduced to an extractable entity and spiritual faith is replaced by material coordinates. “No more within himself,” religion adopts a managerial role as a superintendent that directs and surveys the churchgoer and his trade activities, while conformity develops into wilful enslavement and subjugation to the institution that holds “the locks and keyes into his custody.” This chapter investigates the “dividuall movables” that Milton identifies within the Church and that he enlists in his antiprelatical prose to deconstruct the embodied religion of Laud’s liturgical innovations.

24  Dressing the Devotional Body J. C. Davis has summarized the danger of formality, as seen by Milton and his contemporaries: it “could invert religious priorities, divert pious effort into idolatry or atheism, and trap in immaturity those sincerely pursuing godliness.”1 For Milton, the material manifestation of this danger is the ecclesiastical dress worn by the Church of England ministers, and re-enacting Catholic practices that “sought to transform an active and engaged congregation into a passive and pliant flock.”2 The chapter traces Milton’s references to linen as examples of an embodied uniformity in public devotion, which paradoxically leads to a disembodied experience of religion, as in the example of Areopagitica. It reads Milton’s lists of linen vestments as a rhetorical strategy of inventorying that brings to the foreground the commodification of faith and that fragments the unified body of the Church the bishops seek to uphold. The last part of the chapter juxtaposes the disembodied devotion of congregations to the Lady’s role in A Mask Presented at Ludlow Castle, performed in 1634 and first published in 1637, and reads her performance as Milton’s early vision of an alternative model of embodied faith whereby the integrity of the Lady’s body remains constant, material, and whole, against Comus’s materialistic and divided theatricality. Although it is tempting to study the dishonest conjurer, Comus, as the stage alter-ego of the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud, the juxtaposition does not intend to map Milton’s reformation politics as they emerge from his polemic writing on to his early work, especially given that “in 1634, so far as we know, Milton had not yet broken with the established church.”3 In placing his masque next to his radical early prose, and demonstrating the role he carves in both for the body in worship, the chapter argues that Milton does not treat dramatic and devotional experiences as segregated but seeks their mutual reform by advancing a participatory and self-governing audience.

“A Linnen Sock over It”: Material Bodies in Church From May 1641 to April 1642, Milton produced five tracts castigating the state of the English church for cultivating a disparity between the letter and the spirit of worship, and calling for the abolition of the bishops and any form of customary worship that spiritually impoverished the people driving them to idolatrous piety. Milton’s rhetorical strategy in these tracts is deemed to be one of excess, fraught with images of disease and fleshly appetites, physical violence, and vitriolic humour, all part of his attempt to confine rationality and historical reality in memorable images of “carnal rhetoric,” appealing to the senses instead of engaging with doctrinal matters, while seeking “a redefinition of the term ‘doctrine’ so as to remove it from the theoretical to the practical level.”4 Milton is certainly preoccupied with the excesses of the body, yet his

Dressing the Devotional Body  25 language betrays a further fixation with what covers the body and how this body is displayed. A case in point is his argument in an Apology against a Pamphlet (1642): A Bishops foot that hath all his toes maugre the gout, and a linnen Sock over it, is the aptest embleme of the Prelate himselfe. Who being a pluralist, may under one Surplice which is also linnen, hide foure benefices besides the metropolitan toe, and sends a fouler stench to heaven, then that which this young queasinesse reches at. (CPW 1:894) Noting Milton’s “unknowing obsession with the body, or the lower parts of it,” Annabel Patterson argues that “there is almost too much going on here, too fast, for the reader to take it all in, though the general effect must be distaste.”5 The diseased foot of the bishop is an example of Milton’s well-known metaphor of the corrupt body politic that requires amputation of its contaminated limbs to recover its health. References to the bishop’s foot are recurrent in his tracts and constitute part of the Martin-esque rhetoric, as in the example from Milton’s Of Reformation (1641), which features the most memorable instance of the metaphor: “we must first of all begin roundly to cashier, and cut away from the publick body the noysom, and diseased tumor of Prelacie” (CPW 1:598).6 The image of the afflicted foot in the Apology reiterates the idea that bishops are an ailment to the state, but it is the detail of the foot’s cover that heightens the effect of Milton’s attack. The “linnen Sock” is the “aptest emblem” for a Bishop because it joins stage conventions of dress with ecclesiastical dress. Commenting on this sock, Don Wolfe writes that Milton “stoops to a low level of abuse. ‘Weares a Sock’ seems to be a pun on the sock as a symbol for comedy” (CPW 1:894). Milton had used the symbolism of the sock in his early poem, L’Allegro (“Then to the well-trod stage anon, / If Jonson’s learned sock be on” ll. 131–2), and in his edition of the poem, John Carey explains the significance of the sock: “low-heeled slipper, mark of the comic actor on the Greek and Roman stage. The tragic actor wore buskins.”7 Critics have used the reference to Jonson and comedy as evidence of Milton’s playgoing experience, but Milton’s use of the sock in his radical prose shows that the term’s appeal is not necessarily due to direct experience, but due to the sock’s emblematic value.8 The symbolic associations of the sock with comedy and stage actors transform his enemies into actors and their arguments into false, theatrical statements. Earlier in the Apology, when Milton accuses Bishop Joseph Hall for “likening these grave controversies to a piece of Stagery, or Scene-worke where his owne Remonstrant whether in Buskin or Sock must of all right be counted the chiefe player”

26  Dressing the Devotional Body (CPW 1:879–80), he makes the connection between comedians and prelates even more explicit:9 For if it be unlawful to sit and behold a mercenary Comedian personating that which is least unseemely for a hireling to doe, how much more blamefull is it to endure the sight of as vile things acted by persons either enter’d, or presently to enter into the ministery, and how much more foule and ignominious for them to be the actors. (CPW 1:888) Ministers are here denounced as actors in front of an imagined audience that has to suffer ‘the sight’ of their spiritual leaders’ dishonest actions. In the years after the Reformation, the church and the stage came to occupy the same arena “being in competition for essentially the same audiences and a good deal of the same ideological and cultural terrain.”10 Arnold Hunt’s study has shown that a sermon audience can be recreated by following the clues offered by the early modern playhouse’s audience, while Frank Kermode has connected the two groups based on their ability “to listen to long, structured discourses […] with better memory and more patience than we can boast.”11 Moreover, Jeffrey Knapp has discussed the connections between liturgy and theatre in the second half of the sixteenth century: “theatre people seized on this official toleration of mere outward conformity in religion as a golden opportunity to extenuate their professional stake in ‘hypocrisy.’”12 As institutions deeply embedded in everyday life, addressing the same people and tolerating falsehood, whether in the form of passive conformity or professional deception, the church and the stage discourse mingled, especially with regard to the vestments of the clergy, which were seen as facilitating theatricality. William Tyndale denounced the importance the Catholic church attached to clothes and condemned their obsession with dress using a theatrical vocabulary to mark priests as actors: “so that in one thing or other, what in the garments, and what in the gestures all is played, in so much that before he will go to mass, he will be sure to sell him, lest Judas’s part should be left out.”13 “Play” in the period was often used for the actors on stage, and the reference to Judas’s “part” intentionally foregrounds the hypocritical attitude of the priests.14 Thomas Becon, a reformer writing during Mary’s Catholic regime, made the connection more explicit: “Yee [priests] come unto your altars, as a gameplayer unto his stage” in “gay, gawdie, gallant, gorgious game-player’s garments.”15 For these writers, as for Milton, prelacy meets theatricality in the liturgical dress. His emphasis in the Apology is as much on identifying the ministers as comedians as it is on warning of the moral consequences (“blamefull”) their performance has for the spectators. The conscience of the congregation is threatened not only by the theatrical tradition of the “linnen Sock” and the stage spectacles of

Dressing the Devotional Body  27 the Church, but by the embodied material practices of the bishops, and in particular their linen vestments. Recent work by social historians such as John Styles and Alice Dolan has demonstrated the centrality of linen in the early modern period and its importance for national and international commercial, as well as domestic, bonds. “Touching linen was a universal experience in daily life,” and in the form of dress, linen came in direct and intimate contact with the body, covering it, and endowing it with a sense of decency and respectability that became most prominent in the eighteenth-century use of the fabric.16 Linen’s significant value is evident from the period’s inventories that catalogue it straight after silver plate, making it a luxury item:17 “white linen was an expensive commodity, expensive to produce and to keep clean and was thus a statement of reasonable wealth and status.”18 The import of linen in the years leading up to the Reformation constituted a major portion of the English trade, and it was one of the main activities of the Mercers of London, the company that dominated the English import and export operations from the early Middle Ages up to the end of the sixteenth century.19 The large extent of linen’s commercial and industrial use was due to the fabric’s adaptability: “Without it[linen],” argues Leslie Clarkson, “the range of textile materials to clothe the body, to keep it warm, comfortable and fashionable, would have been much restricted.”20 Linen’s versatile character and the long-standing tradition of its trade and exploitation made it an important asset for the English state. As church vestments were predominantly made of linen, ecclesiastical apparel was one of the luxurious goods on display in the context of early modern worship. If linen and its trade were seen as a profitable national enterprise, however, the continuation of the fabric’s prominent use in church was unwelcome. In medieval times, Thomas Aquinas had defended the extravagance of the clerical dress because of its potential “to signify the nobility of their (priests) office and of divine worship.”21 Nevertheless, early in the years of the Reformation, Tyndale attacked the bishops in terms that anticipate Milton’s rhetoric not only in terms of the theatricality of the bishops but in their extravagant garments: “Behold the monsters, how they are disguised with mitres, crosiers, and hats: with crosses, pillars, and poleaxes; and with three crowns!”22 In Reformation England, liturgical dress’s “highly visible” nature and set of hierarchies that complemented it became a regular point of disputation between the established church and those disappointed by the church’s reluctance to dispense with ceremonies and accessories altogether. 23 The 1559 Book of Common Prayer reinstated the special apparel for the priests (of alb and cope or chasuble) that its 1552 predecessor had sought to suppress, meaning that the visual status of the priest as separate from the laity was restored by Elizabeth I’s injunctions, which aimed to control the clerical elite. 24

28  Dressing the Devotional Body The controversy over vestments remained unresolved during the reign of Charles I, and the clergy’s high degree of visibility was maintained and emphasized further after the succession of William Laud to the office of Archbishop of Canterbury in 1633, where he instigated a programme that required “that awe, fear, and reverence (that God’s presence in church demanded) had to take a directly physical form,” and the Laudians exhibited “an intense concern with the material fabric of the church and a heightened sense of the value of ecclesiastical ornament and decoration.”25 The passionate advocacy of the “beauty of holiness” stemmed from an anxiety that the rejection of the rituals and visual ornamentations of the church denied liturgy its sacred character. Responding to the charge of high treason shortly before his execution in 1645, Laud’s reply contained his vision: But all that I laboured for in this particular was, that the external Worship of God in this Church, might be kept up in Uniformity and Decency, and in some Beauty of Holiness. And this the rather, because first I found that with the Contempt of the Outward Worship of God, the Inward fell away apace, and Profaneness began boldly to shew it self. 26 For Laud, external, physical forms of faith, such as episcopal vestments, were necessary conditions to uphold the inward belief and participation in God’s worship. “Uniformity and Decency” were essential elements in the liturgy, securing the believers’ spiritual commitment, as well as the social rank and recognition of God’s representatives. Integrity, dignity, and visibility within the local community were the indispensable benefits of linen church vestments. The distinction that the garments were called on to signify and assert was much debated by reformers who denounced the special status of priests and argued that such material ceremonies reinforced rather than severed the church’s bonds with its idolatrous Catholic past. Clause XIV of the “Root and Branch” petition expressed the people’s suspicion of vestments: XIV. The great Conformity and likenesse both continued and encreased of our Church to the Church of Rome, in vestures, postures, Ceremonies and Administrations, namely as the Bishops Rochets, and the Lawne sleeves, the 4. cornerd Cap, the Cope and Surplisse, the Tippit, the Hood, and the Canonicall Coate, the Pulpit clothed, especially now of late with the Jesuites Badge upon them every way. 27 Ecclesiastical dress, in the shape of the “lawn sleeves” and the “4 cornered cap,” captured the imagination of satirists and emerged as an appropriate emblem for the hypocrisy of the church, covering the

Dressing the Devotional Body  29 bishops’ moral degeneration with a lavish exterior. A case in point is the 1641 anti-­episcopal satire, Lambeth Faire: Wherein You Have All the Bishops Trinkets Set to Sale, published anonymously and displaying on its frontispiece the woodcut of a colossal bishop in extravagant dress collapsing on his chair. The pamphlet, reprinted in 1642 under the name of its author, the Leveller Richard Overton, is representative of publications that flourished after the collapse of press censorship in July 1641; these were often directed against Laud and his Arminian liturgical practices and his alleged involvement in the dissolution of the Parliament by Charles I few days before exasperated Londoners attacked Lambeth Palace, the episode that inspired the satire. 28 The word “trinket” in the title captures the deceitful nature characteristic of trade and idolatry as both practises are firmly rooted in the paradoxical combination of faith in the word of the Church and of the merchant-and profit, or else in the interdependence between material and immaterial negotiations. Locating exchanges of faith for profit in a “fair” selling “trinkets,” Reformation authors satirised the materialistic spirit of the established church in England by associating it with Catholic practices. As David Kaula writes with reference to the famous Shakespearean peddler, Autolycus, “again and again such words as ‘trumpery’ and ‘trinkets’ appear in the Protestant diatribes against what were considered the mercenary and idolatrous practices of selling indulgences, crucifixes, rosaries, medals, candles and other devotional objects.”29 According to Kirste Milne, “the fair was a well-worn metaphor, fit for a sententious sermon or a swipe at Catholicism,” but in the 1640s “re-animated to attack the hierarchy of the Laudian church.”30 In the case of Lambeth Faire, the trinkets for sale dominating the frontispiece are the large, lavish ecclesiastical garments worn by the archbishop, who has sunk with grief into his ostentatious popish seat (“S. Peters Chaire”) lamenting the assault on his estate. The bishop’s garments are luxuriously exaggerated in size and style, as they appear to be completely swamping a body whose actual corporeal shape is lost under the sumptuous folds of the dress. In the spirit of many anti-episcopalian tracts, satires, and dramatic dialogues, Overton’s verse criticizes the materiality of devotion promoted by Laud’s church government in the 1630s, denouncing its fixation with garments, crosses, crosiers, and other ceremonial paraphernalia by paralleling episcopacy to a mercantile culture keen on maximising profits. The bishops are depicted in the narrative as pedlars trading in Lambeth, loudly, and desperately, asserting the glamorous quality of their products and the religious authority that comes with wearing them: Come buy lawn sleeves. I have no money took, Here, try them on, you’l like a Bishop looke. … Come hither friend, and buy this silken Gowne,

30  Dressing the Devotional Body I’m sure you cannot match’t in Lambeth Towne: In this same Gown, did Canterburies Grace, At High-Commission shew his gracelesse face; Many a storme, and shower it will abide, Yea, and a world of knavery ‘t will hide.31 Denouncing the commodification of religion, the pamphlet derides the fact that a spiritual human activity (worshipping) has been compromised by Laud and his prelates and has been replaced by a predominantly material one (trading). Milton participated in the controversy not through satirical verse like Overton, but via his polemical writing, castigating in his antiprelatical tracts the state of the English church for cultivating a disparity between the letter and the spirit of worship and calling for the abolition of the bishops and any form of customary worship that spiritually impoverished the people, driving them to idolatrous piety.

Inventorying Dress In the opening of Of Reformation, Milton rails against the state of the Church before the Reformation, and by avoiding to name the Catholic church, he implicitly draws similarities with Laud’s party: They hallow’d it (the body), they fum’d it, they sprincl’d it, they be deck’t it, not in robes of pure innocency, but of pure Linnen, with other deformed, and fantastic dresses in Palls, and Miters, gold, and guegaw’s fetcht from Arons old wardrobe, or the Flamins vestry. (CPW 1:521) “They” is left ambiguous, implicating both Catholic and England’s bishops in a model of worship where the spiritual enlightenment of priest and individual, the “robes of pure innocency,” is replaced by the accessories of ceremony, “pure Linnen.” The covering of the body of the church in linen debases it to a concrete and highly spectacular form. “Arons old wardrobe” is a sarcastic reference to the bishops’ claims that ecclesiastical hierarchy and its visualisation in the liturgical dress were founded in the Scriptures, in God’s appointment of Aaron as the first priest, which Milton explicitly denounces in his Reason of Church Government, stating that “it is impossible to found a Prelaty upon the imitation of this Priesthood” (CPW 1:767). For Milton, it is only on a metaphorical level that the finery of the robes is to be celebrated, remaining truthful to the biblical account of Isaiah 61.10: “for he hath clothed me with the garments of salvation, he hath covered me with the robe of righteousness, as a bridegroom decketh himself with ornaments, and as a bride adorneth herself with her jewels.” Purity cannot be spectacular,

Dressing the Devotional Body  31 whereas the external material form contaminates what it seeks to dress. In Milton’s view, “Arons old wardrobe” should include what George Herbert describes as, Holiness on the head, Light and perfections on the breast, Harmonious bells below […] Thus are true Aarons drest

(“Aaron,” ll. 1–5)32

Furthermore, the verb “sprincl’d” and the reference to the “gold” material in the passage from Of Reformation are paired up again in Paradise Lost, when Satan assumes the guise of an angel: Under a coronet his flowing hair In curls on either cheek played, wings he wore Of many a coloured plume sprinkled with gold, His habit fir for speed succinct, and held Before his decent steps a silver wand (PL, III. 640–4) The “decent steps,” echoing Laud’s call for “decency,” and the attire “sprinkled with gold,” demonstrate the ease with which Satan can adopt the visual aids of liturgical devotion and how these aids actually expedite hypocrisy, allowing Milton to have “a little joke on the matter of ‘decency.’”33 The “curls” under the “Coronet” are a distorted image of Uriel’s “Locks” (l. 626), and very similar to the “Mitred Locks” (l. 112) of “the Pilot of the Galilean Lake” (l. 109) found in Milton’s Lycidas and referring to the founder of the Catholic Church, Peter. That the “Mitred Locks” are followed by a direct attack to the bishops and the “Wolf” (l. 128), i.e. the Roman Church, conveys Milton’s association of the clergy’s material accessories with their corruption and deception. In the Apology, the prelates are described as embodying “miter’d hypocrisie” (CPW 1:924), highlighting how connected the Roman and English churches are in Milton’s imagination.34 Milton’s comments on the clergy’s garments are overwhelmingly in reference to the Catholic threat of ceremony and uniformity, sharing Overton’s suspicions of “trumpery.” In his description of the Paradise of Fools in Book 3 of Paradise Lost Milton’s attack is directed both towards the representatives of the monastic life and those adopting its external aids, or “trumpery,” for salvation purposes: Embryos and idiots, eremites and friars White, black and gray, with all their trumpery. Here pilgrims roam, that strayed so far to seek

32  Dressing the Devotional Body In Golgotha him dead, who lives in heaven; And they who to be sure of paradise Dying put on the weeds of Dominic, Or in Franciscan think to pass disguised; […] A violent cross wind from either coast Blows them transverse ten thousand leagues awry Into the devious air; then might ye see Cowls, hoods and habits with their wearers tossed And fluttered into rags, then relics, beads, Indulgences, dispenses, pardons, bulls, The sport of winds: all these upwhirled aloft Fly o’er the backside of the world far off Into a limbo large and broad, since called The Paradise of Fools, to few unknown Long after, now unpeopled, and untrod (III. 474–97) Analysing the “weeds of Dominic” and “Franciscan disguise,” King has argued that “the attack includes lay people who superstitiously believe they may gain entry into heaven by donning a friar’s habit at the point of death”; church clothing is satirically condemned as a carrier of false identity and as a deceptive mechanism. 35 The uniformity they establish is as superficial as the “Cowls, Hoods, and Habits” “tost and flutter’d into Rags” that are exposed as superstitions, reformulating Milton’s comment in his Observations that “Popery, plung’d into Idolatrous and Ceremoniall Superstition, [is] the very death of all true Religion” (CPW 3:316). Milton’s vehement rhetoric in his antiprelatical tracts, repackaged in the Paradise of Fools, is addressed not only to Laud’s programme but captures a deeper distrust of external props of worship. When attacking liturgical garments, Milton often lists items and value one after the other, adopting the style of an inventory and mirroring the accounts of the material possessions of the church. The church’s commodification of worship provides Milton with a material vocabulary that resembles the fascination with images he seeks to undo. Later in the same tract, he lists again items and prices, evoking the images of luxury and sensual appeal he seeks to suppress. Now I appeale to all wise men, what an excessive wast of Treasury hath beene within these few yeares in this Land not in the expedient, but in the Idolatrous erection of Temples beautified exquisitely to out-vie the Papists, the costly and deare-bought Scandals, and snares of Images, Pictures, rich Coaps, gorgeous Altar-clothes. (CPW 1:589–90)

Dressing the Devotional Body  33 In this respect, the linen dress of the Bishops alternates between two realms of display in the seventeenth-century: the realm of ecclesiastical spectacle, and the realm of trade, enslaving “individuals and nations into an intemperate state, plunging towards purgation.”36 The incongruous attire cannot go unnoticed: They would request us to indure still the russling of their Silken Cassocks, and that we would burst our midriffes rather then laugh to see them under Sayl in all their Lawn, and Sarcenet, their shrouds, and tackle, with a geometricall rhomboides upon their heads. (CPW 1: 611–2) Milton here vividly recreates the experience of witnessing the clergy in church by drawing attention to his readers’ senses and exposing the parade of prelates as a feast for the eyes, an extravagant performance devoid of internal faith. While elsewhere he attacks the church for setting “an Enterlude to set out the pompe of Prelatisme” (CPW 1:526), here he stages such an interlude in his own tract. The reader can almost hear the rustling of the Cassocks and the invitation not to laugh actually highlights the absurdity of the scene. The bishops’ garments are again anatomized and inventoried one by one, items of clothing that seem to acquire an agency of their own and to obscure the presence of an actual body underneath them. By the time the reader has arrived at the “geometrical rhomboids,” the bishops’ ridiculous appearance is complete with caps as measured and disciplined as the study of geometry would require. All that is seen, heard, and absorbed is the linen dress. The accumulated effect of terms such as lawn, sayl, sarcenet, shrouds, and tackle, is to position the spectacle not only in the field of church clothing, but in the wider maritime industry as well, since the items listed designate the equipment of ships. Reducing prelates to the fabric of their episcopal garments conjures in Milton’s mind images of sailing, the other sphere of activity in which linen was central. As Clarkson has shown, “the industrial uses of linen were large, particularly for shipping where it was in demand for sails, ropes, and hatch covers and the like.”37 Milton then humorously, and effectively, extracts the linen garments from the church and places them within the commercial context of shipping, transforming in the process the prelates from human beings to vessels of commercial wealth. Such rhetorical strategies connect Milton to anti-episcopalian satires, which often visually dramatized the church as a ship, such as in the pamphlet by Thomas Stirry, whose A Rot Amongst the Bishops, published in 1641, portrays Laud as the captain of a ship navigated towards hell. Helen Pierce, who has studied the visual culture of anti-episcopacy,

34  Dressing the Devotional Body lists the image of the church as ship as an established motif in the vernacular art of satirical convention: established motifs with roots in vernacular art—the gateway to Hell as the jaws of a monster, the church imagined as a great ship, the dark she-devil accompanying Bishop Wren—are fused with topical images such as the cannons, and a flag raised by Laud tied to a papal staff, which point to, and raise concerns about, current, contentious issues.38 Milton’s description of the bishops as sailing boats and their garments as sailing equipment provides the reader with an image as detailed and imaginative as satirical woodcuts, underscoring the clergy’s corruption, their ostentation, and their obsession with the display of their linen garments. Milton’s strategy of condemning the uniformity of Laud’s programme, “the crust of Formalitie,” as he calls it (CPW 1:522), by dissecting its ceremonial appearance into clothing items highlights their absurdity and satirically unravels the prelates’ hypocrisy. Most importantly, however, it exposes the bishops as goods for display, dehumanizes and reduces them to commodities whose gloss and beauty fascinate the observers. The above examples are characteristic of Milton’s polemic strategy in his antiprelatical tracts: he resists the hypocritical conformity sought by the ceremonies of religious observance by lifting clothing items out of context, out of the decent and uniform performance of liturgy as a whole, and exposing them as empty of any devotional value. By making linen sleeves, socks, caps, stand out, the materiality and greed of the Laudian church is underscored and “the crust of Formality” is constantly broken to show its foundation on disjointed commodities and body parts. Milton reacts to homogeneity by focusing on parts, on individuals, by fragmenting and by constantly dismembering the form—the linen garments enable him to deny essence to custom and to expose the Church as physically decadent under its clothing. Milton is aware that for the reformation to be successful in its aim to liberate individuals from the spiritual bondage of ceremonies, an attack on ecclesiastical garments is not enough. In his 1649 Eikonoklastes, his response to Eikon Basilike, attributed to Charles I as the king’s meditations and circulated shortly after his execution, he concludes that it is not the unfrocking of a Priest, the unmitring of a Bishop, and the removing him from off the Presbyterian shoulders, that will make us a happy Nation, no, if other things as great in the Church, and in the rule of life both economicall and politicall be not lookt into and refom’d. (CPW 2:550)

Dressing the Devotional Body  35 By 1649, it seems that Milton comes to acknowledge the futility of rhetorically seeking to restructure the church if that is not part of a broader agenda for national reform, but in his early 1640s pamphlets his style aims exactly at such acts of undressing, of stripping off both garments and power, by particularizing the bishops’ clothes and exposing the layers of ostentation of the church establishment.

“The Ghost of a Linen Decency” The persistent and idolatrous embodiment of devotion in material paraphernalia ultimately distances the congregation who are left inert, as in this instance from The Reason of Church Government: For seeing such a wide and terrible distance between religious things and themselves, and that in respect of a woodden table & the perimeter of holy ground about it, a flagon pot, and a linnen corporal, the Priest esteems their lay-ships unhallow’d and unclean, they fear religion with such a fear as loves not, and think the purity of the Gospell too pure for them, and that any uncleannesse is more sutable to their unconsecrated estate. (CPW 1:843) While listing here again the ceremonial parts of worship, Milton is concerned with how the embodied devotion of the bishops leads the petitioners to question their own embodiment of the gospel as inappropriate and impossible, considering their bodies as unfit to perform their own faith. Although the priests “think by these gaudy glisterings to stirre up the devotion of the rude multitude” (CPW 1:828), the end result is a physically and spiritually marginalised and passive presence, as opposed to passionate. For Milton, this amounts to the disembodied relationship that believers develop with their devotion and that this chapter started with when discussing religion as “dividuall movable.” While in the antiprelatical tracts Milton attacks the body of uniformity by dismembering it, in Areopagitica he moves from the material to the haunting and enslaving presence of linen. The “unfrocking of priest” rhetorical strategy gives way here to an acknowledgement of the metaphysical power dress has and inflicts on the believers’ conscience. Published in November 1644 as Milton’s response to the Parliament’s Licensing Order of June 1643, which sought to secure the monopoly on printing held by the Company of Stationers, Areopagitica is a treatise against the material regulations on print that for Milton can have unbearable internal consequences on national and individual levels. Milton famously calls for the permission of the publication of all books and for the readers’ trial, meaning the exercise of their reason and choice between beneficial and pernicious books. Books and the intellectual labour

36  Dressing the Devotional Body of the author are examined next to metaphors of trade, meat, disease, and architecture in order to highlight their differences to solely commercial and tangible goods. A reference to the clothing industry is used to juxtapose commodities to the unregulated search for knowledge and truth: Truth and understanding are not such wares as to be monopoliz’d and traded in by tickets and statutes, and standards. We must not think to make a staple commodity of all the knowledge in the Land, to mark and licence it like our broad cloath, and our wooll packs. (CPW 2: 535–6) The clothing trade strictly regulated and monopolized is similar yet different to the field of intellectual pursuit and writing. Blair Hoxby explains that truth and understanding are “vital wares of public use and necessity whose production and exchange must not be driven into the hands of a few men.”39 In other words, based on Milton’s argument, books and authorial labour are understood as products to be used, and truth and knowledge become physical items to be exchanged, yet such products cannot be restricted by the monopolies imposed on the circulation of other merchandise. As in the antiprelatical tracts, the commodification of worship finds its way into Milton’s style, turning his tracts into an imaginary catalogue of church vestments and body parts anatomized and paraded in their luxury; in Areopagitica the market ideology which controls human activity infiltrates Milton’s vocabulary, placing “its shadowy print on much of the imagery on the tract.”40 Restricting truth and knowledge via material monopolies carries for Milton the stigma of popish practices. Linking prepublication censorship to Catholicism, Milton writes: How many other things might be tolerated in peace, and left to conscience, had we but charity, and were it not the chief strong hold of our hypocrisie to be ever judging one another. I fear yet this iron yoke of outward conformity hath left a slavish print upon our necks; the ghost of a linnen decency yet haunts us. (CPW 2:563–4) Clothing features not as the material commodity we are familiar with but as a supernatural re-appearance of the spirit of popery. The matter of pre-publication censorship is for Milton a tyranny equivalent to that of the imposition of custom worship in Church. He associates freedom of press with religious freedom, defending in the process the right of sectarian beliefs against a uniform model of devotion. Milton’s rhetorical gestures in this passage move between the material and the immaterial: the images of the “iron yoke” and the “linnen

Dressing the Devotional Body  37 decency” work together to establish the real and inescapable materiality of the church, whereas the images of “slavish print” and the haunting “ghost” testify to the internal subjection produced by idolatry. The tangibility of these images resonates with the process of producing paper from linen rags. Milton fears that the prelates are attempting to transmit on the printing press the memory of Catholicism implicit in their garments, and that uniform religious worship, which controls private faith, corresponds to political absolutism, which controls public expression. Earlier, Milton had argued that licensing of the press is a traditionally Catholic practice: “this project of licencing crept out of the Inquisition, was catcht up by our Prelates, and hath caught some of our Presbyters” (CPW 2:493). “The slavish print upon our necks” turns doubly significant, signalling not just metaphorical tyranny, but denouncing the linen-­ clad bishops for imposing material restrictions on print. In a treatise foregrounding the physical properties of books by imagining books as men, full of blood and life, the bishops are imagined as printers whose censorship is grafted on the people’s bodies. Although in Areopagitica Milton has moved away from the satirical demarcation of bishops as items of clothing and members of the body, linen emerges as the haunting reminder of the underlying threat of material forms on individual conscience. What is at stake here is memory, memory transcribed on linen clothes, the constant visual and material reminder of Catholic bondage that cannot be erased. Milton—and the English people—cannot escape this memory, and in his attack against the clergy’s clothing, Milton tries to declare Catholic ceremonies dead only to acknowledge in the process that they might not be, that the ghost of linen is still haunting England. Read from a Derridian perspective, the ghost of linen decency becomes a specter, the “becoming-body”: The specter is a paradoxical incorporation, the becoming-body, a certain phenomenal and carnal form of the spirit. It becomes, rather, some ‘thing’ that remains difficult to name: neither soul nor body, and both one and the other. For it is flesh and phenomenality that give to the spirit its spectral apparition, but which disappear right away in the apparition, in the very coming of the revenant or the return of the specter.41 Seen as specters, the linen garments in Milton’s imagination are both material and immaterial, at the same time disappearing while becoming. Dress stands between the metaphysical (or else the spiritual degeneration of the people) and the physical presence of ceremonies and conformity, with linen as the material that allows for memory to be inscribed both on dress and in paper. In a different context, Susan Stabile has argued that “the transformation of rags into paper resembles the transmission of memory to written forms,” a process that incites Milton’s fears of

38  Dressing the Devotional Body prelatical hypocrisy and that conveys his investment in what Jones and Stallybrass have called the “animatedness of clothes”:42 To understand the significance of clothes in the Renaissance (they write), we need to undo our own social categories, in which clothes are prior to objects, wearers to what is worn. We need to understand the animatedness of clothes, their ability to ‘pick up’ subjects, to mold and shape them both physically and socially, to constitute subjects through their power as material memories.43 It is the materiality of the garments that Milton picks on and magnifies in order to remove any potential spiritual meaning from them. His attack against the whole is to focus on the parts and to treat linen garments as commodities, describing and ridiculing them as such, and resisting their appeal to a uniform model of devotion. By the time he writes Areopagitica, however, the parts seem to have united back into a haunting presence. The haunting nature of the linen-clad body has private resonances for Milton in his later life: acting “as an important canvas through which to navigate the rituals of the life-cycle,” dress clothes his wife’s apparition in the sonnet “Methought I saw my late espoused Saint,” probably written around 1658.44 In the sonnet, Milton describes his encounter with the ghost of his late wife as a re-enactment of ancient Greek and biblical stories combined. The sonnet ascribes a material substance to the apparition captured in the ghost’s garments: “Came vested all in white, pure as her mind: / Her face was veiled” (ll. 9–10). Here, the dress’s ability to haunt, to transcend time and be constantly present, is for Milton a welcome illusion of his wife’s existence. Hugh Dawson reads the wife’s dress in the sonnet as matching “what Milton remembered of her exemplary life as to confirm […] that she was one of those souls to be gathered into bliss at the Resurrection.”45 This Christian perspective of the importance of the white garment and veil again suspends time limitations and suggests a material reminder of the afterlife. “Fine linen, clean and white” is the garment that the Revelation promises for those saved (Revelation 19.8), and Milton considers his wife among them. The whiteness of the apparition’s garments is the result of the purification ritual of the Old Law, embodying the deep and inward purity that Milton advocates in his antiprelatical tracts and juxtaposes to the superficiality of pure linen. The absence of the word “ghost” and the cautious “methought” temporarily absolve Milton from potential accusations of superstitious belief in ghosts. The circle of life and death, however, that underlies the sonnet (from the mythological story of dead Alcestis coming back to life after a temporary death for her husband, to the biblical ritual of a mother giving life and surviving purification, to Milton’s own faith that he will “have full sight of her in heaven without restraint”) implies the

Dressing the Devotional Body  39 constant presence of the body that has perished.46 Alcestis in the grave, the mother with “child-bed taint,” Milton’s wife and her garments all function as spectres, both material and immaterial, disappearing while becoming, much like the “ghost of linen decency.” Their ambiguous presence interrupts Milton’s present time and exposes it as fragmentary; the last line, “day brought back my night,” signals this sense of haunting time that is constantly “brought back” to reconfigure the present. Anna Nardo’s interpretation of the sonnet touches upon the crucial combination of matter and spirit that the spectre entails: “it is important to realize that he (Milton) sees a real woman, not an unidentified ideal […] the child-bearing woman becomes the saintly ideal, both a flesh-and-blood woman and an angel.”47 In his desire to see his wife and be reunited with her, Milton imagines an apparition that escapes the past and manifests itself triumphantly in the present. While the last line of the sonnet (“I waked, she fled, and day brought back my night”) blurs the boundaries between past and present, it also captures Milton’s uncomfortable experience of the haunting of time and material memories. Milton’s “I waked, she fled” seeks to affirm his wife’s apparition as out of reach and firmly fixed in the past. Yet, this rejection of the ghost might only be a response to desiring the ghost. Jacqueline Pearson has argued that writing about ghosts permits “speaking the unspeakable”; in Milton’s case, writing about the haunting apparition permits him to experience and indulge in the materiality and display of the past that he rejects as ‘unspeakable’ in church.48 His affirmation that “I waked, she fled” might indeed not expel, but prove the effectiveness of the spectre. By declaring his wife’s apparition a fleeting dream, Milton here utters a “performative that seeks to reassure but first of all reassure itself by assuring itself, for nothing is less sure, that what one would like to see dead is indeed dead.”49 In this very human and private instance of his work, he expresses how the grip of material memory on the individual works, and he reveals—while confidently asserting the opposite—that he cannot be sure (and he might not wish to be sure) that his wife’s apparition is forever located in the past. The brief analysis of the wife’s apparition demonstrates Milton’s understanding that ghosts manifest themselves in material ways and that such materiality temporarily satisfies human yearning for salvation, but it inevitably condemns the people to spiritual darkness. The “ghost of linnen decency” in Areopagitica reveals similar sentiments: Catholicism is dead, yet present in the linen garments of the church, and seeking to sink the nation in enslavement. Yet the sonnet gives as an image of a less dogmatic Milton who seems to recognize and share the desire for the material experience of the past, experiencing “what everyone alive knows without learning and without knowing, namely that the dead can often be more powerful than the living.”50 As the apparition of his wife reveals the power of her presence over the poet, Milton tries to declare

40  Dressing the Devotional Body Catholic ceremonies dead only to acknowledge in the process that they are not. The “ghost of linen decency” verifies the hold of materially embodied worship in the early modern imagination.

Shifting Bodies in Milton’s Mask The spectacle put on by the bishops in the Church of England is fragmented and deconstructed by Milton, reduced to individual items of vestments and body parts, in an attack against the uniform wholeness presented to the congregation which creates a morally dubious distance. The last part of this chapter explores a model of embodied devotion that Milton proposes as alternative to the one of the church and in which the participants experience devotion both as audience and as performers, reconciling in the process external and internal expression. The view that Milton’s 1634 masque “reforms” the genre from a spectacular celebration of Caroline royal power and wealth to a carrier of radical ideology that prioritizes individual conscience over external authority has long been established, although it has not been without its critics. 51 Skantze’s reading of the masque reminds us of the close proximity between concerns about the stage and the threat of popery: The fears resemble those that inform Protestant fury over papist pretense […] In the effort to make chaste the theatrical, Milton can also clean up the slovenly false theatre of Roman Catholicism while salvaging the enlivening drama of the Christian life for Protestant believers.52 In pointing out the connection between the masque and religious reformation, her reading follows that of Norbrook, who claims that Milton’s masque dramatizes Protestant concerns against “idolatry” and the “Whore of Babylon,” both associated during the Reformation with popery.53 The last part of the chapter expands on this analysis by suggesting that Milton does not subordinate dramatic form to a religious agenda and by reading his masque as more than an allegorical platform for Milton’s attack on Catholicism and Laudianism. Drawing on the generic conventions of the masque, and in particular Comus’s disguise, the anti-masquers’ transformation, and the Lady’s entrapment and release, this chapter focuses the reform debate on audiences and the role of their bodies in encounters with one another and with the divine. Creating multiple audiences for multiple performances within the same masque, Milton educates his readers and witnesses to a participatory model of embodied performance. The performance that dominates the Mask is Comus’s deceitful revelry. The effects of his performance on his followers is evident in the stage directions on his entrance: “with him a rout of Monsters, headed

Dressing the Devotional Body  41 like sundry sorts of wild Beasts, but otherwise like Men and Women, their Apparel glistering. They come in making a riotous and unruly noise, with Torches in their hands.”54 Comus is introduced as the archetypal hypocrite who alters the state of those he encounters. The rout’s “glistering” clothing reflects the “gaudy glisterings” of the clergy in the Apology and it combines the superficial and extravagant performance of the rout with the hypocrisy of the priests. Before Comus takes the stage, the Attendant Spirit has alluded to the effect Comus’s show has on his immediate audience: Off’ring to every weary Traveller His orient liquor in a Crystal Glass, To quench the drought of Phoebus, which as they taste, (For most do taste through fond intemperate thirst) Soon as the Potion works, their human count’nance, Th’ express resemblance of the gods, is chang’d Into some brutish form of Wolf, or Bear, Or Ounce, or Tiger, Hog, or bearded Goat, All other parts remaining as they were (ll. 64–72) The imagery of beasts indulging in moral depravity is later used by Milton in his Sonnet 12 to insult the Presbyterian ministers for condemning his divorce tracts as schismatic. In the Sonnet, the “Owls and Cuckoos, Asses, Apes and Dogs” (l. 4) “bawl for freedom in their senseless mood” (l. 9) and call for “licence” instead of “liberty” (l. 11). The clergy’s “barbarous noise” (l. 3) mirrors the “barbarous dissonance” (l. 550) of the revellers. The bestiality of Comus’s followers, which stands for their sexual and rational degeneration, evolves into the bestiality of the church authorities, symbolising their cacophonous attempt to control individual expression. The animalistic imagery is effective in denying the prelates and Comus’s company reason, and thus, humanity. As Erica Fudge has noted, “to assert human status writers have to make exclusions. Some humans are aligned with animals: in fact, some humans are not human at all.”55 Milton here follows a similar principle: he deprives priests and anti-masquers of the humanity God originally endowed them with. This challenge to God’s authority is a common accusation against the commercial stage. Barish has explained that “plays, like players, threaten God’s primacy by challenging his uniqueness; they attempt to wrest from him his most inimitable attribute, his demiurgy.”56 William Prynne, for instance, writes that to dress up and act as that which we are not is “to obliterate that most glorious image which God himselfe hath stamped on us.”57 For Prynne, the stage is diabolical, because in its endorsement of false garments and images, it becomes “a kinde of violence

42  Dressing the Devotional Body to Gods owne Image and mens humane shapes, metamorphosing them into those idolatrous, those bruitish formes, in which God never made them.”58 In the late sixteenth century, Stephen Gosson also associates plays with idols and lists the harmful effects of plays on the audience: Because we are so asotted with these delightes, so blinded with the loue, and drunken with the swéetnes of these vanities, that greedely we flocke together, and with our brainesicke assemblies not vnlyke to the Troyanes hale in the horse (…) we professe Christ, and set vp the doctrine of the deuill; wee holde with the hare and run with the hound, heaping vp iudgement vpon our soules by this hipocrisie. 59 The “brainesicke” population cannot discern the duplicity of the spectacle on stage. Plays become a Trojan horse, seemingly full of “delightes,” “love,” and “sweetnes,” while their interior threat remains hidden and potentially destructive. Emotions of love and pleasure, instead of elevating the audience’s experience, turn against the body, which is left “blinded” and “brainsicke.” Gosson here uses a Homeric image of pagan antiquity and transforms it into a religious emblem for hypocrisy. The danger of the stage is its ability to excite worshipful behaviour towards the counterfeit show. The hypocrites, then, not only become the “idolatrous, bruitish forms” that Prynne warned against, but they become idols themselves. The description of the audience alludes to a godly congregation that “greedely flocke together” and “professe Christ,” yet the dishonesty of the spectacle incurs unfavourable “judgement upon our soules.” Gosson’s articulation of the theatre-goer’s experience as one of devotional practice highlights the similarities for the individual in the two spheres, theatre and church. The turn to bestiality, then, in Milton’s Mask resonates with antitheatrical statements made against the stage’s transformative effect on the individual.60 The metamorphosis of the travellers into riotous beasts in the Mask, caused by the trickster Comus, destabilizes God’s authority, and so does the clergy’s tyranny that Milton denounces in his polemic prose. The performance in both cases is of a distorted worship, “a false, thoroughly carnal religion, replete with ‘rites’ (line 125) and ‘Priests’ (line 136),” where God’s power has been usurped by his earthly representatives and devotion is embodied in disjointed forms and accessories.61 The deformed revellers are unaware of their condition, their reason and body separated, and uncritically accepting uniformity “and they, so perfect is their misery, / Not once perceive their foul disfigurement” (ll. 73–4). Milton draws attention to the dangers of received embodiment by inventing for Comus a genealogy of deception and mental decadence. Comus’s father is Bacchus “that first from out the purple Grape / Crusht the sweet poison of misused Wine” (ll. 46–7), and his mother

Dressing the Devotional Body  43 is Circe “whose charmed Cup / Whoever tasted, lost his upright shape” (ll. 50–1). According to Leonora Brodwin, “Circe had become perhaps the most familiar Renaissance symbol of spiritual degradation.”62 The spiritual degradation effected on Circe’s victims mirrors the state of irrationality that results from drinking and whose immorality antitheatrical writers deplore. Gosson, for instance, associates drinking with human vices when speaking of a stage-audience “drunken with the swéetnes of these vanities.”63 Philip Stubbes writes of the incompatibility between drinking and being a Christian: “And a man once drunk with wine or strong drink, rather resembleth a brute beast, then a Christian man […] Are not his wits and spirits, as it were, drowned? Is not his understanding altogether decayed?”64 Milton’s decision to use the “orient liquor” as the means of transformation, and to endow Comus with a heritage of drinking, expresses a similar anxiety about the spiritually incapacitating effects of sensual delights and spectacles. The “drowned” “wits and spirits” leave the body imbalanced and irrationally immersed in consumption. Drinking satisfies bodily consumption and offers momentarily relief from “fond intemperate thirst,” yet the excess that Comus stands for cannot be contained and received in the body of the followers without change. Like in the case of linen dress, embodied worship in the form of wine leads to a fragmented experience of devotion where mind and countenances are separated from the rest of the body, leaving the maskers “unruly” and “riotous.” While those who encounter the evil spirit in the forest are tempted by the “orient liquor,” for the Lady it is Comus’s disguise as a shepherd that she fails to decipher as the false embodiment of true religion. Aware that his “quaint habits” are likely to “breed astonishment” (l. 157), Comus decides to “appear some harmless Villager / Whom thrift keeps up about his Country gear” (ll. 166–7). The disguise is highly successful: in her first acquaintance with Comus, the Lady is not only convinced he is “harmless,” but also instantly interprets his dress as a sign of kindness, repeatedly addressing him as “gentle Shepherd” (l. 271), “gentle villager” (l. 304), “good Shepherd” (l. 307). It is only after she has been trapped in his Palace, and disguise is abandoned, that she perceives his “vizor’d falsehood” (l. 698). Comus’s choice to disguise himself is a common convention in masques, as well as a visible and material indication of his inward malice.65 Apart from fitting with the tradition of the masked villain, the disguise accentuates Comus’s hypocrisy as the reinvention of Archimago’s dress in his encounter with Redcrosse and Una in Spenser’s The Fairie Queene: At length they chaunst to meet vpon the way An aged Sire, in long blacke weedes yclad, His feete all bare, his beard all hoarie gray, And by his belt his booke he hanging had;

44  Dressing the Devotional Body Sober he seemde, and very sagely sad, And to the ground his eyes were lowly bent, Simple in shew, and voyde of malice bad, And all the way he prayed, as he went, And often knockt his brest, as one that did repent (Canto I, XXIX, 253–61)66 The show Archimago puts on is an elaborate combination of dress, accessories, and gesture. The role of posture and gesture in prayer will be examined in depth in the rest of the chapters, but what is of significance is Archimago’s “long blacke weedes.” As Guibbory has argued, “Spenser’s association of Archimago […] with the Roman Catholic Church allows Milton through his Spenserian echo to link Comus with Catholicism.”67 The role of hypocritical devotional dress reinforces this link and exposes Comus’s theatre as idolatrous as the ceremonies of the clergy either in Catholic or Laudian contexts. In the character of Comus Milton dramatizes the moral transformation possible on the individual not only by the allure of staged sin, but also by the deceptions of Catholicism. In this respect, that the Lady ends up “all chain’d up in Alabaster” (l. 661) can be interpreted as the visualisation of the “yoke of outward conformity” that Milton repudiates in his attack against the priests. Before the encounter with Comus, the Lady is confident that “these thoughts may startle well, but not astound / The virtuous mind” (ll. 210–1), firmly stating her conviction of her freedom of will that characterizes her throughout the play. Her entrapment, however, in “this corporal rind” (l. 664) actually reinforces the affective grasp Comus’s material ceremonies have on his audience, anticipating the “crust of Formallitie” (CPW 1:522) Milton denounces in the church. Debora Shuger’s reading of the text invites us to pay attention to the fact that the “chalice and chair are not merely enchanted props” and that the Lady’s entrapment is not simply representative of inward, spiritual conflict in the face of temptation.68 Instead, she suggests we attend to “the jarring proximity of its fairy-tale world, complete with wands, potions, and chairs, to the reality of hard, sticky flesh.”69 As in the vision of his dead wife, Milton in his masque admits the powerful and inescapable hold of the material on one’s inner conscience and piety. Despite claiming an inner freedom, the Lady is physically captured, and this can prove destructive internally as well as externally, since Comus attempts to force her into giving in pleasure. Being tied on the chair, she does not participate in the performance but is passively receptive of it, experiencing a state of “dividuall movable,” or else a division of her selfhood as a whole, which Milton speaks of in Areopagitica. That the change on Comus’s body via his clothes leads to a change in the Lady’s body, i.e., its capture, reveals concerns over bodily integrity

Dressing the Devotional Body  45 similar to those voiced by antitheatricalists with regard to cross-dressing and its effect on spectators. For instance, for Gosson, although male and female bodies and identities were signified by different clothing, the stage rendered these signs counterfeit: “to take unto us those garments that are manifest signes of another sexe, is to falsifie, forge and adulterate, contrarie to the expresse rule of the worde of God.”70 Stubbes makes the same point. “Our apparel,” he writes, Was given us as a sign distinctive to discern betwixt sex and sex, and therefore one to weare the apparel of another sex is to participate with the same, and to adulterate the verity of his own kind.71 The use of “adulterate” in both writers could refer to contaminate and corrupt, but also to defile by adultery.72 With this meaning in mind, it seems that wearing women’s garments did not only have a morally corrupting effect on the male actor, but it turned into the act of committing adultery with one’s own self. The male, putting on a female’s attire, was perceived to cheat on his God-given male person. This type of adultery is one more manifestation of the fear of effeminization Laura Levine analyses with regard to the early modern stage.73 Antitheatrical writers, like Stubbes and Gosson, suggested dress could lead one to metaphorically cheat on and abandon their relationship with God; this would constitute them effeminate since women were seen as most likely to exhibit such unrestrained immoral behaviour.74 Comus’s apparel also proves to be an invitation to sexual license. Despite the fact that Comus does not put on women’s garments, he is explicitly connected to Circe, and offers Milton the opportunity to reinterpret the fear of effeminization the stage might create. In a masque attempting to cleanse the Earl of Bridgewater’s family from a scandalous case and to strongly advocate chastity, Comus’s feminine associations and his disguise are set against the feminine virtue and honesty of the Lady.75 In her character, as Skantze has noted, Milton “creates an image of a ‘good effeminacy’, one, Milton implies, even a man might imitate.”76 Nevertheless, the temporary entrapment of the Lady still expresses the threat of dress as a symbol both of idolatrous worship and of the licentiousness of the theatre that Milton seeks to reform in his masque.77 Comus’s performance in front of the Lady, then, mirrors the ceremonies of the church and the spectacles of the stage. His disguise ignites fears of internal change produced by popery and effeminization, both of which transfigure the body into a site of blind and captive obedience, a position similar to the ritualized subjugation the believers experience in institutionalized worship. Although temporarily captive, the Lady ultimately escapes the imminent threat of disembodied and fragmented devotion caused either by liturgical conformity or spectacular displays. She exalts the significance

46  Dressing the Devotional Body of inward constancy by refusing to transform in response to the demands of whom she identifies as an “impostor” (l. 762). She exhibits awareness that she participates in two performances: one as the audience to the “impostor” in front of her, and one as a performer in front of “heaven [that] sees good” (l. 665). Even when she is temporarily absorbed by the spectacle in front of her (Comus in disguise), she is conscious of who else might be watching: “eye me blest Providence, and square my trial / To my proportion’d strength” (ll. 329–30). The affective potential of the Lady’s performance to inspire change in her audience’s bodies differs from that of Comus and the priests, which result in subjectivities immersed in the excess of the senses. When Comus hears her song, he experiences “a sacred and home-felt delight, / Such sober certainty of waking bliss” (ll. 262–3). The “waking bliss” marks the beginning of an inward transformation in Comus, who momentarily escapes the sensual attraction of his mother’s and the Sirens’ pagan song, while then “sober certainty” is the antidote to the temporary and fluctuated temperance of thirst in his followers. The affective power of song is evident again in the invocation to Sabrina and is consistent with Milton’s belief in music as a form of art capable of approaching the divine: “music becomes a symbol of transcendence rather than courtly splendour […] the lady’s prophetic voice is so powerful because it is informed by this musical quality.”78 In Milton’s masque, the song serves both to highlight the transformative effect on the listener and to engage those present in an address to the divine spirit of Sabrina. Once awake to Comus’s hypocrisy, the Lady excludes him from the “sublime notion and high mystery / That must be uttered to unfold the sage / And serious doctrine of virginity” (ll. 785–7) and describes her own potential performance as one that “should I try” “all the brute Earth would lend her nerves, and shake” (ll. 793–9). The potentially cosmic effect the Lady articulates here situates her firmly within her environment, generating an integrated response that extents from her body to that of the Earth, and places her on a stage wider than that of Comus’s palace or Ludlow Hall. On this stage, the Lady’s “rapt spirits” are to materialise into a “flame of sacred vehemence / that dumb things would be moved to sympathize,” showcasing an emotional dimension to her faith characterised by an embodied energy that connects rather than separates, as in the case of Comus or the bishops’ spectacles. The Lady’s somatic integrity not only remains intact but it also manifests in an eco-network of inner spirits, natural unspeaking things, and the Earth, that all together have the power to smash Comus’s idols, and that pre-date Stacy Alaimo’s concept of “trans-corporeality” by which human embodiment is imagined in terms of “entangled territories of material and discursive, natural and cultural, biological and textual.”79 The changes of emotional matter in her body are also changes of her environment demonstrating a mutual relationality that runs against the

Dressing the Devotional Body  47 fragmented nature of the dazzlying spectacles Milton sees in church and in Comus. His response, “she fables not, I feel that I do fear,” attests to the emotional affect of her speech that proves overwhelming for Comus: “a cold shuddering dew / dips me all o’re” describes an experience as immersive and self-dissolving as the effect of his liquor on his followers, but here the pleasant taste is replaced by “shuddering,” a transformative experience not of compliance and passivity but of violent energy that animates. Comus’s reaction to the threat of this emotional overload is to separate the Lady’s speech and reason from her body by assaulting the latter with delight: This is mere moral babble, and direct Against the canon laws of our foundation; I must not suffer this, yet ‘tis but the lees And settlings of a melancholy blood; But this will cure all straight, one sip of this Will bathe the drooping spirits in delight Beyond the bliss of dreams. Be wise, and taste… (ll. 806–12) The associations of female melancholy with the reproductive tract were recurrent in the renaissance, as “the troublesome womb or ‘mother’, which inflamed by the hot passions by abstinence, affected the rest of the body.”80 Dismissing her sayings as hysteria or melancholic disease and offering himself as her physician, Comus attempts to act on the female body by transforming it from the inside and by replacing one humoral imbalance (excess of black bile) with another (excess of blood), as he anticipates the Lady to move from the melancholic to the sanguine disposition associated with sweetness and delight. If, based on humoral theory, “sanguine people were said to be cheerful, though simple, because most of their blood is directed towards muscular exertion, which ultimately detracts from mental activity,” “bath[ing] the drooping spirits in delight” will act on the Lady’s body in a fashion similar to that of alcohol on the body of the riotous followers of Comus, submerging her intellect to sensual subservience.81 In her resistance to such self-divisive rhetoric, the Lady’s performance implicates the off-stage audience. Rosenberg has suggested that it is the social nature of the masque that allows different groups present to interact and participate in the performance: “the masque, in its very form, was a uniquely cooperative form in which players and spectators were joint performers, for the customary barriers between the two were obliterated.”82 This degree of involvement might have been one of the elements of the genre of the masque that appealed to Milton and interested him to undertake the project. Involvement secures an active and engaged

48  Dressing the Devotional Body audience that participates in the process and does not remain dazzled by the spectacle as those suspicious of the stage feared. An audience fully immersed, physically, emotionally, and spiritually, is the type of congregation Milton believes the church should be cultivating, instead of establishing its distance from the people. Furthermore, participation in the masque is reinforced by its setting. Susan Bennett and Julie Sanders, in their examination of the peripatetic performance of Milton’s Mask, have suggested the effect it could have on the elite audience watching: The audience is taken through several stages of dislocation, a ploy towards identification with Alice and, as such, key to the education embedded in the plot […] Surely the audience cannot help but feel some culpability, that they are involved in this narrative of abandonment, complicit through their own failure to act.83 In the social setting of the masque, the “failure to act” leads to inner responsibility and “education” and results for once in the positive transformation of the audience. The Lady’s performance, in the context of masque conventions, escapes the boundaries of Comus’s palace and becomes a model performance both for those witnessing it and for the divine recipient of her virtuous display. In exercising agency and refusing to conform, she invites the audience to consider themselves as participants, too. The role of the audience becomes, according to Rosenberg, to “maintain its temporary distance and retain its judgment and common sense,” following the example of the Lady.84 Overall, then, in his masque Milton dramatizes the temptation of transformation, but his Lady stands for a coherent self that may be captured yet cannot be transformed by visual displays as she refuses to drink from his cup, hence denouncing his spectacular gestures and rituals as well as the uniformity and the disorder that Comus’s followers enjoy. Being trapped and immobilized on the physical stage in full view, her stillness embodies her bodily integrity as “a self-conscious and autonomous moral agent,” while Comus’s model of selfhood is one “dissolving itself in pleasures.”85 Indeed, she is simultaneously the perfect actor and audience because she participates in a performance aware of divine spectatorship. Her identity is expressed in her performance of choice that is directed towards the divine and those who wish to follow her example, not towards Comus. This is an ideal of a devotion which does not result in a disembodied experience for those witnessing it, as in the case of the bishops and the self-fragmenting worship their dress incites. In Milton’s masque, we are offered a model of a conscious and independent audience, constantly aware that a performance in church or on stage requires also performance in front of God. In the following three chapters and in Milton’s articulation of the performance of prayer in Eikonoklastes, Paradise Lost, and Samson Agonistes, this embodied

Dressing the Devotional Body  49 model is sustained and developed further to include complex inward dispositions and emotions that characterize prayer.

Notes 1 James Colin Davis, “Against Formality: One Aspect of the English Revolution,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 3 (1993): 265–88 (278). 2 Andrew Hadfield, “Milton and Catholicism,” in Milton and Toleration, ed. Sharon Achinstein and Elizabeth Sauer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 186–99 (191). See also Raymond D. Tumbleson, Catholicism in the English Protestant Imagination: Nationalism, Religion, and Literature, 1600–1745 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 41–68. 3 Leah S. Marcus, The Politics of Mirth: Jonson, Herrick, Milton, Marvell, and the Defense of Old Holiday Pastimes (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 177. 4 Cable, Carnal Rhetoric, 2, and Corns, “Milton’s Antiprelatical Tracts,” 41–2. 5 Annabel Paterson, Milton’s Words (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 150. 6 See John N. King, “‘The Bishop’s Stinking Foot’: Milton and Antiprelatical Satire,” Reformation 7 (2002): 187–97: “This satirical application of grotesque humour concerning body odour, festering disease, gluttony, vomiting, excretion and sexual transgression is firmly grounded in the cultural practices of sixteenth and seventeenth century Protestant polemics and their predecessors in medieval anticlerical satire” (188). For the Martin Marprelate controversy in the last sixteenth century, see Joseph Black, “The Rhetoric of Reaction: The Martin Marprelate Tracts (1588–89), Anti-­Martinism, and the Uses of Print in Early Modern England,” Sixteenth Century Journal 28 (1997): 707–25. For Milton and this tradition see James Egan, “Milton and the Marprelate Tradition,” Milton Studies 8 (1975): 103–23. 7 John Carey, ed., John Milton: Complete Shorter Poems, 2nd edn (London: Longman, 1997), 143. 8 For a biographical reading of L’Allegro see Burbery, Milton the Dramatist, 18–9. 9 King, “‘The Bishop’s Stinking Foot’,” 192. 10 Peter Lake with Michael Questier, The Antichrists’s Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists and Players in Post-Reformation England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 483. 11 Arnold Hunt, The Art of Hearing: English Preachers and Their Audiences, 1590–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 187–228, Frank Kermode, Shakespeare’s Language (London: Penguin, 2000), 4. 12 Jeffrey Knapp, Shakespeare’s Tribe: Church, Nation, and Theater in Renaissance England (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 19–20. 13 William Tyndale, The Works of the English Reformers William Tyndale and John Frith, Vol. 1, ed. Thomas Russell (London: Ebenezer Palmer, 1831), 77–8. 14 See Crane, “What Was Performance?” 173. 15 Thomas Becon, The Displaying of the Popish Masse (London, 1637), 70, 77–8. 16 Alice Dolan, “The Fabric of Life: Linen and Life Cycle in England, 1678–1810.” PhD diss., (University of Hertfordshire, 2015), 19. 17 Linda Levy Peck, Consuming Splendor: Society and Culture in Seventeenth-­ Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 222.

50  Dressing the Devotional Body 18 Marcus K. Harmes, Bishops and Power in Early Modern England (London; New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), 101. 19 See Anne F. Sutton, The Mercery of London: Trade, Goods and People, 1130–1578 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2005), and Sibyl M. Jack, Trade and Industry in Tudor and Stuart England (London: Allen & Unwin, 1977). 20 Leslie Clarkson, “The Linen Industry in Early Modern Europe,” in The Cambridge History of Western Textiles, Vol. 1, ed. David Jenkins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 473–92 (492). 21 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae: A Concise Translation, trans. by Timothy McDermott (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1989), 232. 2 2 Tyndale, The Works of the English Reformers, 279. 2 3 Graeme Murdock, “Dressed to Repress?: Protestant Clerical Dress and the Regulation of Morality in Early Modern Europe,” Fashion Theory 4 (2000): 179–200 (195). 2 4 See Janet Mayo, A History of Ecclesiastical Dress (London: Batsford 1984), 129, and Mary Hayward, Rich Apparel: Clothing and the Law in Henry VIII’S England (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 255. 2 5 Peter Lake, “The Laudian Syle: Order, Uniformity and the Pursuit of the Beauty of Holiness in the 1630s,” in The Early Stuart Church, 1603–1642, ed. Kenneth Fincham (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1993), 161–85 (165). 2 6 Laud, The History of the Troubles and Tryal of the Most Reverend Father in God and Blessed Martyr, William Laud, 157. 27 Anon, The First and Large Petition of the Citie of London, sigB3v. 28 Stephen N. Zwicker, “Habits of Reading and Early Modern Literary Culture,” in The Cambridge History of Early Modern English Literature, ed. David Lowenstein and Janel Mueller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 170–98 (189). 29 David Kaula, “Autolycus’s Trumpery,” Studies in English Literature 16 (1976): 287–303 (289); on trinkets see James J. Kearney, “Trinket, Idol, Fetish: Some Notes on Iconoclasm and the Language of Materiality in Reformation England,” Shakespeare Studies 28 (2000): 257–61. 30 Kirsty Milne, At Vanity Fair: From Bunyan to Thackeray (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 53. 31 Anon, Lambeth Faire, Wherein You Have All the Bishops Trinkets Set to Sale, sig.A3r. 32 George Herbert, “Aaron,” in George Herbert and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Poets, ed. Mario A. Di Cesare (New York: Norton, 1978), 61–2. For an analysis of Herbert’s poem and its vision of ceremony see Guibbory, Ceremony and Community, 72–4. 33 Thomas Kranidas, “Satan’s First Disguise,” English Language Notes 2 (1964): 13–5 (14). For the iconography implicit in this disguise and the depiction of Satan as a guardian angel, see Roland Mushat Frye, Milton’s Imagery and the Visual Arts: Iconographic Tradition in the Epic Poems (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), 177–9. Frye’s reading highlights the depth of hypocrisy implicit in the disguise: “Satan enters the created world not only disguised as an angel, but even disguised in a form which artistically sophisticated readers could readily identify as the usual form of the guardian angel” (179). See also Chuck Keim, “‘A Seraph Wing’d’: Raphael and the Office of High Priest in Paradise Lost,” in John Milton: ‘Reasoning Words’, ed. Kristin A. Pruitt and Charles W. Durham (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 2008), 147–64, who argues that the dress Satan adopts mirror’s Raphael’s in Book V and argues that it portrays “a picture of the ideal priestly system” (162).

Dressing the Devotional Body  51 34 Milton’s recurrent references to mitres and church vestments were not unusual in anti-Episcopalian tracts. Apart from Overton’s example earlier in this chapter, see, for instance, William Ames, A Fresh Suit against Human Ceremonies in God’s Worship (1633), 185, and William Prynne, A full Reply to Certaine Briefe Observations and Anti-queries on Master Prynnes Twelve Questions about Church-Government (1644), 4. The preoccupation evident in these writers with the dress of the bishops had actually become a cause for anti-Puritan satire. See Richard Corbett’s refrain in “The Distracted Puritane” ballad: ‘Boldly I preach, hate a Crosse, hate a Surplice, / Miters, Copes, and Rochets’, in The Poems of Richard Corbett, ed. Jack A. W. Bennett and Hugh R. Trevor-Roper (Oxford: Clarendon, 1955), 56–9. Judy Kronenfeld, in King Lear and the Naked Truth: Rethinking the Language of Religion and Resistance (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998) notes that “usually it is the Protestant who charges the Catholic with the sins of false costume and the Catholic who charges the Protestant with inefficacious nakedness. But […] both parties may make both claims” (50). 35 For Milton and satire, see John N. King, Milton and Religious Controversy: Satire and Polemic in Paradise Lost (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). For the different colours and dress codes of the monks, see Mayo’s study. Clerical garments, and in particular the apparel of monks, was also used to denote hypocrisy and corruption on the early modern stage. Robert I. Lublin, “‘A comely presentation and the habit to admiration reverend’: Ecclesiastical Apparel on the Early Modern Stage,” in The Sacred and Profane in English Renaissance Literature, ed. Mary A. Papazian (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008), 57–83, has argued that the garments of monks, nuns, and friars were regarded as “symbols of greed and sexual license” and that “the association of Catholic apparel with iniquity remained strong all the way up to the closing of the playhouses in 1642” (60). See also Lublin, Costuming the Shakespearean Stage: Visual Codes of Representation in Early Modern England (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 6–7. 36 Laura Lunger Knoppers, ‘Consuming Nations: Milton and Luxury’, in Early Modern Nationalism and Milton’s England, ed. David Loewenstein and Paul Stevens (Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 331–55 (332). 37 Clarkson, “The Linen Industry in Early Modern Europe,” 475. 38 Helen Pierce, “Anti-episcopacy and Graphic Satire in England, 1640–1645,” The Historical Journal 47 (2004): 809–48 (845). 39 Blair Hoxby, Mammon’s Music: Literature and Economics in the Age of Milton (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press 2002), 40. 4 0 Christopher Kendrick, Milton: A Study in Ideology and Form (New York; London: Methuen, 1986), 40. 41 Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. by Peggy Kamuf (London; New York: Routledge, 1994), 6. 42 Susan M. Stabile, Memory’s Daughters: The Material Culture of Remembrance in Eighteenth-Century America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), 97. 43 Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 2. 4 4 Sally Holloway, “Textiles,” in Early Modern Emotions: An Introduction, ed. Susan Broomhall (London; New York: Routledge, 2017), 161–5 (164). 45 Hugh J. Dawson, “The Afterlife of the Widower’s Dream: Rereading Milton’s Final Sonnet,” Milton Studies 45 (2006): 21–37 (31).

52  Dressing the Devotional Body 46 I find Milton’s “fancied sight” and his desire to see his wife’s face under her veil and white garments is an interesting reworking of Donne’s erotic desire in his Elegy “To his Mistress Going to Bed”: “cast all, yea, this white linen hence; / There is no penance due to innocence” (ll. 45–6). Although the relationship between white linen and innocence is problematic in Donne, clothes are here also imagined as a site of desire; a desire for spiritual union in Milton’s case, and a sensual union in Donne’s elegy. 47 Anna K. Nardo, Milton’s Sonnets and the Ideal Community (Lincoln; London: University of Nebraska Press, 1979), 41. 48 Jacqueline Pearson, “‘Then She Asked It, What Were Its Sisters Name?’: Reading between the Lines in Seventeenth-Century Pamphlets of the Supernatural,” The Seventeenth Century 28 (2013): 63–78 (64). 49 Derrida, Spectres of Marx, 48. 50 Ibid., 48. 51 Critics that have assessed Milton’s Mask as a reformed enterprise, driven by Puritan inclinations, include Marcus, The Politics of Mirth, Norbrook, “The Reformation of the Masque,” in The Court Masque, ed. David Lindley (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), 94–110, Guibbory, Ceremony and Community, especially 157–72, and Lewalski, “Milton’s Comus and the Politics of Masquing,” in The Politics of the Stuart Court Masque, ed. David Bevington and Peter Holbrook (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 296–320. For the opposite view, that in Milton’s masque “there is little if any common ground between Miltonic and Puritan aesthetics,” see Catherine Gimelli Martin, Milton among the Puritans: The Case for Historical Revisionism (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), Chapter 4 (173). 52 Skantze, Stillness in Motion, 64. 53 Norbrook, in “The Reformation of the Masque,” notes: Milton’s Comus is the Son of Circe, the wicked enchantress who had become associated in Protestant iconography with the Whore of Babylon. The scene in which he tempts the lady with an enchanted cup had many precedents in sixteenth-century Protestant drama, where representatives of the true faith were shown struggling with the magical temptations of idolatry. (105)

54 55 56 57 58 59

60

For the religious and political affiliations of masque writers, see also, Norbrook, “‘The Masque of Truth’: Court Entertainments and International Protestant Politics in the Early Stuart Period,” Seventeenth Century 1 (1986): 81–110. These stage directions are found in Hughes, CP, 92. Erica Fudge, Perceiving Animals: Humans and Beasts in Early Modern English Culture (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 2000), 8. Jonas Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 93. William Prynne, Histrio-mastix: The Players Scourge, or, Actors Tragaedie, Divided into Two Parts (London, 1633), 892. Ibid., 893. Stephen Gosson, Plays Confuted in Five Actions (1582), in Arthur F. Kinney, Markets of Bawdrie: The Dramatic Criticism of Stephen Gosson, Salzburg Studies in English Literature, vol. 4 (Salzburg: Institut fur Englische Sprache und Literatur, 1974), 138–97 (152). The usual connection made between Milton and these writers tends to be based on Milton’s alleged detest for spectacles or on him sharing the Puritan contempt for the stage, and it is usually found in discussions of Eikonoklastes or Samson Agonistes. For example, Loewenstein in Milton

Dressing the Devotional Body  53

61 62

63

6 4 6 5

6 6 6 7 68 69 70 71

and the Drama of History, proposes that “the fierce iconoclasm of Samson Agonistes might well seem to align Milton with the extreme antitheatricalism of a Puritan like William Prynne” (136). Loewenstein proceeds to explain Milton’s differences to this extreme antitheatricalism, but it is important to note that the tragedy is the typical context Milton’s relationship to such writers would be evoked. Describing Milton’s attack against Eikon Basilike, Nicholas McDowell, “Milton’s Regicide Tracts and the Uses of Shakespeare,” in The Oxford Handbook of Milton, ed. Nicholas McDowell and Nigel Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 252–71, argues that “Milton calls upon the language of Puritan antitheatricalism to identify the King’s book” (254). Guibbory, Ceremony and Community, 161. Leonora Leet Brodwin, “Milton and the Renaissance Circe,” Milton Studies 6 (1974): 21–83 (22). Brodwin’s study offers a good introduction to the Circe myth in Ariosto, Tasso, Spenser and Milton, and expands on the political significance the figure of Circe held for Milton, who equated brutishness with tyranny. See also Karen Britland, “Circe’s Cup: Wine and Women in Early Modern Drama,” in Pleasing Sinne: Drink and Conviviality in Seventeenth Century England, ed. Adam Smyth (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2004), 109–25, who studies the treatment of Circe in plays where she exhibits her Homeric characteristics of temptation and hospitality. On the drinking culture and its reputation in the early modern period, see Joshua Scodel, Excess and the Mean in Early Modern English Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002). Adam Smyth, in Pleasing Sinne: Drink and Conviviality, writes that “perhaps the most consistently noted characteristic of drunkenness—particularly in condemnations—was that it induced a loss of rationalism and, in particular, a loss of control over words” (196). Smyth also points out that attacks against the stage reflect attacks against drinking, where “the tavern is often depicted as a stage, and drinkers as players” (198). Philip Stubbes, The Anatomie of Abuses (1583), in Life in Shakespeare’s England: A Book of Elizabethan Prose, ed. John Dover Wilson (New York: Cosimo, 2008), 103–4 (104). Ulinka Rublack, Dressing Up: Cultural Identity in Renaissance Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), writes that, after the Reformation, “disguise became associated with the immoral, and only the ‘real’ with the sincere” (108). For a general discussion of disguise in early modern drama, see Peter Hyland, Disguise on the Early Modern Stage (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011). For the politics of disguise, see Douglas F. Rutledge, “The Politics of Disguise: Drama and Political Theory in the Early Seventeenth Century,” in The Witness of Times: Manifestations of Ideology in Seventeenth Century England, ed. Katherine Z. Keller and Gerald J. Schiffhorst (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1993), 90–120. Edmund Spenser, The Fairie Queene (1590), in The Broadview Anthology of British Literature, vol. 2, ed. Joseph Black et al. (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2006): 142–241 (147). Achsah Guibbory, “Milton and English Poetry,” in A Companion to Milton, ed. by Thomas N. Corns (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 72–89 (76). Debora Shuger, “‘Gums of Glutinous Heat’ and the Stream of Consciousness: The Theology of Milton’s Maske,” Representations 60 (1997): 1–21 (9). Ibid., 8. Gosson, Plays Confuted in Five Actions, 175. Philip Stubbes, The Anatomie of Abuses (1583), in Renaissance Woman: A Sourcebook: Constructions of Femininity in England, ed. Kate Aughterson (London; New York: Routledge, 1995), 74–6 (76).

54  Dressing the Devotional Body 72 OED, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/2828?rskey=gm7rZj&result=2& isAdvanced=false#eid (last accessed 14th January 2013). 73 See Laura Levine, Men in Women’s Clothing: Anti-theatricality and Effeminization, 1579–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 74 Tyndale had also attacked clerical clothes as effeminizing the clergy: It is not that white rochet that the bishops and canons wear, so like a nun, and so effeminately, a false sign? What other things are their sandals, gloves, mitres, and all the whole pomp of their disguising, than false signs in which Paul prophecied that they should come? (285) 75 For context and setting in the Mask see Barbara Breasted, “Comus and the Castlehaven Scandal,” Milton Studies 3 (1971): 201–24, Leah S. Marcus, “The Milieu of Milton’s Comus: Judicial Reform at Ludlow and the Problem of Sexual Assault,” Criticism 25 (1983): 293–328, John Creaser, “‘The Present Aid of This Occasion’: The Setting of Comus,” in The Court Masque, ed. David Lindley (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), 111–34, and Brown, Milton’s Aristocratic Entertainments. 76 Skantze, Stillness in Motion, 65. Skantze also picks on the discussion of effeminization by stage spectacles in her analysis, but she does not connect it to dress. 77 Very few critics have explored the topic of dress in church and on stage. See, for instance, Lublin cited above (fn. 35), and Adrian Streete, “Reforming Signs: Semiotics, Calvinism and Clothing in Sixteenth-Century England,” Literature and History 12 (2003): 1–18. Streete has made the case about “just how similar the anti-theatricalists’ rhetoric is in respect of cross-­dressing to those Protestant polemicists who railed against Catholic ecclesiastical clothing” (13). 78 David Norbrook, Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 247. 79 Stacy Alaimo, Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 3. 80 Laurinda Dixon, Perilous Chastity: Women and Illness in Pre-­Enlightenment Art and Medicine, (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), 109. Lesel Dawson contests Dixon and the idea of gendered melancholy in Lovesickness and Gender in Early Modern English Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 81 Ken Albala, Eating Right in the Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 52. 82 Donald Maurice Rosenberg, “Milton’s Masque: A Social Occasion for Philosophic Laughter,” Studies in Philology 67 (1970): 245–53 (246). 83 Susan Bennett and Julie Sanders, “Rehearsing across Space and Place: Rethinking A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle,” in Performing Site-­ Specific Theatre: Politics, Place, Practice, ed. Anna Birch and Joanne Tompkins (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2012), 37–53 (45). 8 4 Rosenberg, “Milton’s Masque,” 249. 85 William Shullenberger, “Circe’s Best Boy,” in Uncircumscribed Mind: Reading Milton Deeply, ed. Charles W. Durham and Kristin A. Pruitt (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 2008), 67–90 (84).

2 “Stale and Empty Words” Consuming Prayers in Eikonoklastes

Milton’s masque and his antiprelatical tracts reveal a recurrent concern with the disembodied effect the displays of the Church have on the congregation, and they problematize the ways that the devotional body communicates and the affective excesses it signposts. This chapter is concerned with the print controversy between Eikon Basilike and Eikonoklastes, reading both texts as devotional works in which Charles I and Milton, respectively, unfold their vision of authentic prayer. The first part of this chapter examines how Eikon Basilike mirrors the practice of public prayer as captured in the Book of Common Prayer, studying both the liturgical text and Charles’s book as creating a sense of community and inviting the readers to adopt and imitate the devotional model on offer. Eikon Basilike is shown to share with the Book of Common Prayer the power to invest individuals with feelings of inclusion, empowerment, and proximity to God via the Christian community. The second part of the chapter explores how Milton’s Eikonoklastes targets those attributes that Eikon Basilike shares with liturgical prayer, i.e. communality, visibility, and set forms. It explores how Milton dismisses the idea that set phrases can empower the subject at prayer, continuing the antiliturgical project he had started in his antiprelatical tracts, drawing a parallel between the popish garments of the bishops and set prayers: “how constantly the Priest puts on his Gown and Surplice, so constantly doth his praier put on a servile yoak of Liturgie” (CPW 3:505). The final part of the chapter explores how Milton uses his Chapter 16, “Upon the Ordinance against the Common-prayer Book,” to articulate his theory of devotion and the role of the body in it. Although the critical reception of Eikon Basilike has acknowledged the centrality of piety in Charles’s text, Milton’s views on prayer in Eikonoklastes have received less attention. The tract has traditionally been read for its politics, for its problematic handling of conscience, for its antitheatrical rhetoric, and for its concentrated efforts to educate and guide its readers through the turbulent post-regicide years.1 There are two notable exceptions, including Ainsworth’s examination of the spiritual guidance Milton offers in this tract to his readers, and Gay’s association of the Spirit with artistic inspiration and his reading of prayer as “opening a space for the Spirit

56  “Stale and Empty Words” which can, in turn, empower both voice and image in the perception of the sacred.”2 The final part of the chapter builds on their work by focusing on Milton’s conceit of extempore prayer as manna and intercourse, metaphors that encapsulate a physical, emotional, and collaborative exchange between petitioners and the divine.

Subjects and Audiences in Liturgical Prayer In a review of Brian Cummings’s Book of Common Prayer: The Texts of 1549, 1559 and 1662, Diarmaid MacCulloch describes the prominence of the text in the early modern people’s liturgical and national experience: Its liturgy was not a denominational artefact; it was the literary text most thoroughly known by most people in this country—the Bible should be included among its lesser rivals. The English and the Welsh were active participants in the Prayer Book, as they made their liturgical replies to the person leading worship in the thousands of churches throughout the realm: they were actors week by week in a drama whose cast included and united most of the nation, and which therefore was a much more significant play, and culturally more central, than anything by Shakespeare.3 The participation of the worshippers in the liturgy that MacCulloch describes in theatrical terms (actors, drama, cast, play, Shakespeare) was the direct result of the first vernacular Book of Common Prayer in 1549 by Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer. Up until 1549, liturgy was conducted in Latin, keeping the church-gatherers firmly at a linguistic and spatial distance from the priest, and the sacred rites carried out at the altar. After the break with Rome, Latin and the Catholic ceremonies were reconsidered and treated with suspicion, though not altogether abandoned. The Reformation, which Cranmer had encountered while in Europe, had emphasized individual responsibility in interpretation of the Bible and an intense introspection for signs of election. The English Prayer Book of 1549 and its further reformed edition in 1552 (re-­established by Elizabeth in 1559, after its short expulsion by Catholic Mary) were instrumental in England’s progress to Protestantism. Targoff has listed the “new conditions of public worship” as “the wide availability of the Prayer Book as a material text; the audability of the priest’s words to all listeners; the emphasis upon the laity’s comprehension of and engagement with the service.”4 Access to worship guaranteed the “active participation” that MacCulloch noted above and the consequent wide endorsement of the prayer book. Judith Maltby’s work has analysed the popularity of the Book of

“Stale and Empty Words”  57 Common Prayer due to “its lawfulness and scriptural soundness [...] as a text standing within an ancient tradition of Christian worship,” and she has shown its importance in the vast majority of early modern communities, which, in the face of innovations, revolutions, and iconoclasm, remained moderate. 5 The book was central both in forging strong cultural bonds within regional locations and in creating a sense of national identity. Nevertheless, it was also partly responsible for the civil wars of the seventeenth century, and its divisive nature is captured in Maltby’s statement: “while to its hotter protestant critics the familiarity of the Prayer Book was its fatal flaw, turning it into an ‘idol’, to its adherents its familiarity was its greatest aid to devotion.”6 The juxtaposition of views on the Book of Common Prayer escalated to unforeseen disarray. Charles and Laud’s attempts in the late 1630s to impose the Scottish Prayer Book led to the Bishops’ Wars and eventually to the First Civil War.7 For the Presbyterian Scots and the radical Protestants, the book was steeped in the king and the Archbishop’s Arminian sensibilities imposed on the English church.8 When the Civil War started, politically the book turned into “the badge of the royalist party,” while theologically it was perceived by its enemies as an idol.9 It was so defined in the act of its abolition by its substitute, the Directory for the Public Worship of God in 1645, which claimed that the Book of Common Prayer “was made no better than an Idol by many Ignorant and Superstitious People.”10 As studies of parish response on radical reformation sought by Puritans have shown, episcopacy and the Book of Common Prayer were more readily denounced in theory than in everyday liturgical practice.11 Following the return of Charles II in 1662, it was re-instated by the Act of Uniformity and dominated the liturgical setting for centuries, practically unaltered in content.12 The major innovation of Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer was that it allowed the congregation’s participation in the liturgy to an unprecedented extent. Cranmer’s text stemmed from an “overwhelming desire to render the liturgy comprehensible to all.”13 In the Preface to the Book of Common Prayer he noted that The service in this Churche of England (these many years) hath been read in Latin to the people, whiche they understoode not, so that they have heard with theyr eares onely: and their hartes, spirite and minde, have not been edified thereby.14 Cranmer amended this not only via the use of the vernacular but also by having instructions for the inclusion of the people. For instance, one of the directions in the Communion service of 1549 stated, “the Clearkes and people shall aunswere.”15 This liturgical Q&A continued

58  “Stale and Empty Words” in the most sacred moment of the communion where the priest was preparing the bread and wine and the congregation had to respond to his commands: Then the Prieste shall saye. The Lord be with you. Aunswere. And with thy spirite. Priest. Lift up your heartes. Aunswere. We lift them up unto the Lorde. Priest. Lets us geve thankes to our Lorde God. Aunswere. It is mete and right so to do.16 The “generall Confession” that preceded communion combined the congregation’s voice and physical posture into a joint (priest and people’s) expression of introspection and repentance: “then shall thys generall Confession bee made all kneling humbly upon their knees.”17 Moreover, the new Book of Common Prayer included instructions that forbade the priest to receive communion alone (as it would happen in the Catholic Mass), emphasizing that “there shal always some Communicate with the Prieste that ministreth.”18 The participation of the people in the communion was explicitly stated and enforced in one of the exhortations: “every man and woman to be bound to […] communicate once in the yeare at the least […] and whoseoever willingly upon no just cause, doeth absent themselves […] to bee excommunicated.”19 The threat of excommunication suggested an attempt to eradicate the laity’s potentially ad hoc involvement in the church and to strengthen their bonds with the ecclesiastical life. The purpose then of the new liturgy was to establish a wide and communal understanding of its proceedings. The worshippers were to experience a unique sense of inclusion in public prayer, since the priest’s address to God was no longer in an alienating and prohibiting language, but in their own. According to Natalie Mears, the new liturgy was one in which “all prayers, whether recited by the congregation or assented to, were worth the same if they were undertaken in the right frame of mind.”20 This inclusive model suggested that public prayer was no longer only performed in public, but by the public, too. The egalitarian sentiment that characterized the new church, and that the Book of Common Prayer allowed and came to symbolize, had implications for the role of the individuals in worship, transforming them from an inert presence within the church to active supplicants. 21 The aforementioned characteristics of the Book of Common Prayer, such as the use of set phrases and the construction of models for meditation, the invocation of a communal feeling and solidarity, and the reliance on visual communication, were the same elements that defined the success of Eikon Basilike and Milton’s counterattack.

“Stale and Empty Words”  59

Prayer in the King’s Closet King Charles I’s execution on January 30th, 1649, was followed the next day by the publication of a work, allegedly in his own hand, under the full title Eikon Basilike, The Portraiture of His Sacred Majestie in His Solitudes and Sufferings. 22 The king’s book, shaping the king’s image, turned out to be “the most popular and influential tract of the English Revolution,” reaching thirty-five editions in England in the same year; a sign both of its popularity and of the Parliament’s failure to erase the regicide from public memory. 23 The king’s justification of his political actions and the private account of his last thoughts in the face of execution proved a highly successful press project and infiltrated the common mind, casting doubt on the motives behind the trial and on the unprecedented sentence on the sovereign. For instance, commenting on the publication of his captured correspondence by the Parliament after the 1645 Battle of Naseby, Charles argued for the sacredness of privacy: And such I should have esteemed the concealing of My Papers; The freedom and secrecy of which, commands a civility from all men, not wholly barbarous; nor is there any thing more inhuman than to expose them to public view. (EB 159)24 Similarly, in the chapter touching “Upon the Earl of Strafford’s death,” Charles lamented sacrificing the privacy of his conscience to the public requirements of his position. He explained that he regretted following the advice of Parliament, who had insisted on him “preferring the outward peace of My Kingdoms with men, before that inward exactness of Conscience before God” (EB 54). In an era when conscience “was not a subjective matter, but an act of deliberate judgment which could be mistaken,” the book made the case for conscience as a matter of the individual’s private relation to God, which could not be regulated by public forces and thus “denied the victory to Charles’s enemies by elevating the sphere of conscience above that of state.”25 The book’s exaltation of the king’s private conscience and confessions above the prerogatives of the state allowed Charles I to fashion his experience as martyrdom and to claim Christ’s suffering as a precedent for his own afflictions. The two instances above are characteristic of the rhetoric of privacy that Eikon Basilike employed throughout to undermine the public authority of the Parliament, to evade accountability, and to appeal directly to the reader who is invited to witness Charles’s “inward exactness of Conscience before God” (EB 54). The critical role of prayer in Eikon Basilike’s success cannot be overstated as it had proven one of the book’s most effective rhetorical and

60  “Stale and Empty Words” visual strategies in fashioning Charles I’s sufferings as reminiscent of David’s supplications and Christ’s martyrdom and in eliciting the readers’ sympathy. If in the case of the Naseby letters the king’s privacy was violated and used against him, in Eikon Basilike private prayer was intentionally publicly exposed and enlisted for the king’s cause: according to Lois Potter, “to counteract the damage done by the contents of the king’s cabinet, it was essential to believe that the piety and forgiveness expressed in the posthumous book came from the still more secret cabinet of the king’s heart.”26 It allowed the reader to intrude upon Charles’s unfolding of his heart to God, and the sincerity of the king’s confession was reinforced by the impression of privacy. 27 The impression of private prayer was established by the textual apparatus of the work, which created the illusion of a very private moment (one’s address to God) in a very public forum (the world of print). The frontispiece to Eikon Basilike, the accompanying psalm paraphrases at the end of each chapter, and the “Meditations upon Death” in the conclusion all attested to the status of the book as an act of private prayer. In the frontispiece by William Marshall, Charles I was seen abandoning his earthly crown for the crown of thorns, becoming another Christ about to suffer for the love of his subjects. The self-sacrificial, Christ-like imagery was enhanced by the semi-enclosed and solitary space depicted and the ray of light illuminating Charles’s penitent face evoking Christ’s prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane. The hagiography of the emblem on the cover supplemented the prayers at the end of each chapter and the final meditations. As Loewenstein has suggested, Charles’s decision to pattern his meditations on the Psalms “further reinforces the link between Charles and the biblical line of kingship represented by David and Christ, while highlighting the pathos of the royal martyr, a king more sinned against than sinning.”28 The image of the solitary king at prayer alongside the modelling of his prayers on David’s Psalms created for the reader an instantly recognizable pattern of devotional experience. The readers were invited to enter the devotional closet of Charles and partake of his prayers because Charles’s text presented them with a petitionary model relevant to the common Reformation anxiety about how to approach God. Sharpe has argued that “Charles in the pages of the Eikon conducts a national service of worship and atonement. Once we read in it, we, willy nilly, participate in that service and acknowledge the king’s sacerdotal role.”29 Elizabeth Skerpan Wheeler has also noted that the sense of privacy that Charles employed in his work acted as a way of “bridging the distance between king and people by asking for their sympathy,” inviting “commiseration and friendship, almost fellow-feeling.”30 For Wheeler, the impression of private prayer was central in this process of identification: “the penitential model permits the direct identification of readers with the king, spanning the gulf between ruler and subject.”31 If kingship was

“Stale and Empty Words”  61 strictly a divine and hereditary privilege, thus an exclusive right, prayer was a widely shared and practised experience that an audience could relate to regardless of their position in the social hierarchy. Stripped of his earthly crown, evoking his inner conscience, and speaking in psalms familiar to all, Charles embodied not the king’s, but the subject’s position in a private address to God, evoking a shared petitionary feeling. In this respect, Eikon Basilike, despite its claim to privacy, acted as a public devotional aid similar to the Book of Common Prayer, and evidence from the period suggests it was even treated as such, combining public memory with public worship: in the Restoration “the frontispiece from Eikon Basilike serves as the new cover for the Prayer Book,” while “separate editions of the devotions and chapter 27 were also produced” and they “were in fact read out loud and even sung after being translated into verse and set to music.”32 In Chapter 16, “Upon the Ordinance against the Common-prayer Book,” Charles establishes direct connections with his readers: Sure we may as well before-hand know what we pray, as to whom we pray; and in what words, as to what sense; when we desire the same things, what hinders we may not use the same words? Our appetite and digestion too may be good when we use, as we pray for, our daily bread. (EB 132) For Charles, the identical needs and experiences of the religious community justify conformity to identical expressions. If “the two central principles that governed the texts of the Book of Common Prayer” are the “intertwining of the singular I and the collective we, and the absolute preference for formalized over spontaneous voice,” Eikon Basilike follows similar principles in order to persuade the readers of its sincerity and to extract their compassion.33 Moreover, when Charles opts for the inclusive “we,” Eikon Basilike designates an audience already aware of the power that collective feeling could gather in the 1640s. 34 The persistent use of the Book of Common Prayer during the tumultuous years of the Civil War was a key indicator of the laity’s need for unity and harmony. As Nicholas Tyacke explains, lay piety revolted from Calvinism opting for less confrontational approach with regard to faith. Contrary to Puritan individualism, the conformists sought “a collective immersion of the parish in reformed religious beliefs and practices.”35 Furthermore, collective feeling and community are concepts exploited in Eikon Basilike via its literary affiliations with Protestant historiography and spiritual autobiography that reinforce the martyr image that Charles fashions for himself. 36 The central quality of such an image is the portrayal of “an individual private life as exemplary,” as a model the followers can appropriate and unite

62  “Stale and Empty Words” under as when reading John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs.37 In other words, martyrdom is enlisted for its ability to ignite a sense of communal suffering and to offer a model for imitation. Charles’s efforts at creating a community of “we” are suspended by Milton in Eikonoklastes with the constant reference to “his [Charles’s] own,” individualizing the king and dissociating him from his readers. Alert to the fact that “bonds of compassion become bonds of slavery” since “compassion is aimed at unifying a public against the public sphere” Milton tries to dispel sympathetic intimacy by distancing the readers from Charles’s “own” text and purposes.38 The Preface to Eikonoklastes is fraught with the possessive pronoun. Eikon Basilike is criticized as “this op’n and monumental Court of his own erecting” and “in his own cause affirming,” as “the best advocate and interpreter of his own actions,” facilitated by those “of his own Party” (CPW 3:340–1). Milton is vehement in attributing to the king “what is properly his own guilt,” which “shall be laid here without circumlocutions at his own dore,” and seeks to reveal “his own far differing deeds” (CPW 3:341). According to Milton, the royalists taking advantage of Eikon Basilike are “making thereby the Book their own rather than the King’s” (CPW 3:338) and remain “divided from the public by several ends and humours of their own” (CPW 3:344). Personal possessions, personal motives, and personal actions dominate the Preface, suggesting to the readers of Eikonoklastes that the book in question is not their book but a product of the king’s private interests. 39 To counteract what Milton calls “this great shew of piety” he chooses to expose Charles’s prayer as counterfeit by insisting on the excessive spectacle of the devotion and by turning the king’s closet into a stage.40 Milton’s Preface condemns Charles’s printed supplications to a theatrical performance by defining Charles’s meditations as “these Soliloquies” and “fair spok’n words” (CPW 3:346). The iconography of Marshall’s frontispiece is denounced in Milton’s iconoclastic writing as “conceited portraiture before his Book, drawn out to the full measure of a Masking Scene, and sett there to catch fools and silly gazers” (CPW 3:342). Charles’s venture is reduced to nothing but a compilation of “quaint Emblems and devices begg’d from the old Pageantry of some Twelf-nights entertainment at Whitehall” (CPW 3:343). The accusation of “Masking Scene,” “Pageantry,” and “Twelf-nights entertainment” intends to reveal Charles’s book not only as a dramatic, instead of devotional, enterprise but also as a vehicle of monarchical ideology, since during the Jacobean and Caroline regimes, the extravagant and spectacular masques had the power to act as guardians of the royal image and to perpetuate regal order and conformity.41 This was not the first time Milton had tried to counteract courtly fascination with elaborate pageants and shows; as examined in the previous chapter, in 1634 Milton’s Mask Presented at Ludlow Castle transformed the genre

“Stale and Empty Words”  63 from a celebration of the extravagances of royal authority to a tribute to feminine virtue and chastity. When placed next to two other works staged in the same year, Shirley’s The Triumph of Peace and Carew’s Coelum Britannicum, Ann Baynes Coiro has argued that Shirley and Carew’s masques exaggerate the form’s spectacular qualities almost to the extent of caricaturing its purpose.42 For Coiro, Milton’s innovations to the genre lie elsewhere, in his intention to add depth and to praise the human and material body of his female actor. The Lady in Milton’s masque rejects Comus’s insincere stage and empty rituals for an embodied performance of chastity directed to her heavenly father. In his prayerful masque, however, for Milton Charles acknowledges and seeks to dominate a purely theatrical stage and an earthly audience. Drawing the parallel between Charles’s petitions and the Whitehall entertainments, Milton implies that the king’s prayers are not signs of inward faith and virtue but superficial displays of power, there to fool the audience into obedience and endorsement of tyranny. Some years later, at the dawn of the Restoration, and with the threat of civil idolatry again imminent, Milton will explicitly reject the visible signs of what he views as political tyranny: in The Ready and Easy Way (1660) he warns against a king that will “pageant himself up and down in progress among the perpetual bowings and cringings of an abject people” and denounces “the base necessitie of court flatteries and prostrations” (CPW 7:426–8). The Pamela prayer, which Milton accuses Charles I of inserting in his text from Sidney’s Arcadia, further contributes to Milton’s attack against Charles’s theatrical show by providing the scripted words: “to attribute to his own making other mens whole Prayers, hath as it were unhallow’d, and unchristen’d the very duty of prayer it self, by borrowing to a Christian use Prayers offer’d to a Heathen God” (CPW 3:362). Milton’s argument that Charles had used set forms of pagan worship in his pretentious address to God follows in this section the remark that Shakespeare was Charles’s “Closet Companion” (CPW 3:361) and the connection between Shakespeare’s character, Richard III, and the king as “dissembler(s) of religion”: Shakespeare, Milton writes, “introduces the Person of Richard the third, speaking in as high a strain of pietie, and mortification as is utterd in any passage of this Book” (CPW 3:361). In order to firmly place Charles I on a hypocritical stage, Milton here alludes to a play that includes exactly such a hypocritical depiction of piety: In Richard III act 3, scene 7, Richard’s closet becomes a stage on which to deceive and manipulate the gathered audience. Milton combines Shakespeare’s dramaturgy with the insult of the Pamela prayer to reveal that the king’s devotions are merely scripted words and examples of bad, theatrical practice. Charles’s performance is exposed as an artificial enterprise, misleadingly presented to the people, and exploiting scripted words, visual aids, and his spectators to form “Soliloquies.”

64  “Stale and Empty Words” In comparing Charles’s prayer closet to a theatrical stage, Milton seeks to deny Charles a divine auditor and to highlight that the king’s prayers, do not reach God but seek only human approbation. For Milton, Charles’s invitations to an earthly audience subtract from the sincerity of his prayers and ultimately doom them: “Such prayers as these may perhaps catch the people, as was intended: but how they please God, is to be much doubted, though prayed in secret, much less written to be divulged” (CPW 3:601). Earlier Milton had denounced the spectacle of Charles’s supposedly private meditations, by claiming that Charles “should have shut the dore, and pray’d in secret, not heer in the High Street. Privat praiers in publick, ask something of whom they ask not, and that shall be thir reward” (CPW 3: 456), paraphrasing the biblical command in Matthew 6.6: “when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret.” By referring to Matthew, a parallel is established between Charles and the Pharisees that Matthew denounces just before his advice for private prayer: And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward. (Matthew 6.5) Adopting Matthew’s language, Milton’s certainty of the “reward” of Charles’s prayer carried an air of biblical authority. By constructing Charles’s private prayer to be a pretence, Milton alerts his reader to the open door of the king’s closet and consequently to the inefficient petitionary model of Charles. Eikon Basilike is then presented by Milton as an individualistic and self-referential project, which instead of seeking God, elicits emotional responses of sorrow and pity at the hypocritical performance of the king. Charles I’s prayers are shown to remain an obstinately external and theatrical action, performed with the appropriate gestures and words, but at odds with his inward disposition. Yet, while launching a systematic assault against the king’s construction of interiority, Eikonoklastes also points to the emotional manipulation of a people who sacrifice reason for easy and marketable passion: “the king’s rhetoric and all the trappings of royalty give the people the lowest of pleasures; as their passions are moved and ravished, the people are moved to choose subjugation.”43 Critics have traditionally read such references to the reader as evidence of Milton’s distrust of the critical skills of the common people: “in Milton’s prose tracts,” Richard Hardin writes, “the common people are increasingly seen as unreliable, unprincipled, susceptible to flattering rhetoric.”44 Others, however, have read passages like the above as rhetorical tropes, with Daniel Shore arguing that Milton’s “constructions of audience exclude so as to include exclusively” and that “his descriptions

“Stale and Empty Words”  65 are attempts to create the proper readers and interpreters of his tract.”45 Ainsworth shares the view that Milton is being didactic and that by the end of Eikonoklastes the readers “have become educated” in how to read Eikon Basilike and how to overcome their deception.46 The next part of this chapter shows how Milton’s tract, while educating against deception, also educates towards authentic prayer. Eikonoklastes does more than react against the representation of Charles’s inauthentic prayers: Chapter XVI offers Milton the opportunity to rehearse his own understanding of prayer and to present an alternative devotional model to that of the king.

“Wholesome Words” and Manna What is at stake in Chapter 16 is the negotiation of the cause-and-effect relationship between words and passions in prayer. For the author of Eikon Basilike, set forms in liturgy are thus justified: For the manner of using Set and prescribed Forms, there is no doubt but that wholesome words, being known and fitted to men’s understandings, are soonest received into their hearts, and aptest to excite and carry along with them judicious and fervent affections. (EB 131) Set prayers have the ability to excite particular emotional states in the petitioners, or else pious fervency is stimulated by prescribed words. Charles’s definition of the Lord’s Prayer as “the warrant and original pattern of all set Liturgies, in the Christian Church” (EB 132) was a point commonly voiced in defence of liturgical prayers. Richard Hooker in his extensive treatise on ecclesiastical policy objected to the arrogance of those discarding God’s forms for spontaneous prayers: As if our Lord, even of purpose to prevent this fancy of extemporal and voluntary Prayers, had not left us of his own framing one, which might both remain as a part of the Church-Liturgy, and serve as a Pattern whereby to frame all other Prayers with efficacy, yet without superfluity of words.47 Jeremy Taylor, writing against the Directory for Worship, listed the Lord’s Prayer alongside other biblical instances (featuring Moses, David, Solomon, and so on) that included set prayers and authorized their sacred inviolability.48 The validity of the Lord’s Prayer as the original model for set prayers is explained by Taylor: Christ gave it not onely inmassâ materiae, but in forma verborum; not in a confused heap of matter, but in an exact composure of words, it makes it evident, he intended it not onely proregula

66  “Stale and Empty Words” petendorum, for a direction of what things we are to aske, but also proforma orationis, for a set forme of Prayer.49 Following Christ’s example, Charles claims that he had also based the validity of set forms in prayer on “the joint abilities and concurrent gifts of many learned and godly men; such as the Composers of the Service-­ Book were” (EB 132). Authorial prestige is called upon to secure the weight of set prayers, and Charles picks on the liberating potential set forms have for the laity by condemning individually conceived prayers as exposed to “every Minister’s private infirmities, indispositions, errors, disorders, and defects, both for judgement and expression” (EB 133). Milton responds by writing against the tyranny of set forms and by undermining their foundation in the Lord’s Prayer. Responding to Charles’s claim that the Lord’s Prayer proves the legitimacy of set prayers, he asks, “why was neither that Prayer, nor any other sett forme ever after us’d, or so much as mention’d by the Apostles, much less commended to our use” (CPW 3:506). Tom Corns has shown that Milton’s tract is characterized by an “interrogative mood” and “to dismiss it as ‘rhetorical questions’ is to understate its effect in persistently opening a dialogue with the reader.”50 In this case, Milton invites his reader to reflect on the Lord’s Prayer not as a rigid pattern to be blindly followed and to bind the church in oppressive worship, but as a framework to be followed creatively. Whereas Charles focuses on the status of “learned and godly men” to convince his readers, Milton alerts his audience to the unreliability of non-scriptural texts and authors. With regard to the Apostles not prescribing the Lord’s Prayer as a fixed form, he asks, “why was thir care wanting in a thing so usefull to the Church? Full of danger and contention to be left undon by them to other mens Penning, of whose authority we could not be so certain?” (CPW 3:506) Although Milton states in his Preface to Eikonoklastes that he is not interested in the controversy over the real author of Eikon Basilike, his point here about “other mens Penning” serves a double purpose: it warns the reader of the unsoundness both of the Book of Common Prayer and of the king’s book.51 For Milton, cause and effect between words and passions are reversed: “for the manner of using sett forms, there is no doubt but that, wholesom matter, and good desires rightly conceav’d in the heart, wholesom words will follow of themselves” (CPW 3:504). The cause-and-effect dynamic that Charles and the apologists for liturgy maintained is overturned in Eikonoklastes: the devotional disposition of the petitioners predates its oral articulation. “Wholesom words” follow “wholesom matter, and good desires,” the former only a palpable symptom of the latter. The two views expressed above occupy the two sides of the extensive debate regarding set forms in worship that dominated the seventeenth century.52 The division between set forms and extempore prayer translated

“Stale and Empty Words”  67 into a division between those who defended the use of preconceived and established modes of prayer (of which the Book of Common Prayer was the most prominent) and those who rejected set prayers as tyrannical, unlawful, and as devoid of the Spirit of God that existed to aid everyone’s petitions separately according to their needs. To win the argument, and show his readers how to cultivate a unique relationship with God in prayer, Milton’s rhetorical strategy involves imagining prayers as edible and constructing an elaborate metaphor of prayers as manna in order to foreground the active devotional duty and the direct physical and spiritual involvement required from the petitioner. The use of manna and food imagery more widely take the reader directly to the source of danger Milton finds with Eikon Basilike’s prayer style: reprocessed words, and a ‘readymeal’ attitude to devotion. As a substance simultaneously divine and material, a gift of divine origin but with the purpose of physical consumption, manna is discussed in the seventeenth century as food, yet food that directly nourishes and determines one’s spiritual condition as well, serving thus as a synonym for prayer. Originating in Exodus 16, according to which God miraculously nourished the starving Israelites in the desert by dropping manna, throughout the period the incomprehensibility of manna and its divine origin mark it as a symbol for the gift of prayer in religious lyric, devotional manuals, sermons, and theological treatises of both conformist and non-conformist authors. Manna’s centrality in debates of prayer rests with its amalgamation of divine authorization and inspiration on the one hand, and human effort and labour on the other. Listing synonyms for the practice in “Prayer (I),” George Herbert celebrates prayer among other things as “Exalted Manna” (l.10), an image that captures the poet’s efforts to approximate prayer despite never fully defining it. 53 Abuses of the gift of manna are used by Jeremy Taylor to criticise the Directory of Worship and the ineptitude of extempore prayers: For now adaies men are never edified, unlesse they be pleased … and the ground of their displeasure is nothing from the thing it selfe, but from themselves onely: they are wanton with their meat, and long for variety, and then they cry out that Manna will not nourish them, but prefer the onions of Egypt before the food of Angels. 54 For John Wilkins, manna’s divine origin does not minimise the human labour prayer involved: in the Primitive times … they were extraordinarily inspired with these gifts by immediate infusions, without the usual means of study and labour; but that Manna was only for the Wildernesse … God does now expect that we should plow and sowe. 55

68  “Stale and Empty Words” The substance’s miraculous and suitable nourishment for each famished Israelite, as described in Exodus 16.18, mirrors prayer’s quality to be performed by, and prove beneficial to, every subject. In a sermon on the Psalms, John Donne refers to them as “the Manna of the Church,” explaining that “as Manna tasted to every man like that he liked best, so doe the Psalmes minister Instruction, and satisfaction, to every man, in every emergency and occasion.”56 Donne’s understanding of the Psalms as food here is characteristic of the post-Reformation religious rhetoric that, according to Kristen Poole, depended for transmission of its message on food imagery: “In seventeenth-century sermons and pamphlets the nature of religious language is given material form through alimentary images.… Scripture is to be eaten.”57 Critical attention to the metaphor of manna in Donne’s work has emphasized how the materiality attributed by Donne to the Word, the pairing of textual and physical nourishment implied, rendered manna a symbol for the sacrament of the Eucharist, but at the same time relinquished power over its consumption and taste to God: “not as I would but as thou wouldest have it taste, and to conform my tast, and make it agreeable to thy will.”58 Eating manna enters the individual in a power relation with the divine where the producer of the substance determines its flavour and affective impact on the consumer. Manna’s ties to seventeenth-century devotion, therefore, may be attributed to its providential role in the narrative of Israel’s deliverance from its enemies, its heavenly origins, and its Eucharistic typology. What remains absent from such discussions, and what Milton contributes to early modern representations of manna, is less the role of God in manna’s dissemination and the typological associations this encourages, and more its actual nature, the physical and spiritual attributes of manna, and their relationship to the human body. In Eikonoklastes, as elsewhere in his work, Milton uses manna to reflect and advise his readers on eating habits, and to alert them to their own corporeality when reaching out to God. Milton’s unorthodox reading and application of manna highlights the substance’s complexity not only as the result of divine origin and human reception, but also due to its incorporation of nutrition and waste. In other words, manna for Milton can both nourish and malnourish, investing man with the responsibility of taking action to ensure the former and avoid the latter. As such, manna participates in ways eating can define one’s identity, or else in ways the consumption of manna can shape one’s religious self.59 Although Milton’s interest in food, and eating in particular, has sparked critical attention to the ways eating and tasting in his poetry can create particular human, angelic, Christian, moral, and gendered identities, the role of manna in the process of fashioning devotional identity has been largely ignored.60 This might partly be attributed to

“Stale and Empty Words”  69 the substance’s undetermined consistency, which resists categorisation and fails to fully convince critics of its materiality. In the banquet scene of Book V in Paradise Lost, for instance, Raphael mentions manna alongside nectar and ambrosia as the types of meal he enjoys in heaven: “We brush mellifluous dews, and find the ground / Covered with pearly grain” (V. 429–30). Milton’s scriptural basis for manna as food consumed by angels is found in Psalm 78 that praises God for sending it to man on earth, defining manna as “the bread of Angels” in the Geneva Bible, or the “angels’ food” in King James Bible. While rendering it celestial, however, the distinct location of manna does not contradict its material nature; after all, Raphael’s reference to manna is in the context of his lecture to Adam on how the angels in heaven eat and digest as materially as man. Manna here becomes implicated in what Stephen M. Fallon has identified in Milton as “materialist monism,” the philosophy that “treats spirit and matter as manifestations, differing in degree and not qualitatively, of the corporeal substance,” and according to which “moral purity is measurable in the degree of rarefaction of body.”61 The “pearly grain” that is manna, therefore, is dissimilar to the “viands” (V. 434) that Adam and Eve offer the archangel straight after these lines, in terms of access only, while they actually serve the same purpose of fulfilling hunger and “corporeal to incorporeal turn” (V. 413).62 The focus is firmly on the act of eating as bridging the matter of food with the spiritual condition that ensues from food. Milton’s engagement with manna does not privilege any heavenly and disembodied state of it other than food, but pays tribute to it as nourishing matter, alluding in this respect to his translation of Psalm 80, where the people are imagined as fed “with the bread of tears / their bread with tears they eat” (ll. 21–2). Milton had previously linked the materiality of manna with that of meats in the metaphor of books as food discussed in Areopagitica. Wholesome meats to a vitiated stomack differ little or nothing from unwholesome; and best books to a naughty mind are not unappliable to occasions of evill. Bad meats will scarce breed good nourishment in the healthiest concoction; but herein the difference is of bad books, that they to a discreet and judicious Reader serve in many respects to discover, to confute, to forewarn, and to illustrate. (CPW 2:512) In this treatise the food imagery highlights how physical and spiritual nourishment are essentially linked in man, how the material food or text cannot be held accountable for spiritual degeneration, and how reading, like eating, depends on a pure and healthy body to be fully beneficial. Yet meats are not the only food Milton enlists to make a case for books

70  “Stale and Empty Words” as nourishment; a few lines later Milton uses manna to establish man’s liberty in exercising temperance and regulating his own diet. I conceive therefore, that when God did enlarge the universall diet of mans body, saving ever the rules of temperance, he then also, as before, left arbitrary the dyeting and repasting of our minds; as wherein every mature man might have to exercise his owne leading capacity … And therefore when he himself tabl’d the Jews from heaven, that Omer which was every mans daily portion of Manna, is computed to have bin more then might have well suffic’d the heartiest feeder thrice as many meals. For those actions which enter into a man, rather then issue out of him, and therefore defile not, God uses not to captivat under a perpetuall childhood of prescription, but trusts him with the gift of reason to be his own chooser. (CPW 2:513–4) Manna, like the content of books, does not bear any responsibility for upsetting man’s diet since food is external to him, thus innocent from accusations of defilement. Instead, like books, it offers the individuals the opportunity to apply reason and choose nourishment as relevant to their needs, as it happened in the case of the Israelites in the desert. As critics have argued, the metaphor of meats and manna, in conflating the flesh with the word, could be seen to follow the Eucharistic model and to reimagine it at the same time.63 But manna here is more than a metaphor for God’s word. Focusing on the omer, Milton is interested in the effect manna has on man, and specifically the matter of physically achieving satisfaction from eating manna. That manna would have “well sufficed the heartiest feeder thrice as many meals” is a declaration of the gratification the substance is capable of providing. The food from heaven, which Raphael lists as part of the celestial diet in Paradise Lost, is consumed by those on earth too, creating obligations for the management of appetites which escape the letter of the law (“the perpetual childhood of prescription”) and are to be determined by the individual’s reason. The intricate nature of manna as material and spiritual food appears to capture Milton’s imagination later in his life, too. In Paradise Regained Milton revisits manna and in fact complicates our interpretation of its nature and meaning by having both Jesus and Satan expound on its significance. Against Satan’s one-dimensional reading of bread as only physical, Jesus juxtaposes its potentially transcendent nature, evoking Deuteronomy 8.3: Think’st thou such force in bread? is it not written (For I discern thee other than thou seem’st) Man lives not by bread only, but each word Proceeding from the mouth of God; who fed

“Stale and Empty Words”  71 Our fathers here with manna; in the mount Moses was forty days, nor eat nor drank, And forty days Eliah without food Wandered this barren waste; the same I now. (PR, I. 346–54) The crucial word here is only; Jesus’s reference to manna and the Israelites separates manna from the obstinately physical substance Satan tries to tempt him with, the “bread only,” and indicates his faith in God’s provision. Jesus is “the same now” with “our fathers,” establishing a transhistorical continuity of trust that Satan seeks to undo in his solely literal understanding of bread.64 Manna is more than nutrition; it is a reminder of God’s and man’s responsibilities in solidifying a relationship of trust. Jesus’s narrative of continuity, however, is disrupted when in Book II the reference to Israelites and manna is found in the mouth of Satan. A shrewd and manipulative listener, Satan re-appropriates Jesus’s text, eliminating any spiritual concerns of trust and faith, and emphasizing instead material relief from hunger in material time: With granted leave officious I return, But much more wonder that the Son of God In this wild solitude so long should bide Of all things destitute, and well I know, Not without hunger. Others of some note, As story tells, have trod this wilderness; The fugitive bond-woman with her son Outcast Nebaioth, yet found he relief By a providing angel; all the race Of Israel here had famished, had not God Rained from Heaven manna; and that prophet bold Native of Thebez wandering here was fed Twice by a voice inviting him to eat. Of thee these forty days none hath regard, Forty and more deserted here indeed. (PR, II. 302–16) Manna’s complexity is sacrificed at the expense of the physical nourishment it can provide. In recycling Jesus’s words, Satan dramatically accentuates their material context: the Israelites “had famished,” Eliah is remembered for his human-only nature (“native of Thebez”), and God is described as having a fixed testing time of forty days for his subjects, which has now expired in Jesus’s case (“forty and more deserted here indeed”). Satan, then, adopts Jesus’s reference to manna, but reconfigures it as evidence of material satisfaction only and dissociates it

72  “Stale and Empty Words” from its spiritual giver and content. Milton’s decision to have Satan echo a distorted version of Jesus’s argument alerts the reader to the dangers implicit in adhering to scriptural texts without the spirit’s enlightenment. At the same time, however, it attests to the interpretative challenges that manna poses, inviting a consideration of the consumption of manna as establishing a particular relationship with God (here of trust) and not as serving purely physical needs. The debate on manna in Paradise Regained, therefore, reflects on and reiterates the substance’s essential qualities: the heavenly derivation, the satisfaction of physical needs via employment of temperance, the implicit threat of waste, and the cultivation of a mutual and responsible bond between God and his subjects. It also implicitly gestures towards early modern debates about the status of manna as physical food and its role as an emblem for the Eucharist and the sacrament’s controversial interpretation of the consumption of divine matter. As the chapter shows next, Milton’s discussion of manna in Eikonoklastes reveals an awareness of prayer as a psychosomatic process, where the physical and emotional stimulation of the body meets one’s spiritual obligations in speaking to God as an agent.

Feeling and Eating Prayers The debate on set versus extempore prayers is imagined in alimentary terms initially in Eikon Basilike in a passage already quoted: Sure we may as well before-hand know what we pray, as to whom we pray; and in what words, as to what sense; when we desire the same things, what hinders we may not use the same words? Our appetite and digestion too may be good when we use, as we pray for, our daily bread. (EB 132) “Our daily bread” is a phrase borrowed from the Lord’s Prayer and it is part of the request to God to “Give us this day our daily bread.” The reference here becomes explicit a few lines later when Charles defines the Lord’s Prayer as “the warrant and original pattern of all set Liturgies, in the Christian Church,” a point commonly voiced, as we have seen, in defence of liturgical prayers. Apart from serving as justification for the use of set forms in prayer, the phrase “our daily bread” combined with “our appetite and digestion” directly points to bread as the material good of sustenance. Consuming the daily bread simultaneously benefits appetite and digestion. Eating does not have to follow the body’s appetites but it can excite them, as much as in prayer words precede affections.

“Stale and Empty Words”  73 In response to these lines, Milton rewrites the idea of prayer as a product for consumption by substituting “our daily bread” with its Old Testament type, the manna God sent to the people of Israel in the desert. We profess the same truths, but the Liturgie comprehends not all truths: wee read the same Scriptures; but never read that all those Sacred expressions, all benefit and use of Scripture, as to public prayer, should be deny’d us, except what was barreld up in a Common-­prayer Book with many mixtures of thir own, and which is worse, without salt. But suppose them savoury words and unmix’d, suppose them Manna it self, yet if they shall be hoarded up and enjoynd us, while God every morning raines down new expressions into our hearts, in stead of being fit to use, they will be found like reserv’d Manna, rather to breed wormes and stink. (CPW 3:505) That Milton chooses to discuss Jewish law and material bread instead of Eikon Basilike’s reference to “our daily bread” is in accordance with his rejection of the typology, which in the Christian Doctrine he holds responsible for “turning the Lord’s supper into a cannibal feast” (CPW 6: 554). Yet, this does not obstruct him from articulating his own embodied understanding of prayer based on manna and its relation to appetite and digestion. Manna, hence prayer, as in Eikon Basilike, is to be eaten, but for Milton it has to be consumed in accordance with the body’s needs and not to precede appetite. Surprisingly, then, manna for Milton bears the potential both for nourishment and for waste. Its very design is to be stale and wasted when not consumed in accordance with the body’s rational temperance. The savoury words, or prayers, need to be used when the need for them is felt, as opposed to them being stored and preserved to satisfy an imaginary future hunger: “as if Christians were now in wors famin of words fit for praier, then was of food at the siege of Jerusalem” (CPW 3:505–6). The allusion here to a historically terrible disaster, the famine in Jerusalem during the siege by Titus in A.D. 69–70, as the editor of Eikonoklastes Hughes glosses it, is juxtaposed to the seventeenth-­ century English nation, which should not be storing what is abundantly supplied, foreshadowing the importance of temperance in food that Milton vividly describes in the banquet scene between Adam, Eve, and Raphael, who finish their meal “when with meats and drinks they had sufficed / Not burdened Nature” (V. 451–2). Human attempts at preserving the divine essence are not only conducted erroneously (“barreld up … without salt”) but they turn into authoritative prescriptions (“hoarded up and enjoynd us”) of a practice that should only be freely initiated and regulated by the individual. In the Exodus narrative, the

74  “Stale and Empty Words” result of preserving, instead of eating, what God offered was the stale and foul-smelling “reserved Manna” the Israelites would encounter the day after gathering it. The example of “polemical worm,” as Karen Edwards has called it, highlights the rotten state fostered by recycled food as opposed to the “appetite and digestion” proposed by Eikon Basilike.65 In Eikonoklastes, the results of recycling prayers, instead of being constantly inspired to new ones, are stale and empty words and in extension apathy on the petitioner’s side. This apathy is registered physiologically as much as it is mentally and is set up against the emotional capital of prayer as Milton understands it. Persisting in the model of affections preceding words, Eikonoklastes uses humoral language to foreground the responsibility of individuals in their communication with the divine: Voluntary prayers are less subject to formal and superficial tempers then sett forms: for in those, at least for words & matter, he who prays, must consult first with his heart; which in likelihood may stir up his affections; … In these, having both words and matter readie made to his lips, which is anough to make up the outward act of prayer, his affections grow lazy, and com not up easily at the call of words not thir own; the prayer also having less intercourse and sympathy with a heart wherin it was not conceav’d, saves it self the labour of so long a journey downward, and flying up in hast on the specious wings of formalitie, if it fall not back again headlong, in stead of a prayer which was expected, presents God with a sett of stale and empty words. (CPW 3:506–7) Voluntary prayers appear as a psychosomatic process, and they derive from an emotional depth that contradicts the superficial nature of conformity in worship and the sluggish behaviour fostered by set forms. The corporeal map that registers the passage of prayer from the heart to the mouth and lips, combined with the spatial demarcations of “up,” “downward,” “flying up,” and “back again headlong,” engages God and petitioner in a mutual and passionate exercise that reconciles man’s affections with the presence of the divine. Milton’s anxiety over the liturgy’s disembodied effect on the petitioner examined in the previous chapter is here reimagined as a division between external action and internal emotion. The movement of extempore prayers is as follows: they are administered by the divine power, they enter the petitioner and remain in his heart awaiting consultation, upon which they excite the petitioner’s feelings and move him to an articulation of his request. Once the expressions are internalized, they are not instantly accessible, but man has to engage in a downward and interpretative journey himself. A sincere prayer requires consultation with the heart in the form of an

“Stale and Empty Words”  75 introspective plunge. Set prayers, on the other hand, preclude consultation with the heart. The progress in this case is of a single direction: the petitioner’s words arise from a superficial reading or recitation of the set forms and head to the divine. The exchange between the divine and the human occurs in the heart, and is termed “intercourse.” The word, in its embodied and erotic meanings, captures the nature of prayer for Milton and confirms his call for individual agency in the petitionary process. Joanna Picciotto has argued that in Paradise Lost Milton “famously uses the word Rites for both prayer and intercourse” to suggest their association as acts of worship.66 In Eikonoklastes, Milton unites the two terms again. Prayer is “conceav’d’ in the ‘heart” and might “stir up” the petitioner’s emotions, while set prayers remain superficially on the “lips” and do not result in “labour.” Prayer is here discussed as an organic experience that God implants in the petitioner’s heart and then it grows to fruition. Milton’s description of this experience in this passage is sensually charged and reminiscent of the religious lyric of the metaphysical poets who imagine their relationship to God in erotic terms. Richard Crashaw, for instance, imagines his heart as an organism independent from his body, containing “brim-filled bowls of fierce desire” (l. 99) that unites the heart with the divine: “by the full kingdom of that final kiss / That seized thy parting soul, and sealed thee his” (ll. 101–2).67 In an “Ode to a Prayer Book” Crashaw discusses prayer as the means to “a thousand unknown rites / Of joys and rarefy’d delights” (ll. 79–80), expressing thus a conviction that addressing God is a sensual experience. Donne, in his Holy Sonnets, is famously more forward: Batter my heart, three-personed God […] Take me to you, imprison me, for I Except you enthral me, never shall be free, Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

(ll. 1, 12–4)68

This desire to have God present himself forcefully into one’s craving heart is implicit in Milton’s discussion of prayer. Milton also imagines a God that impregnates a believer’s heart with prayers that excite and stimulate them.69 The believer has then to engage in labour in order to give birth to prayers that can be presented to God. This could be an example of the “transgressive love” found in Crashaw or Donne’s poetry, a love which “changes the dynamic between violator and violated because the transgressor is often the divine, while the human lover becomes the love object seeking to be violated.”70 Milton’s conception of a reproductive model of prayer, however, escapes Crashaw or Donne’s self-effacing desire. For the metaphysical poets, God’s presence in the heart requires

76  “Stale and Empty Words” the elimination of the individual. Donne’s willingness to surrender liberty to his violent penetrator is mirrored in Crashaw’s yearning that God entering his heart “combined against this Breast at once break in / And take away from me my self and sin” (ll. 89–90). In both poems, the hierarchical relationship between man and God is solid and threatening to erase man’s agency. As Schoenfeldt has observed in Donne, “only in the peculiar complementarity of the mortal desire for total submission and the divine power to overwhelm, Donne suggests, can mortal and God be considered a match made in heaven.”71 Man and God’s relationship figures as an oppressive—despite being welcome—condition. Unlike such “renunciation of subjectivity” via transgression, the intercourse that occurs during Miltonic prayer does not presuppose two separate spheres that the individual and God occupy.72 In Eikonoklastes, the petitioner seeks neither to become an empty vessel on which God will prescribe an identity nor to obtain transcendence purely via erotic love.73 Intercourse here points to a subjectivity that is not annulled by the divine but is adjacent to it. That prayer is the result of a reproductive process suggests that it is not founded on an inaccessible privacy and that it does not rely only on interior motives, as Charles’s devotions seem to do. On the contrary, reproduction, like manna, blurs the boundaries between the external, divine power and the internal, subjective responsibility, and it highlights the centrality of the individual in prayer. Analysing male renaissance poets who resort to the female body to symbolize their creativity, Katharine Maus has noted that: The birth process, both in reality and as a metaphor for rhetorical production, involves the permeability of boundaries in the other direction, the sensational transfer from inside to outside through an orifice that ordinarily, in Jonson’s phrase, out to be ‘fenced in, and defended by certaine strengths’.74 In conceiving the petitioner’s body as a female body that gives birth, Milton celebrates the exchange of divine and human agency that moves reciprocally from interior to exterior, unlike Donne, Crashaw, or Charles’s address to God that render man passive and uninvolved. To go back to the quote from Eikonoklastes, therefore, the consumption of manna, like the practice of intercourse, both indicate the embodied collaborative project that Milton envisages for voluntary prayers, one where the addressed and the addressee are not fixed and unique but substitute each other: God both sends and receives, man both receives and sends. Prayer does not stem from manmade artificial expressions, but like manna, it flows from God’s mouth, it is always renewable, and if processed accordingly, it is nourishing for man and God. As such, it participates in the “restricted economy” Denise Gigante finds in Milton’s theory of taste, “in which things circulate smoothly, so that what the consuming

“Stale and Empty Words”  77 organism ingests it sublimates back into expression.”75 Furthermore, the metaphor of manna as a God-sent gift that grows stale if not consumed establishes that divine origin cannot guarantee divine destination. If the right conditions are not adhered to, and if words are found in the lips first, then the address to God is no more than the recycling of words, and his subjects no more than apathetic mouthpieces. That the distribution of manna, when not processed, leads to perilous passivity informs the moment in Paradise Lost where Belial advises his fallen peers to adopt a position of inactivity: On th’ other side up rose Belial, in act more graceful and humane; A fairer person lost not heaven; he seemed For dignity composed and high exploit: But all was false and hollow; though his tongue Dropped manna, and could make the worse appear The better reason, to perplex and dash Maturest counsels: for his thoughts were low; To vice industrious, but to nobler deeds Timorous and slothful: yet he pleased the ear, And with persuasive accent thus began. (PL, II. 108–18) The devil, administering manna to an audience of fallen angels, conjures the power of word over a community, which is reminiscent of God’s word to Israel. Yet the image of nourishment by the divine has been undoubtedly distorted. Belial’s “tongue” is not the organ of taste, where the Word and manna, or else the spirit and the matter meet, but an organ of rhetorical speech without substance. Moreover, Belial’s advice for “ignoble ease, and peaceful sloth, / Not peace” (II. 226–7) suggests that if the devils are to follow his instructions and to feed on his deceptive manna, their misjudged actions will exhibit the indolence that the Israelites who gathered manna and stored it for future use displayed. The passage portrays a doubly distorted image of manna administration: firstly, manna proceeds from the devil to his followers instead of from God to his people, and secondly, the distributed manna urges to sloth and inaction instead of active participation in the consumption of it. In Eikonoklastes, the “set of stale and empty words” that God is presented with in prescribed prayers designates a wider disgust with using devotions already consumed by another, whether it is a priest, a petitioner, or the king. When not referring to manna, Milton still uses imagery of food leftovers to denounce unimaginative repackaging of words. The most memorable and controversial instance of borrowed prayer in the treatise, mentioned in the first part of this chapter, comes at the end of Eikonoklastes’s Chapter I, where Milton accuses the king of distorting

78  “Stale and Empty Words” “the very duty of prayer it self, by borrowing to a Christian use Prayers offer’d to a Heathen God” (CPW 3: 362). The prayer in question derives not from godly inspiration, as prayers should, but from an irreligious literary text, Sir Philip Sidney’s romance, Arcadia, recycling thus Pamela’s devotions and presenting them as the king’s own. Milton adopts a stance of incredulity in the face of the borrowing, an incredulity exaggerated by the close detail to the actual process of borrowing: “a Prayer stol’n word for word from the mouth of a Heathen fiction praying to a heathen God” (CPW 3: 362). Placing devout words in someone’s mouth had been referenced by Milton just earlier, with the example of Richard III, as the usual practice of tyrannical rulers, and it is an idea Milton revisits towards the very end of his polemical tract. Arguing again for an unmediated relationship between believer and God, one that involves no set prayers and not priests, Milton reacts to the king’s complaint that he could not receive his chaplains while in captivity, by reducing Charles’s set prayers to chewing words: “what aild this King then that he could not chew his own Mattins without the Priests Oretenus?” (CPW 3:550). ‘Chew’ in this case could be defined by OED as “to take or retain the mouth; to keep saying or mumbling over,” yet it could also refer to the sense of “masticating for another,” portraying Charles as dependant on his chaplains’ feeding him used prayers. The heathen prayer, however, is an even worse text to consume, and Milton resorts once again to the metaphor of food to denounce the forgery: If only but to tast wittingly of meat or drink offerd to an Idol, be in the doctrine of St. Paul judg’d a pollution, much more must be his sin who takes a prayer, so dedicated, into his mouth, and offers it to God. (CPW 3:363–4) Eating what remains after idolatrous offerings is paralleled to praying to God using idolatrous, second-hand words, such as Pamela’s prayer. Both signal reprocessing of a product not fit for consumption to begin with. Milton’s substitution of what in the Pauline epistle is termed “defilement” for its near synonym “pollution” firmly connects the idolatrous food leftovers with the “polluted orts and refuse of Arcadia’s and Romances” (CPW 3:364). As in the case of the accumulated manna and its state of decay, the Pamela prayer cannot be properly consumed and digested by man, but exists in crumbs, in fragments of little nutritional value, reminiscent of the dregs, or else “the lifeless, spiritless waste” John Rogers has shown to interrupt Milton’s monistic universe.76 The danger of these crumbs, of eating fragments of forged texts, is the contamination of manna, and consequently the smearing of the truth. In Of Prelatical Episcopacy (1641), Milton had attacked episcopacy’s

“Stale and Empty Words”  79 legitimacy and its foundation on the writings of Ignatius and Irenaeus. Such arguments are dismissed not only as morally wrong for the spiritual liberty of Protestants but also as based on inauthentic texts that were inherited “in this broken and disjointed plight.” Milton’s polemic style, prefiguring the iconoclasm of Eikonoklastes, enlists manna and food imagery to combat false texts: “We doe injuriously in thinking to tast better the pure Euangelick Manna by seasoning our mouths with the tainted scraps, and fragments of an unknown table” (CPW 1:639). Leftovers and reprocessed food spoil the pure taste of manna, suggesting the detrimental effect forged texts can have on achieving truth. Consuming manna, therefore, emerges in Milton’s polemical tract as an exercise in prayer and as a moral duty. In the context of Eikonoklastes, attention to nourishment by manna, and by prayers in extension, reveals a philosophy of devotion that seeks to replace Charles’s set prayers with a different model based on deep engagement with divine inspiration and reciprocal communication with God. This model is conceived in physiological, emotional, and spiritual terms: the reader cannot escape the corporeality of the metaphors of manna and food and is instead alert to the demands eating places on the body as much as on the spirit, since extempore prayer materializes from the stirring of affections. Savoury words, reified in manna, create the responsibility for particular eating habits, for wise consumption, and for rejection of stale, recycled substances. They require digestion and consumption, or the individual’s active participation in their use, as opposed to their unquestioning endorsement and exploitation as divine gift. Manna as sent by God cannot be automatically comprehended or useful to petitioners, but the interpretative steps begin with the work of the human body. In this respect, the petitioners’ active response to the matter and spirit generously bestowed by God emerges as the appropriate way of communicating with the divine. Milton’s incorporation of manna in his work intricately oscillates between metaphor and literality, highlighting the danger of privileging matter over spirit and vice versa. Relying on manna as the spiritual gift of God may lead to apathy and the substance’s divine origin may lead man to receive it unthinkingly. Conversely, engaging with manna as predominantly physical food may result in waste due to man’s irrational efforts to satisfy his bodily needs. Prayer follows analogically the same directions in Milton’s thought. Using the metaphor of intercourse, Milton pictures prayer as the embodiment and the erotic fulfilment of one’s loving relationship with God. Using the metaphor of manna, the energies of the human body are again foregrounded. The balance that the petitioners need to strike in their performance of prayer is encapsulated in the nature of manna, which for Milton bridges the materiality of the body with the rational spirituality of exercising control over consumption to avoid waste.

80  “Stale and Empty Words”

Notes 1 Some important studies of Eikonoklastes in these traditions include Loewenstein’s Milton and the Drama of History, Sharon Achinstein’s “Milton Catches the Conscience of the King: Eikonoklastes and the Engagement Controversy,” Milton Studies 29 (1992): 143–63, and Cable’s Carnal Rhetoric that reads Eikonoklastes as one of Milton’s iconoclastic metaphors where language is relied upon to break the illusion of Charles’s icon. 2 David Gay, “Prayer and the Sacred Image: Milton, Jeremy Taylor, and the Eikon Basilike,” Milton Quarterly 46 (2012): 1–14 (4). 3 Diarmaid MacCulloch, “‘Mumpsimus, Sumpsimus’: Review of Book of Common Prayer: The Texts of 1549, 1559 and 1662, edited by Brian Cummings,” London Review of Books 34 (2012): 13–5 (13). 4 Targoff, Common Prayer, 18. 5 Maltby, Prayer Book and People in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England, 113–5. 6 Maltby, “Suffering and Surviving: The Civil Wars, the Commonwealth and the formation of ‘Anglicanism’, 1642–60,” in Religion in Revolutionary England, ed. Christopher Durston and Judith Maltby (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), 158–80 (165). 7 See Diane Purkiss, The English Civil War: A People’s History (London: Harper Press, 2006), 71–97. 8 By the 1630s and Laud’s succession to Archbishop of Canterbury, the Book of Common Prayer was part of the programme of Charles and Laud which “rested upon a narrow and literal enforcement of the observances and practices of the Book of Common Prayer and early injunctions of the Elizabethan Church”: John Morrill, The Nature of the English Revolution (London: Longman, 1993), 53. For Charles’s role in the advancement of Arminianism, see Nicholas Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists: The Rise of English Arminianism, c.1590–1640 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987), 181–244. 9 Cummings, The Book of Common Prayer: The Texts of 1549, 1559, and 1662, xl. 10 Anon, A Directory for the Publicke Worship of God throughout the three kingdoms of Scotland, England, and Ireland (London, 1645), 3. For a concise account of the reasons of its abolition, see Peter King, “The Reasons for the Abolition of the Book of Common Prayer in 1645,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 21 (1970): 327–39. 11 Studies of the parish include Maltby’s Prayer Book and People in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England, Dan Beaver’s ‘Behemoth, or Civil War and Revolution in English Parish Communities’, in The English Revolution, c.1590–1720: Politics, Religion and Communities, ed. by Nicholas Tyacke (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 129–49, and Morrill’s The Nature of the English Revolution. 12 For the fate of the Prayer Book after the seventeenth century, see Cummings, xlvi, and Rosendale, Liturgy and Literature in the Making of Protestant England, 201–4. 13 Targoff, Common Prayer, 16. 14 Cummings, The Book of Common Prayer: The Texts of 1549, 1559, and 1662, 4 from the 1549 Preface. 15 Ibid., 21. 16 Ibid., 27. 17 Ibid., 32. Cummings explains that the 1549 Book of Common Prayer borrows the idea of confession from old sources but relocates it from the private space of the priest or the choir to the public space of the congregation: “the form

“Stale and Empty Words”  81

18 19 2 0 21 22

23

is transposed in 1549 so that the whole congregation gives voice to communal confession, combining the formal act of the priest with a personal performance of humility and critical self-analysis” (702–3). Ibid., 39. Ibid., 39–40. Natalie Mears, “Public Worship and Political Participation in Elizabethan England,” Journal of British Studies 51 (2012): 4–25 (15). Targoff, Common Prayer, 56. Eikon Basilike: The Portraicture of His Sacred Majestie in His Solitudes and Sufferings (London, 1648). All the references to Eikon Basilike in this book are from Eikon Basilike, with selections from Eikonoklastes, ed. by Jim Daems and Holly Faith Nelson (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Editions, 2006), and they will be parenthetically included in the text. Although I acknowledge the work might have been authored by Bishop John Gauden, a full discussion of the authorship debate exceeds the parameters of this study. For the composition of the book, see Francis Falconer Madan, A New Bibliography of the Eikon Basilike of King Charles the First; with an Note on the Authorship (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1950), Hugh Trevor-­Roper, “Eikon Basilike: The Problem of ‘The King’s Book’,” History Today 1 (1951): 7–12, Merrit Y. Hughes, “New Evidence on the Charge That Milton Forged the Pamela Prayer in the Eikon Basilike,” The Review of English Studies 3 (1952): 130–40, Henry Beecham, “John Gauden and the Authorship of the Eikon Basilike,” The Library: A Quarterly Journal of Bibliography 20 (1965): 142–4. Elizabeth P. Skerpan Wheeler, “Rhetorical Genres and the Eikon Basilike,” Explorations in Renaissance Culture 11 (1985): 99–111 (101). Milton’s Eikonoklastes was part of this Parliamentarian agenda. According to Milton it was commissioned by the Parliament, probably in an attempt to minimize the damage caused in the aftermath of the appearance of the king’s thoughts in print. In the preface to his tract, Milton had appeared unenthusiastic about the task at hand: Or as to any need of answering, in respect of staid and well-principl’d men, I take it on me as a work assign’d rather, then by me chos’n or affected. Which was the cause both of beginning it so late, and finishing it so leasurely, in the midst of other imployments and diversions. (CPW 3:339)

Eikonoklastes was first published in October 1649. Gordon Campbell and Thomas N. Corns, John Milton: Life, Work, and Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), suggest that “there is no record of Milton’s commission though he clearly asserts that the work came to him as an unlooked for assignment, rather than a task that he had sought” (222). 2 4 For the significance of The Kings Cabinet Opened (1645) and Charles’s manipulation of domesticity, see Michael McKeon, The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private, and the Division of Knowledge (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 482–6, and Laura Lunger Knoppers, Politicizing Domesticity from Henrietta Maria to Milton’s Eve (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), Chapters 2 and 3. 25 Keith Thomas, “Cases of Conscience in Seventeenth-Century England,” in Public Duty and Private Conscience in Seventeenth-Century England: Essays Presented to G.E. Aylmer, ed. John Morrill, Paul Slack and Daniel Woolf (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993), 29–56 (30), and Kevin Sharpe, “Private Conscience and Public Duty in the Writings of Charles I,” The Historical Journal 40 (1997): 643–65 (660).

82  “Stale and Empty Words” 26 Lois Potter, Secret Rites and Secret Writing: Royalist Literature, 1641–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 175. 27 Although piety seems a constant point of reference for critics of Eikon Basilike, Sharpe has argued, in Remapping the Early Modern England: The Culture of Seventeenth-Century Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), that Charles’s actual thoughts on prayer remain unexplored: Few scholars have paid any attention to the prayers Charles composed and published under his name […] as we read them, we cannot doubt that for Charles prayers were […] a meditation on, a personalizing of scripture—and a baring of the conscience before God. (185) 28 2 9 3 0 31

Loewenstein, Milton and the Drama of History, 54. Sharpe, “Private Conscience and Public Duty,” 661. Wheeler, “Rhetorical Genres and the Eikon Basilike,” 105. Wheeler, “Eikon Basilike and the Rhetoric of Self-Representation,” in The Royal Image: Representations of Charles I, ed. Thomas N. Corns (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 122–40 (128). 32 Elizabeth Sauer, ‘Paper-contestations’ and Textual Communities in England, 1640–1675 (Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, 2005). Elizabeth Sauer gives a very specific and intriguing example of how close the two publications were in their printers and followers’ minds: “a 1636 edition of the Book of Common Prayer,” she writes, “used by Charles for worship, later became an “Eikon Basilike,” which memorialized the king himself and provided a gloss for reading his private devotions,” while in the Restoration “the frontispiece from Eikon Basilike serves as the new cover for the Prayer Book” (74–5). She also states that separate editions of the devotions and chapter 27 were also produced(…) The king’s devotions(…) were in fact read out loud and even sung after being translated into verse and set to music in Thomas Stanley’s famous Psalterium Carolinum, The Devotions of his Sacred Majesty, published just before the Restoration. (74) 33 Targoff, Common Prayer, 87. 34 Maltby’s study on the petitions of 1641–2 examines the power of local communities and explains how the Book of Prayer was central in their demands: “Liturgy was also a great leveller; the Book of Common Prayer provided some common culture; a shared experience across the divides of class, sex, and age” (30). 35 Tyacke, England’s Long Reformation, 1500–1800 (London; New York: Routledge, 1998), 22. Ann Hughes, The Causes of the English Civil War (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991) also writes: “English Arminians stressed order and hierarchy, seemliness and obedience to the established practices of the church as an institution; they decried individual activism and initiative” (113). 6 Wheeler, “Eikon Basilike and the Rhetoric of Self-Representation,” 132. 3 37 Ibid., 131. 38 John Staines, “Compassion in the Public Sphere of Milton and Charles,” in Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion, ed. Gail Kern Paster, Katherine Rowe, and Mary Floyd-Wilson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 89–110 (110). 39 Sharon Achinstein’s “Milton and King Charles,” in The Royal Image: Representations of Charles I, ed. Thomas N. Corns, 141–60, also reads

“Stale and Empty Words”  83

4 0

41 42 43 4 4 45 4 6 47 4 8 49 50 51 52 53 5 4 55 56 57 58

Eikonoklastes as an attack against the private nature of kingship, and in particular as “a masterpiece of Popish-plot thinking” where “repeatedly Milton finds the secret motives and deeds underlying Charles’s public statements” (154). For an analysis of Charles’s theatricality on the scaffold, see Nancy Klein Maguire, “The Theatrical Mask/Masque of Politics: The Case of Charles I,” Journal of British Studies 28 (1989): 1–22, and Derek Hirst, “Milton’s Eikonoklastes: The Drama of Justice,” in The Theatrical City: Culture, Theatre and Politics in London, 1576–1649, ed. David L. Smith, Richard Strier, and David Bevington (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 245–59. For the relation between theatricality and power in Milton’s tract, see David Loewenstein, Milton and the Drama of History. See Stephen Orgel, The Illusion of Power: Political Theater in the English Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975). Ann Baynes Coiro, “‘A Thousand Fantasies’: The Lady and the Maske,” in The Oxford Handbook to Milton, ed. Nicholas McDowell and Nigel Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 89–111. Staines, “Compassion in the Public Sphere of Milton and King Charles,” 107. Richard F. Hardin, Civil Idolatry: Desacralizing and Monarchy in Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton (London; Toronto, ON: Associated University Presses, 1992), 164. Daniel Shore, ‘“Fit though Few”: Eikonoklastes and the Rhetoric of Audience’, Milton Studies 45 (2006): 129–48 (130 and 135). David Ainsworth, “Spiritual Reading in Milton’s Eikonoklastes,” Studies in English Literature 45 (2005): 157–89 (162). Richard Hooker, The Works of Mr. Richard Hooker (That Learned and Judicious Divine), in Eight Books of Ecclesiastical Polity Compleated Out of His Own Manuscripts (London, 1666), 170. Jeremy Taylor, A Discourse Concerning Prayer ex tempore, or, by Pretence of the Spirit (London, 1646), 21. Ibid., 22. Thomas N. Corns, Uncloistered Virtue: English Political Literature, 1640–1660 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 213. For the authorship controversy, see the Introduction to Eikon Basilike, 16–21, and fn.22 in this chapter. See, for instance, Christopher Durston, “‘By the Book or with the Spirit’: The Debate over Liturgical Prayer during the English Revolution,” Historical Research 79 (2006): 50–73. George Herbert, “Prayer (I),” in George Herbert and the Seventeenth-­ Century Religious Poets, ed. Mario A. Di Cesare (New York: Norton, 1978): 21–2. Jeremy Taylor, An Apology for Authorized and Set Forms of Liturgie against the Pretence of the Spirit 1. For ex tempore Prayer 2. Forms of Private Composition (London, 1649), 40–41. John Wilkins, A Discourse Concerning the Gift of Prayer (London, 1651), 8–9. John Donne, “The Second of My Prebend Sermons upon My Five Psalms,” in Donne’s Prebend Sermons, ed. Janel M. Mueller (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), 91. Kristen Poole, Radical Religion from Shakespeare to Milton: Figures of Nonconformity in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 62–3. John Donne, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, ed. John Sparrow (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1923), 40. For criticism on Donne

84  “Stale and Empty Words”

59

6 0

61

62

63

6 4

6 5 66 67 68

see John S. Pendergast, Religion, Allegory, and Literacy in Early Modern England, 1560–1640: The Control of the Word (Farnham: Ashgate, 2006), 119–31, and Louise Noble, Medicinal Cannibalism in Early Modern English Literature and Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2011), 89–126. Typological associations between manna and the Eucharist, the round disks in the wilderness and the host, are further sustained by iconographical traditions, see Valerie Hutchinson Pennanen, “Communion,” in Encyclopedia of Comparative Iconography: Themes Depicted in Works of Art, ed. Helene E. Roberts (Chicago, IL: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 1998), 179–88, 182, and Rosemund Tuve, A Reading of George Herbert (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1952), 51. Eating manna, in this respect, bears strong similarities with what Michael C. Schoenfeldt has called “a particularly literal mode of self-fashioning, one that turns inward as much as outward,” in Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 38. See, for instance, Anthony Low, “Angels and Food in Paradise Lost,” Milton Studies 1 (1969): 135–45, Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England, Denise Gigante, Taste: A Literary History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), Amy L. Tigner, “Eating with Eve,” Milton Quarterly 44 (2010): 239–53. Stephen M. Fallon, Milton among the Philosophers, 102–3. For Milton’s monism see also John Rogers, The Matter of Revolution: Science, Poetry, and Politics in the Age of Milton (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), Regina M. Schwartz, Remembering and Repeating: Biblical Creation in “Paradise Lost” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), William Kerrigan, The Sacred Complex: On the Psychogenesis of “Paradise Lost” (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), and William B. Hunter, Jr., “Milton’s Power of Matter,” Journal of the History of Ideas 13 (1952): 551–62. For discussions of transubstantiation and the Eucharistic in this passage see Regina M. Schwartz, Sacramental Poetics at the Dawn of Secularism: When God Left the World (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), Jamie H. Ferguson, “Satan’s Supper: Language and Sacrament in Paradise Lost,” in Uncircumscribed Mind: Reading Milton Deeply, ed. Charles W. Durham and Kristin Pruitt (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 2008), 129–45, and Sophie Read, Eucharist and the Poetic Imagination in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). John D. Schaeffer, “Metonymies We Read By: Rhetoric, Truth and the Eucharist in Milton’s Areopagitica,” Milton Quarterly 34 (2000): 84–92 (88), David Gay, “Prayer and the Sacred Image: Milton, Jeremy Taylor, and the Eikon Basilike,” Milton Quarterly 46 (2012): 1–14 (11–12). See Emilie Babcox, “Physical and Metaphorical Hunger: the Extra-biblical Temptations of Paradise Regained,” Milton Quarterly 26 (1992): 36–42, and Lee Sheridan Cox, “Food-Word Imagery in Paradise Regained,” ELH 28 (1961): 225–43. Karen Edwards, “Worm,” Milton’s Reformed Animals: An Early Modern Bestiary, Milton Quarterly 43 (2009): 289–94 (292). Joanna Picciotto, Labors of Innocence in Early Modern England (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 480. Richard Crashaw, from “The Flaming Heart,” in George Herbert and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Poets, ed. Mario A. Di Cesare (New York: Norton, 1978), 88–9. John Donne, The Major Works, ed. by John Carey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 177–8.

“Stale and Empty Words”  85 69 Guibbory also mentions this image of reproduction in her study Ceremony and Community. She arrives at this conclusion while discussing creativity and originality in Milton and without expanding specifically on the importance of reproductive prayer for Milton’s vision of prayer. See Ceremony and Community, 192–3. 70 Sean McDowell, “Stealing or Being Stolen: A Distinction between Sacred and Profane Modes of Transgressive Desire in Early-Modern England,” in The Sacred and Profane in English Renaissance Literature, ed. Mary A. Papazian, 132–58 (147). 71 Michael Schoenfeldt, “The Gender of Religious Devotion: Aemilia Lanyer and John Donne,” in Religion and Culture in Renaissance England, ed. Claire McEachern and Debora Shuger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 209–33 (221). 72 McDowell, “Stealing or Being Stolen,” 151. See also Rambuss, Closet Devotions: 73–102. 73 Guibbory, “Erotic Poetry,” in The Cambridge Companion to John Donne, ed. Achsah Guibbory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 133–48 (146). 74 Katharine Eisaman Maus, “A Womb of His Own: Male Renaissance Poets in the Female Body,” in Sexuality and Gender in Early Modern Europe: Institutions, Texts, Images, ed. James Grantham Turner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 266–88 (274). 75 Gigante, Taste: A Literary History, 26. 76 Rogers, The Matter of the Revolution, 134.

3 Hymns, Sighs, and the Materiality of Prayer in Paradise Lost

If in Eikonoklastes Milton constructs a devotional model that includes physical and emotional intimacy between the individual and God, his epic, Paradise Lost, features Adam and Eve in two prominent prayer scenes, one set in the prelapsarian world, the other in a postlapsarian setting, in which the physical and emotional intensity of devotion is not contained in the body alone but through the inhaled and exhaled air interconnects subjects and their environment. In an epic that has been read as in its entirety as a prayer, or as “striv[ing] to constitute such a song,” the two scenes are diametrically opposite in sentiment and content: the first depicts Adam and Eve praising God for the harmony of his creation and for the humans’ place in it, while the second shows Adam and Eve pleading for God’s forgiveness after trespassing his command and introducing disorder in the creation.1 Nevertheless, in prelapsarian singing and in postlapsarian sighing, breath offers a universalizing model of embodiment, and one that reconstructs and orders an experience of loss. The first part of this chapter is concerned with the description of Adam and Eve’s prelapsarian hymns in Books IV and V of Paradise Lost and with their significance for Milton’s articulation of prayer. 2 Even though Milton’s incorporation of the Psalms in his work has received important critical attention, the present analysis is interested specifically in those qualities of the Psalms, and singing and music more broadly, with which Milton infuses Adam and Eve’s prayers to create an image of communal and sincere worship. 3 The second part of this chapter focuses on the postlapsarian prayer of Adam and Eve in Books X and XI and suggests that the Fall does not initiate an altogether different model of worship, but it reconfigures the performance of prayer found in prelapsarian Eden, sharing the interdependence of the body and the spirit that features in the prelapsarian hymns. When studied next to each other, the two prayer scenes allow for a continuity that conveys Milton’s anxiety about language’s potential to reach God, an anxiety echoed in contemporary discourses of how to secure God’s audience and a prevalent concern in devotional publications and religious lyric. Other than a suspicion towards language in devotion, Milton shares with his contemporaries an understanding that the poetics of breath can be called upon as a secure agent to perform prayer.

Hymns, Sighs, and the Materiality of Prayer  87

Prayer in Hymns The Evening Prayer, Book IV In Book IV Adam and Eve perform a prayer of praise at the threshold of their “blissful bower” (IV. 690). Milton’s description focuses on the couple’s surroundings: Thus at their shady lodge arrived, both stood, Both turned, and under open sky adored The God that made both sky, air, earth and heaven Which they beheld, the moon’s resplendent globe And starry pole (IV. 720–4) “Arrived,” “stood,” and “turned” represent a disruption to the narrative of the domestic scene from Adam and Eve’s life. A few lines earlier Milton has the couple enter the bower and offers us a short but exquisite depiction of the space, highlighting its organic nature and its symbolisms of “ordered profusion, innocent nature, fruition and growth.”4 By the time Eve’s “nuptial bed” (IV. 710) is mentioned, Milton’s readers are under the impression they are placed inside the bower and about to witness Adam and Eve’s nuptial rites. The voyeuristic journey is interrupted here by the evening prayer that transports Adam and Eve again in the exterior and locates them firmly “under open sky” (IV. 721). Since, as Fenton has pointed out, this is “the first action readers witness Adam and Eve performing” and since it frames a controversial decision to have Adam and Eve engage in prelapsarian sex, the portrayal of the prayer begs our attention.5 Lewalski tells us that in content the prayer is “psalmic, a paraphrase and elaboration of Psalm 74.16: ‘The day is thine, the night also is thine: thou hast prepared the light and the sun.’,” and that it exhibits elements of the epithalamic lyric, which explains why Adam and Eve sing their praise outside their bower.6 Since epithalamium is a song accompanying the bride to the newlyweds’ bedchamber, it has to be sung in the external space surrounding the bower.7 Articulating a lyric reminiscent of a psalm in an open space under the stars establishes God as the direct audience and recipient of this prayer and is very close to Milton’s ideal of worship that requires no specific place, as is later proclaimed: “To teach thee that God attributes to place no sanctity, / If none be thither brought / By Men who there frequent, or therein dwell” (XI. 832–4).8 While in Eikonoklastes Milton had attacked Charles’s private, yet at the same time very public, prayer closet, and in his antiprelatical tracts he had opposed fixed and adorned spaces of devotion that distance the petitioner, here, it is the exterior and natural world that is celebrated as fit place for devotion.9

88  Hymns, Sighs, and the Materiality of Prayer Central throughout the depiction of the prayer is Adam and Eve’s companionship. Their joint behaviour and praise is first demonstrated with the repetition of “both” (“both stood, / Both turned” (IV. 720–1)), it then continues with “mutual” (“mutual help / And mutual love” (IV. 727–8)), and finally culminates in their “unanimous” worship: This said unanimous, and other rites Observing none, but adoration pure Which God likes best, into their inmost bower Handed they went (IV. 736–9) Adam and Eve’s body language is identical and it reflects their unified voice in praise. “Handed” looks back to the first image of Adam and Eve in the epic who “hand in hand they passed” (IV. 321) in Paradise, and to our last image of them who “hand in hand with wandering steps and slow” (XII. 648) leave in exile. Their evening prayer is marked as a collective experience, similar to their shared life and death. The harmony of their bodies, in conjunction with the idyllic landscape, suggests a joint performance of prayer in front of God. Moreover, the double meaning of the word “rites” alludes both to devotional and marital duties, establishing a linguistic connection between sexual intercourse and prayer. In Eikonoklastes this connection supports the representation of prayer as the product of an intimate relationship between the individual and God. In Paradise Lost it serves to highlight the intimate relationship between man and woman and their common address to God. In Eikonoklastes prayer is imagined as reproduced from God impregnating the human body; in Paradise Lost God bestows the burden of reproduction on Adam and Eve yet again their physical intimacy is intended to result in prayers: But thou hast promised from us two a race To fill the earth, who shall with us extol Thy goodness infinite, both when we wake, And when we seek, as now, thy gift of sleep (IV. 732–5) The descendants of the nuptial rites of Adam and Eve are destined to form a community in praise of God’s “goodness infinite.” Prayer as a collaborative process between the human and the divine is here re-­ imagined and developed as one between humans. The physical union found in the evening prayer resembles a chorographical performance. John Demaray has read this scene in the tradition of court masques and has pointed out that “Adam and Eve participate, first, in an extraordinary ‘presentation’ to the ‘divine’ state and then in an

Hymns, Sighs, and the Materiality of Prayer  89 innocent revel.”10 This performance is not divorced from spirituality but it is inspired by praise, echoing the Lady’s devotion in the Mask where the female protagonist remains constantly aware of her performance in the eyes of the divine. Milton highlights the sincerity of Adam and Eve’s devotion by contrasting it to hypocrisy shortly after: “and eased the putting off / These troublesome disguises which we wear” (IV. 739–40). The bodies of Adam and Eve are under no suspicion of misdirected and hypocritical worship. They represent, instead, a mutual and unified performance of praise. This brief instance of worship in Eden introduces Milton’s readers to some of the integral constituents of “adoration pure” (IV. 737), such as community, song, and the natural world. The purity of Adam and Eve’s adoration is based on the surroundings of their worship, the praise they sing, and their shared emotional and physical state. The Morning Prayer, Book V Milton revisits these elements in the morning prayer in Book V. This prayer, “the most eloquent and complex lyric in the entire epic,” celebrates spontaneous worship and the direct address to God:11 Lowly they bowed adoring, and began Their orisons, each morning duly paid In various style, for neither various style Nor holy rapture wanted they to praise Their maker, in fit strains pronounced or sung Unmeditated, such prompt eloquence Flowed from their lips, in prose or numerous verse, More tunable than needed lute or harp To add more sweetness, and they thus began (V. 144–52) As in their evening prayer, Adam and Eve engage in a joint performance. Their bodies are again coordinated into a posture of worship (“lowly they bowed adoring”) and the expressions that “flowed from their lips” give the impression of simultaneous voices. The “prayer is prompted for a second time by the change of scenery and the move to natural surroundings: “but first from under shady arborous roof, / Soon as they forth were come to open sight / Of day-spring, and the sun” (V. 137–9).12 Apart from the devotional posture they adopt in this natural location, Adam and Eve’s “holy rapture” draws attention to their emotional relationship. John Leonard has affirmed that “rapture” is one of the words in the epic that “occurs frequently in Paradise Lost, appearing with different meanings in different contexts” and he has identified that “the sense of “seizing and carrying off as prey” (OED “rapture” 1) blends harmoniously with the sense “ecstatic delight or joy” (OED 5).”13

90  Hymns, Sighs, and the Materiality of Prayer The word’s combination of a violent, physical act with an inner sense of delight can also be interpreted as denoting a sexual relationship. As in the evening prayer there is no fixed boundary between sexual intimacy and praise, so in the morning prayer the couple’s bodily relationship is echoed in their praise. Going back to Milton’s Mask, “holy rapture” evokes Comus’s description of the Lady’s song to Echo: Can any mortal mixture of Earth’s mold Breathe such Divine enchanting ravishment? Sure something holy lodges in that breast, And with these raptures moves the vocal air (Mask, ll. 244–7) Also moulded of the earth, Adam and Eve’s praise mirrors the Lady’s holy singing. Such singing is imagined by Comus in sensual terms (“divine ravishment,” “raptures”) that bring to mind Donne’s “Batter my Heart” sonnet, and the effect of the Lady’s song on Comus is the desired response Donne expects from God: a violent sexual manifestation of his presence. “Rapture,” like “ravishment,” expresses both divine and sensual love in the literature of the seventeenth century, and captures the intensity and violence of pleasure that accompanied the “holy affections.”14 Thomas Carew, a Cavalier poet writing in the libertine tradition that Milton criticizes in his Comus, named one of his poems “A Rapture.” The poem is representative of the libertine attitude to the sexual act, using its title to capture the intensity of pleasure that Carew is expecting from the act.15 Thomas Traherne’s “The Rapture,” on the other hand, written probably during the Restoration, is a poem about the joy of the individual in praising God. The language defines a spiritual as well as physical relationship between speaker and deity: From God above Being sent, the Heavens me enflame, To praise his Name. The stars do move! The burning sun doth show his love

(ll.11–5)16

Addressing God, instead of a female lover, Traherne resorts to an erotic vocabulary of blazing motion similar to Carew’s. The poets’ decision to call their condition “rapture” signals the term’s combination of erotic and religious love. When read in this light, Adam and Eve’s “holy rapture” in their morning prayer, although deeply spiritual, is also inclusive of physical desire. William Kerrigan and Gordon Braden have argued that in prelapsarian Eden, Adam and Eve enact “a drama of delay,” whereas

Hymns, Sighs, and the Materiality of Prayer  91 in postlapsarian Eden, “the last act of intercourse in paradise sets the urgent flesh against the deity, and that, in fact, is its pleasure.”17 Even in a prelapsarian setting, however, Milton’s language, mixing prayer with sensuality, suggests that Adam and Eve’s innocent state of singing includes the erotic body in praise. In the Protestant experience of prayer, “holy rapture” was expressed in spontaneous song that drew on the scriptures as “when Protestants who had experienced joy of this kind attempted to describe it, they regularly found that language failed them, and were reduced to stating that it was inexpressible, ‘ioy vnspeakeable’.”18 As Lewalski has illustrated, Adam and Eve erupt into “an archetypal psalmic hymn of praise, of which Psalm 148 is an abbreviated version.”19 Advice towards extempore prayer involves “a rhetoric of spontaneity [that] serves two purposes: firstly, it renders the form practicable to even the meanest readers; secondly, it provides its own, apparently non-aesthetic rhetoric, which does not value stylistic sophistication.”20 In this respect, by creating their own hymn, Adam and Eve’s spontaneous prayer is effortless yet applicable to a wider devotional community, escaping set and premeditated forms of prayer. Adam and Eve pray in “various style” and do not conform to a specific worship ritual that ecclesiastical authorities, such as Laud, had attempted to implement and that the Church of England imposed after the Restoration with the Act of Uniformity (1662). As such their prayer promotes a devotional model of independence and creativity and guarantees active participation. As Fenton argues, “not simply the product of ritual or habit, Adam and Eve’s prayer reflects a state of consciousness, a state of awareness, appreciation, and worship, all of which produce the habit.”21 Adam and Eve’s words are “unmeditated” and sung in “holy rapture” highlighting the potential of extempore prayers to reach the divine over the vanity of set forms. This suggests their kinship to the angels’ song in heaven: “of charming symphony they introduce / Their sacred song, and waken raptures high” (III. 368–9). The couple’s spontaneity is the creative power that renders the praise harmonious without relying on artificial aids (“lute or harp”). Despite its anti-ceremonialism, Adam and Eve’s prayer in Book V features some unmistakably liturgical elements. Borrowing from Psalm 148, it aligns the praise to God with the Morning Prayer, one of the key sections of the Book of Common Prayer used in daily liturgy. 22 The position Adam and Eve assume could also be interpreted as a ritual of the established church worship. Since this is a public prayer (two worshippers in an open space), the gesture of the body aims at uniformity, as the Episcopalian George Downame had advised: “The gesture and voice […] in publick prayers they are also good means to excite and stirre up one another […] for as there is commanded inward unanimitie in the publick assemblies, so also outward uniformity.”23 In Eikonoklastes Milton attacked the ritualistic petition of Charles I for the

92  Hymns, Sighs, and the Materiality of Prayer use of set forms and his self-fashioning as a martyr, and urged against “the servile yoake of Liturgie” (CPW 3:505). The ceremony in which Adam and Eve participate seems to contradict Milton’s ideal of the performance of prayer. Critics have acknowledged the ceremonial overtones in these lines and have invariably reached the conclusion summed up in Fowler’s gloss: Milton disliked set forms of worship; yet the hymn that follows draws on the liturgy. Before the Fall there is no antagonism between formal elaboration (various style) and inspired spontaneity (rapture). Adam and Eve pray from the heart. 24 Stroup also explains how the use of liturgy is justified in Paradise Lost by suggesting that Milton “tries to show how they [rites and ceremonies] sprang naturally into being as institutions among men.”25 Schwartz agrees that, “Milton objects to a separated worship; no external form can suffice as substitute for ‘internal or spiritual involvement.’ The separation between external and internal worship only occurs after the fall.”26 The critical commonplace that the prayer in Book V is only a version of an idealized type of worship no longer available to us in the postlapsarian world can be qualified if we focus on the emotional state of the petitioners and how prayer for Milton, both before and after the Fall, shares a firm grounding in the language of breath, as expressed in singing and in sighing respectively. Adam and Eve’s prayers in prelapsarian Eden share some important characteristics: they are mutually experienced by Adam and Eve in body and in spirit, they occur naturally (both in natural surroundings and spontaneously), and they are both paraphrases of hymns offering praise. This communal experience, physical participation, and inspiration are integral constituents of early modern hymn culture, accepted both by the established Church and by the more radical confessions. The hymns’ special appeal to petitioners of all denominations, and Milton particularly, is due to the performance they excite.

Singing Prayers Milton’s appreciation of hymns and psalms is evident throughout his career: he often paraphrases and includes hymns and psalms in his poetry, as in the example from the prayers discussed above, and he often explicitly declares his endorsement of hymns and psalms as the appropriate way to address God. For instance, Book IV of Paradise Regained includes the following celebration of hymns: All our Law and Story strew’d With Hymns, our Psalms with artful terms inscrib’d

Hymns, Sighs, and the Materiality of Prayer  93 Our Hebrew Songs and Harps in Babylon, That pleas’d so well our Victor’s ear, declare That rather Greece from us these Arts deriv’d; […] With Sion’s songs, to all true tastes excelling, Where God is prais’d aright, and Godlike men, The Holiest of Holies, and his Saints; Such are from God inspir’d, not such from thee (IV. 334–50) Hymns here are praised by Christ as “a model for verbal excellence” and for their simplicity in composition, which they owe to their inspiration by God. 27 In The Reason of Church Government, Milton refers to the psalms as “those frequent songs throughout the law and prophets beyond all these, not in their divine argument alone, but in the very critical art of composition, may be easily made appear over all the kinds of Lyrick poesy” (CPW 1:816). Psalms are extolled for their divine content and their unmatched poetry. Milton also shows his appreciation of the psalms by engaging in their translation during the turbulent years surrounding the regicide and the foundation of the commonwealth. 28 Consequently, hymns and psalms for Milton are, linguistically and thematically, the ideal address to the divine. Hymn singing featured widely in debates on the use of music in liturgy and on music’s capacity to facilitate the communication between man and God. Psalms and hymns underwent numerous alterations in the sixteenth and seventeenth century (translated from Latin, adjusted to the Book of Common Prayer, turned into metrical psalms, sang by choir or read out), which this study cannot fully analyse. Graham Parry and Noel O’Regan have thoroughly investigated the transition from the singing of Psalms in Catholic services by the choir and the accompaniment of the organ to the “Spartan” public worship which Puritans imposed. 29 Parry’s work has outlined how in this austere musical context, William Laud’s innovations and support of choir singing in the Chapel Royal were detested as Catholic: “the complex artistry of interweaving voices was regarded as meretricious and frivolous, unlike the robust songs of praise sent up by the whole congregation in unison.”30 Hymns, as Milton explains in Paradise Regained, display a sophisticated simplicity originating in their divine inspiration. This simplicity is irreconcilable with the adorned artificial style of organ and choir music. 31 Despite the divisive issue of instrumental music, psalm-singing was widely embraced both by ceremonialists and by those seeking an unmediated relationship with God: “almost all congregations permitted at least psalm-singing in church.”32 That the Psalms were integral to any confession’s devotional practice also meant they could be enlisted by different political groups, whether for the royalist or the republican cause. 33 The agreement of

94  Hymns, Sighs, and the Materiality of Prayer conformists and radicals on the value of the Psalms is also evident in the high sales figures of the Sternhold and Hopkins psalter, attributed by Hamlin to both camps. 34 Green offers three explanations for the popularity of Psalms in early modern worship: “the language of Sternhold and Hopkins was readily understood without fanciful expressions,” “the similarity of style with ballads with didactic content,” and the fact that “participation in metrical psalms was a relief, an involvement and control.”35 Participation was what transformed the private reading of the Psalms into the collective experience of singing: “to sing its texts was to express both the personal and the universal.”36 Achinstein points out that the qualities of the hymns that allowed this transition between the private and the public realm of worship were their “openness, transparency, familiarity and accessibility.”37 This inclusive method of worship offered the petitioners a welcoming environment of participation. Singing hymns in early modern England, therefore, constituted an event and involved a performance. As such it was considered a more secure signifier of truthful devotion compared to uttered words. It was the collective act that mattered since the words were divinely inspired. As Achinstein has argued, Song is a kinaesthetic art, and attention to the words of a lyric alone only give us part of its meaning; as a physical action experienced by separated individuals hymns brought people together to partake in their community—its memories, hopes, longings—through song. Hymns, like prayers, are performative utterances; they are also performances of the body.38 Adam and Eve in prelapsarian Eden can be seen as two such individuals brought together to conduct such praise. The prelapsarian hymns in Paradise Lost construct a physical relationship between the couple that highlights the importance of communal involvement. In the seventeenth-­ century context, nowhere was this participation in performing devotion more effective for the liturgy members than in the practice of lining out. OED defines it as “the giving out of a hymn [by the precentor] line by line.” Ian Spink traces the first actual references to the term in the Presbyterian worship and explains in detail what it consisted of: It had been advocated by the Directory and consisted essentially, of the minister or parish clerk reading aloud the words of each line of the psalm before it was sung by the congregation, thus helping those who could not read. Each line of the tune began with a long ‘gathering note’ to enable the people to start together, and continued all too slowly from note to note with scoops and flourishes. 39 Even though singing could be replaced by reading aloud—again, it was not the content of the hymn as such that drove the congregation but

Hymns, Sighs, and the Materiality of Prayer  95 the awareness of participating in the event. The lining out involved a performativity similar to an oath-taking, or the exchange of vows in a wedding ceremony, and it was a highly ritualistic process. Thinking of hymns as performative suggests that their value consisted in performing actions, and specifically uniting the congregation into addressing God. Applying Austin’s framework to hymns, their locution was the singing by the people, their illocutionary force was the praise to the divine, while their elocutionary impact was God’s acceptance of such praise. The congregation’s conviction that their hymns were heard and accepted was due to the hymns’ inspiration by the divine. Like Milton’s theory of prayer in Eikonoklastes, where prayers are envisaged to begin from God, travel down to the petitioner, and successfully return to God, hymns followed a similar journey. The singing voice was both the people and God’s. Hence, the voice heard in hymns was not insincere being neither purely human nor purely divine, but an amalgamation of the two. As Walter Schindler has asserted, “because it is a vehicle of transcendence, either hoped for or realized, and a sign of man’s special relation to the divine source, the human voice tends to affirm in the Psalms a certain transcendent character of its own.”40 Singing prayers, therefore, was a performance where voice has an external, divine, point of reference with which it sought to coincide. This is most evident in Milton’s representation of the angelic song in Book III. When God finishes his speech, the angels begin their “solemn adoration” (III. 351). As Lewalski has pointed out, the words of the hymn the angels sing to God are “ambiguously” blended with the narrator’s own praise.41 For Lewalski this is due to the context of fallen language Milton writes in and that prevents him from conceiving and repeating the angelic song. Erin Minear makes a similar point when she notes that “Milton makes no attempt to describe the form or sound of the angelic song. We are simply told: ‘they sang,’ and we are told, at length, what they sang.”42 What we are explicitly told, however, is the embodied performance that accompanies the angelic song. Milton devotes 26 lines (III. 345–71) to the description of how the angels perform their hymn, paying attention to their posture (“lowly reverent / Towards either throne they bow”), their gestures (“down they cast / Their crowns” and “their golden harps they took”), and their voice that unites with the divine (“no voice exempt, no voice but well could join / Melodious part”). Joad Raymond has noted that angelic song “is a pattern for human praise and for human prayers, more perfect and therefore an ideal to be striven for.”43 In the above passage, the angels’ song, as a conscious yet spontaneous reaction to God’s call for adoration, does indeed set out a pattern of praise for individuals: it resembles a lining-out performance of hymns and anticipates Adam and Eve’s posture when “lowly they bowed adoring” (V. 144). The spontaneity of angelic praise is stated later in Book IV, where Milton describes them as erupting in song “while they keep watch, or nightly rounding walk” (IV. 685). The

96  Hymns, Sighs, and the Materiality of Prayer performance embedded in hymns is what Milton attempts to recreate in the evening and morning prayers of Paradise Lost. The spontaneity of Adam and Eve’s devotion, inspired by God and their natural habitat, and the physicality of their praise are representative of the communal performance that Milton and his contemporaries valued in the hymns.

Prayer in Sighs In the postlapsarian world of Paradise Lost, hymns give way to inarticulate sighs and groans. Though public, vocalized prayer serves to praise God, at the moment of repentance and petition a different language of expression is required and presented in the beginning of Book XI. Thus they in lowliest plight repentant stood Praying, for from the mercy-seat above Prevenient grace descending had removed The stony from their hearts, and made new flesh Regenerate grow instead, that sighs now breathed Unutterable, which the spirit of prayer Inspired, and winged for heaven with speedier flight Than loudest oratory (XI. 1–8) In Book X, Adam had stated his belief that God “will instruct us praying” (X. 1081), and, accompanied by Eve, had decided to abandon his previously wordy self-pity and laments for a new vocabulary: What better can we do, than to the place Repairing where he judged us, prostrate fall Before him reverent, and there confess Humbly our faults, and pardon beg, with tears Watering the ground, and with our sighs the air Frequenting, sent from hearts contrite, in sign Of sorrow unfeigned, and humiliation meek (X. 1086–92) Sighs and tears in a prostrate position are relied upon to address God and to beg his forgiveness. Milton’s exact repetition of these lines at the end of Book X and the start of Book XI suggests that Adam’s view is not simply a pronouncement of the manner in which to petition to God, but a material demonstration of it, too. The prayer is imagined and subsequently embodied and materially performed. The content of the prayer this time is not praise in hymn but repentance in “sighs now breathed unutterable” (XI. 5–6). This is a paraphrase of the biblical foundation for non-verbal communication found in Romans 8.26: “Likewise the

Hymns, Sighs, and the Materiality of Prayer  97 Spirit also helpeth our infirmities: for we know not what we should pray for as we ought: but the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered.” In this case, Christ becomes the intercessor to his Father: Now therefore bend thine ear To supplication, hear his hear his sighs though mute; Unskilful with what words to pray, let me Interpret for him, me his advocate (XI. 31–2) Although the sighs cannot be spoken, the divine ear is capable of decoding their sound. Unlike the hymns of praise sung before the Fall, sighs do not constitute verbal communication. What defines them is their physicality as signs of respiration and they are manifest in breathing. They are in fact as elementary as air: natural, God-given, and simple. Although they manage to pass “dimensionless through heavenly doors” (XI. 17), their physical component is emphasized, an example of the “concretization of the intangible.”44 In a period anxious over the division between the physical and the spiritual and their efficacy in addressing God, Milton’s choice to portray prayers as sighs on the one hand naturalizes prayer, remaining faithful to his rejection of artificial aids, forms, and ornaments, and, on the other hand, it makes the body the central, if not the only, secure means of communicating with the divine. Adam and Eve’s sighs and tears in Paradise Lost offer a vision of prayer as a natural product, similar to Milton’s view of prayers in Eikonoklastes as God’s “rain” of new expressions. The natural status of sighs is revealed explicitly by Adam in Book XI where he states that prayer is “one short sigh of human breath” (XI. 145). This definition echoes Herbert’s, who in “Prayer I” calls prayer “God’s breath in man returning to his birth” (l. 2). Nuttall has commented on this line that “the image is very beautiful but at the same time troubling. Most of us prefer fresh air to CO2 .”45 Although for Nuttall the recycling of air seems suffocating, for Herbert and Milton prayer and breath, or life, are interchangeable, and they follow a natural course. In the creation story, Milton has God breathe life in Adam: “This said, he formed thee, Adam, thee O man / Dust of ground, and in thy nostrils breathed / The breath of life” (VII. 524–6). As breath moves cyclically from the surrounding air of God’s universe into man’s lungs and then returned again out in the atmosphere, sighs internalize an external stimulus, such as infliction of pain, only to send it out again processed by the body into an inarticulate sound. Following such process, prayer too moves between God and the individual naturally with little consideration of inward or outward existence; exterior and interior worlds are linked in this course.

98  Hymns, Sighs, and the Materiality of Prayer In Paradise Lost sighs and groans are nature’s vocabulary and are imagined as natural phenomena. When Eve falls into temptation, Milton projects the profound consequences of man’s fall on the landscape: “Earth felt the wound, and nature from her seat / Sighing through all her works gave signs of woe” (IX. 782–3). The sighs of nature, verifiable outwardly on “her works,” become the expression of the suffering earth, as Adam and Eve’s sighs become the expression of their repentance. When Adam tastes the apple and partakes of Eve’s sin, Milton again turns his attention to the expression of humanity’s pain on the environment: “Earth trembled from her entrails, as again / In pangs, nature gave a second groan” (IX. 1000–1001). This image of painful reproduction foreshadows God’s pronouncement on Eve that after the Fall she shall bring her children “in sorrow forth” (X. 195). The groans and sighs of nature are the material evidence of pain and suffering, suggesting that the loss of paradise has repercussions for man’s physical as well as spiritual life. With the commitment of sin, the first earthquake occurs to signal earth’s direct implication in humanity’s just enacted turmoil. The previously idyllic garden is now literally and symbolically shaken. From then on, Earth would quake to match the human prayer’s struggle to reach God and reunite in harmony as is evident in the Bible. Earthquake, for instance, accompanies freedom from tyranny: And at midnight Paul and Silas prayed, and sang praises unto God: and the prisoners heard them. And suddenly there was a great earthquake, so that the foundations of the prison were shaken: and immediately all the doors were opened, and every one’s bands were loosed. (Acts 16.25–6) Most importantly, an earthquake also occurs in the moment of figurative liberation of man from the tyranny of his sins during the crucifixion: “Jesus, when he had cried again with a loud voice, yielded up the ghost. And, behold, the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom; and the earth did quake, and the rocks rent” (Matthew 27.60–1). In both biblical accounts prayer is manifest in an earthquake, the most materially powerful way possible. Milton’s Lady is also well aware that the earth may express a devotee’s inner condition. She warns Comus that his “profane tongue” could be answered by her commanding speech on Chastity. In that case, “the brute Earth would lend her nerves, and shake / Till all thy magic structures rear’d so high, / Were shatter’d into heaps o’er thy false head” (ll. 797–9). Samson, as examined in the next chapter, pushes such violent depictions of prayer to the extreme. Sighs and groans are the natural reaction not only of humans and earth in the face of suffering, but of the nation, too. In Areopagitica Milton describes his nation’s enslavement to the power of the church as

Hymns, Sighs, and the Materiality of Prayer  99 a time when “England was groaning loudest under the Prelaticall yoak” (CPW 2:538). As discussed in Chapter 1, the “yoak” of conformity is for Milton spiritual as well as physical, its power and control stemming from the material practices of the church. The reference to the physical symptoms of England’s pain, “the groaning,” is thus an apt expression of the nation’s internal and external agony. After all, Milton at this passage discusses the Inquisition, whose practices were felt by the affected nations of Europe both spiritually but also very physically via torture, death, and the destruction of books. A groaning nation, however, is not necessarily a republican nation. Responding to the regicide of Charles I, the one time royal chaplain, Henry King, published in 1649 his long poem “A Deepe Groane” as an elegy to the beheaded king, and as a prophetic pronouncement of the country’s misery that would follow Charles’s death. Groans and earthquakes characterize once more the sufferings of the nation, although on this occasion the victimized population bears royalist feelings: As Earth-quakes fright us, when the teeming earth Rends ope her bowels for a fatall birth; […] Alas! our Ruines are cast up, and sped In that black Totall—Charles is Murthered. […] Let not a breath be wafted, but in moanes; And all our words be but articulate groanes.46 The sin of murdering the king results in an earthquake, the offspring of a violent natural birth similar to the ones found in the Bible or Paradise Lost. Instead of words, in royalist responses to the regicide, such as King’s elegy, groans are enlisted as the means to express the nation’s pain and lament for their sins, regressing to “primal gestures.”47 Regarding Adam and Eve’s prayer, then, sighs, groans, and tears become the natural expression of the Earth, accentuating the interconnectedness of prayer. The tears water the ground and the sighs fill the air in an undivided sphere of humanly-enacted and naturally recycled repentance. In one of his sermons, Donne unites nature and tears with an analogy: “as God sees the water in the spring in the veins of the earth, before it bubble upon the face of earth; so God sees tears in the heart of a man, before they blubber his face.”48 The parallelism Donne draws between earthly water and human tears as observed by God renders tears into signs that are natural and their meaning recognizable by the divine. In Milton, too, Adam and Eve’s tears and sighs succeed in flying up to heaven because humanity’s suffering is jointly experienced by the universe. Similarly to the prelapsarian hymns that occur in a natural environment and express praise in simple, yet inspired, terms, the

100  Hymns, Sighs, and the Materiality of Prayer postlapsarian prayers of Adam and Eve adopt a natural discourse to address God in (distorted) harmony with their surroundings. The materiality of prayer not only accentuates prayer’s connection with nature, but it informs a suspicion of articulate language as capable of reaching the divine, a scepticism towards language that characterized post-Reformation England and reached its peak during the years of the English Revolution. In her consideration of the newly formed interactions between public and private space in the 1640s–50s, Ann Hughes concludes that “private identities […] were forged through an engagement with public dilemmas.”49 This intense engagement of the personal with the communal was inevitably informed by individual motives and meant to serve individual purposes. The burgeoning pamphlet culture allowed for a multitude of printed works each speaking its own distinct voice. The result was, what David Zaret calls, “a representational kaleidoscope, in which the relationship between the word and the world is as tenuous as in the contemporary condition described as postmodernism.”50 The dialogical culture that emerged in the 1640s permitted plethora of voices, but not everyone was speaking the same language. Achinstein has discussed in depth how the English Revolution mirrored and adapted the story of Babel and how “the revolutionary press became itself the focus of worries about the condition of linguistic diversity.”51 Since language was obviously a carrier of ideology, this “linguistic diversity” was on the one hand liberating, for those critical of the tyrannical rule, on the other hand threatening for the establishment’s future. Language was elusive and insincere and could not be trusted. John Wilkins’s An Essay towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language (1668) is central in the literary history of the so-called Universal Language Movement, whose chief aim was “to resolve the diversity of Earthly languages into a common tongue.”52 According to the theory of this movement, language divisions could only be overcome through a new Adamic language. In an earlier work of his, A Discourse Concerning the Gift of Prayer (1651), Wilkins outlines his views on prayer as the Holy Spirit’s grace to man, and when the discussion turns to Expression, he notes: But because the language of Canaan, the stile of the Holy Ghost is undoubtedly the fittest for holy and spiritual services […] therefore we should rather chuse, (where we may) to speak in Scripture expression.53 The language of Canaan, preceding the linguistic chaos of the Tower of Babel, is praised as the fittest for supplication casting a shadow over highly eloquent expressions, which “will appear to be wholly empty, and to signifie nothing.”54 The expressions that are allowed are those that are direct signifiers of “our affections”: “exclamations” to denote

Hymns, Sighs, and the Materiality of Prayer  101 “affectionate wonder,” “expostulations” for “deep dejection of minde,” “option” for “earnest desires” and “ingemination” for “eager and inflamed affections.”55 Speaking in the language of Canaan is using language as the direct means to reflect emotions, similar to Wilkins’ theory of “a Real universal Character, that should not signifie words, but things and notions, and consequently might be legible by any Nation in their own Tongue.”56 Wilkins’s writings explicitly demonstrate that in early modern England thinking about prayer requires thinking about language and vice versa. In both situations, the scriptures offer the example of a language as a system of authentic signification, where meaning and expression correspond entirely. Nevertheless, religious writers fear that in private devotions scriptural language is superseded by Babel or ‘babble’. Bunyan’s example, alongside the devotional manualists mentioned in the introduction to this book, is not untypical of how these writers often condemn eloquence as hypocritical. Taylor writes that, God understandeth what we say sure enough, he hath no prejudices to be removed, no infirmities to be wrought upon, and a fine figure of Rhetoricke, a pleasant cadence, and a curious expression move not him at all.57 Moreover, Preston agrees that “when you vse manie reasons to perswade him, you alter not him, but your selues.”58 Downame defines extempore worshipers as “oratours or speakers themselves in great ostentation and spirituall pride.”59 For Featly, “humane eloquence (consisting instreined conceits of wit, and swelling words of vanitie) which, as it is puffed vp it selfe, so it puffeth vp those that vse it.”60 Bunyan defines as a hindrance to sincere prayer the Pharisaic practice of “men [who] pray for a shew to be heard”: “Them also that seek repute and applause for their eloquent terms, and seek more to tickle the ears and heads of their hearers, than any thing else.”61 Henry Lukin, in The Interest of the Spirit in Prayer (1674), repeatedly juxtaposes the “mouth” and the “heart.” He proposes that “when we flatter God with our mouth […] but we cannot bring our hearts freely to consent” or “drawing nigh to God with our Lips, and honouring him with our Mouths, when our Hearts are far from him.”62 Later in his tract he adds: “Thus many take up the words of David, (as it is too ordinary for men to make use of expressions borrowed from Scripture to fill up their prayers, without that spirit wherewith they were there spoken).”63 This is the accusation Milton extends to Charles I and his Eikon Basilike a few years earlier when he writes that Charles “abuses the words of David, and dissembles grossly eevn’n to the face of God” (CPW 3:555). Set prayers and articulacy fail as rhetorical strategies to move God and to persuade him to listen to the petitioner’s request because human voice runs the danger of being uninspired, proud, and

102  Hymns, Sighs, and the Materiality of Prayer inauthentic. Eloquence in prayer, as these writers make clear, defines a petition that does not originate in God, but in the subject, therefore it cannot reach the divine but remains grounded on earth. From the consideration of the religious writers of the period and their discussion of prayer, it becomes evident that Milton’s decision to portray Adam and Eve’s prayer as a silent but embodied performance connects him with a tradition of thinkers anxious to establish a model for sincerely addressing the divine. The variety of performances advocated by these writers (sighs, groans, tears, silence) is driven by a suspicion of human language and it shows that they share a belief in the potential of inarticulate, inspired expression to be heard by God. If Milton is suspicious of language in postlapsarian Eden, he is equally hesitant of its use in prelapsarian Eden and the hymns offer him a secure means of addressing God. In this respect, the physical prayer in Book XI can be seen as a model that has developed from the hymns: physical participation is augmented; mutual performance is reinforced as Adam and Eve are again in harmony in their gestures and expression; and although voice is removed, voice is inspired by God as the sighs and tears are. Prayers, then, in both the prelapsarian and the postlapsarian world involve a performance where the human and the divine meet. Yet, the power dynamics of this encounter shift, since prayers in the postlapsarian world widen the scope for human contribution and empowerment, and this is what the last part of this chapter explores.

Sighs, Groans, and Agency In response to language being an untrustworthy means of communication, embodied prayers, in the form of sighs and groans, are advised by a variety of religious groups as the alternative to insincere petitionary rhetoric. Sighs and groans have unique communicative powers: they generate a spontaneous, immediate, and yet contrived address to God, upsetting any dichotomy between voluntary and involuntary expression their authors strive to erect. The last part of this chapter examines to what extent sighing and groaning in early modern religious writing, and in the Garden of Eden, is passive and to what extent it bears the potential for a voluntary and autonomous relationship with the divine. During the Reformation, the sighing and groaning human body was discussed as a sign of the subject’s dejected state and dependence on God. Luther believed groans, in their capacity to express utmost humility and contrition for our current fallen state, to be fundamental in the life of faith. In Luther’s theology, the concept of “simul Gemitus et Raptus” (simultaneously groaning and enraptured) denotes man’s condition as one of joint groaning and rapture, or else the simultaneous experience of absolute anguish and humility in front of God and participation in the mystical joy offered by him.64 Human groanings in prayer are an

Hymns, Sighs, and the Materiality of Prayer  103 exercise in faith, yet they escape human sense: “for our faith, which in temptation thus groaneth unto Christ, is very weak, if we consider our own sense and feeling; and therefore, we hear not this cry […] of this groaning some little feeling we have, but the cry we hear not.”65 The subject is almost insensitive to groaning, despite it being indicative of the workings of the spirit within them. Fervency in prayer seems to require a distance between the sensory experiences of the body and the intangible workings of the spirit. The human failure to perceive groaning through sound translates for Luther into divine listening: “to this searcher of the hearts, this small and feeble groaning (as it seemeth unto us) is a loud and mighty cry, and an unspeakable groaning […] It filleth heaven; so that the angels think they hear nothing else but this cry.”66 Furthermore, Luther explains that the groanings of true prayer that escape our acoustic radar emerge from a loving relationship between the subject and God: “this is done when I again with this groaning do cry, and with a childly heart do assent unto this name, Father.”67 If for Luther groaning is a whisper that expresses the spiritual proximity between father and son, in Calvin’s Institutes the dynamics of groaning are transformed into the sound of a mother giving birth. In his commentary on Romans 8.19–22, Calvin glosses Paul’s verse: “for we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now,” with the following commentary: “They groan like a woman in travail until they shall be delivered. But it is a most suitable similitude; it shows that the groaning of which he speaks will not be in vain and without effect; for it will at length bring forth a joyful and blessed fruit.”68 The sound of “a woman in travail” is an apt simile to refer to the condition of mankind because it encapsulates both pain and hope. The groans of labour suggest the temporary circumstances man has to endure in order to be delivered to the “joyfull and blessed fruit” of God’s grace. As in Luther, groaning is not a step undertaken without the petitioner knowing whether they will be heard by God or not; it is a process endured in secure hope of being united with the divine.69 Medical understandings of sighs and groans, on the other hand, limit them to symptoms. In early modern theories of passions sighs and groans feature predominantly as symptoms of sadness, suffering, and grief, whose impact on the body is felt via violent modifications in air circulation. In his famous treatise, Descartes lists the “exteriour signes” of passions as follows: “the chief of these signes are the gestures of the eyes and face, changes of colour, tremblings, languishing, swooning, laughter, tears, groanes, and sighes.”70 Regarding groans he writes: And then, sometimes, the lungs two are blown up all at once by the abundance of blood which gets into them, and drives away the aire they contained, which breaking forth through the gullet, begets groanes and cryes which usually accompany tears. And these cries

104  Hymns, Sighs, and the Materiality of Prayer are commonly more sharp than those which accompany Laughter, though they be produced almost in the same manner: the reason whereof is, that the nerves which serve to enlarge or contract the organs of the voice to make it stronger or sharper, being joyned to those which open the Orifices of the heart in Joy, and contract them in Sadnesse, cause these organs to be dilated or contracted at the same time.71 Groans, according to Descartes, are produced when air is violently expelled from the lungs after it has been superseded by overflow of blood. This intense and sudden action is audibly felt, as well, since voice and breathing are physiologically linked, producing thus expulsions of air that are loud and shrill in nature. The production of sighs follows an alternative route, instigated due to lack of blood this time, not overflow, and resulting in absorption of air instead of its violent expulsion: For whereas a man is excited to Weep, when the lungs are ful of blood; he is incited to sigh when they are almost empty … because then the final remainder of blood in the lungs … agitates all the muscles of the Diaphragma and breast, the air is suddenly blown through the mouth into the lungs, to fill up the vacant place of the blood. And this is called sighing.72 Descartes’s account is similar to Francis Bacon’s observations on natural philosophy as outlined in Sylva Sylvarum first published in 1626: Sighing is caused by the drawing in of a greater quantity of breath to refresh the heart that laboureth … groaning, and screaming, and roaring, are caused by an appetite of expulsion, as hath been said: for when the spirits cannot expel the thing that hurteth, in their strife to do it, by motion of consent, they expel the voice.73 Walter Charleton, seventeenth-century physician and natural philosopher, in his Natural History of the Passions, published in 1674, makes a similar case for groans as the sudden motion of the lungs and their expansion to accommodate the abrupt surge of blood: “in general, whatsoever causeth the Lungs to be suddenly puffed up and distended with blood, causeth also the external action of Laughter; unless where sorrow changeth that action into groaning and weeping.”74 Similarly to laughter, groaning and weeping are physiologically experienced by the subject and can be traced anatomically in the functions the body is requested to conduct in order to respond to the emotional stimulus. Despite the differences in their biological production, sighs and groans are characterized by a sense of violent suddenness, a swift convulsion the body is subjected to in order for the balance between air and blood in the lungs

Hymns, Sighs, and the Materiality of Prayer  105 to be restored. This physiological process results from reactionary acts the body performs spontaneously such as contractions, expulsions, and ingestions. In this context where passions are intensely and affectively experienced dualities of body and mind, or body and soul, collapse. The French natural philosopher and Catholic clergyman Jean-Francois Senault, author of the influential work De L’Usage des Passions (1643), explains in a different tract how sighs and groans capture the blend of the physical and the spiritual qualities of man: She [the soul] makes her fear appear upon the body, which she in-animates, she weeps through the eyes thereof, looks pale in its visage, sighs by its mouth: and in this mutuall suspiration, a man cannot tell whether it be the soul that is afflicted; or the body that complaineth.75 Combining natural philosophy with Augustinian principles, Senault here charts fear’s symptoms as weeping, paleness, and sighs, yet the suspiration is “mutual,” the air expelled is simultaneously corporal and mystical. As such it is a genuine sign of the sorrow of the soul, similar to the sighs of Adam and Eve that in Milton’s Paradise Lost act as “sign / Of sorrow unfeign’d, and humiliation meek” (X. 1091–2). Practitioners such as Thomas Willis, physician and Fellow of the Royal Society, accept such a clear connection between prayer and breath that they resort to the example of prayer to explain respiration, such as in this example from his treatise, De Anima Brutorum (first published in Latin in 1672, and in English, with the title Two Discourses Concerning the Soul of Brutes, in 1683), on the brain and nervous system: For truely, almost everybody experiences in himself that in strong Prayer, the Blood is more and more heaped up in the Bosomes of the swelling Heart: wherefore, that the Vacuities of the Lungs might be supplied, we breath deeply, and so the Air being more fully drawn in, the Muscles of the Breast, and the Diaphragma, are detained almost in a continual Systole, or more often iterated; to wit, for this end, that the Vital Blood, to be offered as it were a Sacrifice to God, should be there kept, nor suffer’d to go from thence, or to be inlarged, till as it were by a long immolation, together with Prayers, lieve may be had from the Godhead.76 The offering of bodily functions, of blood and air, is imagined as an offering of the self at times of intense emotional charge such as in prayer. This interaction between the soul’s passions and the bodily symptoms they excite is powerfully on display in acts of devotion. A visual example is offered in one of Herman Hugo’s emblems from his Pia Desideria.

106  Hymns, Sighs, and the Materiality of Prayer Published in 1624, Pia Desideria includes poetic renditions of verses from the Psalms, prefacing every poem with an emblem and an inscription of the verse. For Psalm 38.9, “Lord thou knowest all my desire, and my groaning is not hid from thee,” the emblem features a petitioner who has discarded the mask of falsehood and has opted instead to literally open his heart in front of God and let arrows with inscribed words reach God’s eye and ears. The arrows emblematize the groaning that is not hid from God, and is expanded in the accompanying poetic paraphrase: “none knows my secret GROANS, and VOWS, and SIGHS, / None but we Two, and only we suffice.”77 The arrows, depicted as coming straight out of the subject’s chest as he unfolds his shirt, create the impression that the petitioner experiences his address to the divine psychosomatically, dissecting his body and soul in front of God, so that he can observe “the secret pantings of my love-sick Heart.”78 In a sermon expanding on the same verse, John Donne highlights how anatomical examination in the presentation of groaning is necessary. For groanings to be received by God, Donne suggests we need to anatomize our soule in both (groaning and desire), and find every sinnewe, and fiber, every lineament and ligament of this body of sinne, and then every breath of that newe spirit, every drop of that newe bloud that must restore and repayre us.79 Although ineffable, groans are not estranged from the petitioner’s body during address to the divine, but they are imagined by Donne as enabling new air and new blood to circulate within one’s dejected carnal state. George Herbert, a poet who often turns to groans for their potential to establish a truthful and unmediated relationship with the divine, provides us with an interpretation of prayerful groaning as not passive signs but active agents. Studying the passions in Herbert’s poetry, Richard Strier argues that for the poet “groans are products of human emotional responsiveness” (40) through which the poet tries to affect God.80 Groaning, the physical experience of being moved to prayer, becomes part of an emotional rhetoric that aims to elicit God’s own emotional response. Strier’s focus is the poetry, which explicitly links groans to musical tunes (like “Sion” and “Gratefulnes”), yet the presence of groans in less obviously sensory moments also confirms this view. In “Longing” (139–42), for instance, Herbert blends the spiritual anguish of addressing with God with the physical gestures required to form the ritual of prayer. Knees, bones, cries, groans, sighs, tears, throat, heart, bowels, head, ear, tongue, feet, breast all make an appearance in this poem drawing a corporeal image of the petitioner at the moment of conversing with God. The body parts and actions, fragmented and scattered throughout the poem, seek to be reunited, “long” to be reattached and to represent a coherent unity of the self that can only be achieved in

Hymns, Sighs, and the Materiality of Prayer  107 dialogue with the divine. The feeling of passions, the sensing of passions, emerges as crucial and painful to the petitioner as it is crucial and preferable to God. If indeed, as Schoenfeldt has contended, “pain mediates the relationship between divinity and humanity throughout The Temple” (Prayer and Power 130), in “Longing” pain is visibly registered on the body both in its external parts, such as the knees, and in its sounds, such as the groans.81 “My throat, my soul is hoarse” (l.7) implies that the prayer has been loud both physically and spiritually with exhausting effects both on the vehicle of voice, the throat, and the site of contrition, the soul. The loud and inarticulate sighs and groans create a new mode of discourse that runs through Herbert’s poem “Sighs and Groans.” Here God is imagined as a physician who is meant to relieve the patient from his suffering, but the sighs and groans are not merely to be treated, they are not only the symptoms of bruising, scourging, grinding, and killing. Their passive embodiment is not the only or even the dominant characteristic of the petitioner’s condition. Perhaps this would explain why references to sighs and groans are conspicuously absent in this poem, even though they are regularly dispersed throughout The Temple: the poem itself turns into the performative act of sighing and groaning. The signs of affliction turn into a new sacred language that captures the tension between Herbert’s poetics and his religion, between the physical and audible means of his lyric expression and his passionate appeal to be relieved. Sighs and groans are the poem, audible physically and metaphysically at the same time, contrived and yet authentic. The discourse of the religious writers of the seventeenth-century then places the material interests of natural philosophers in passions and the production of forced breath into a broader devotional framework, where sighs and groans are not merely symptoms but producers of fervency in prayer. The petitioner is imagined as fashioning prayer while embodying it. Sighs and groans in this context are signs of the presence of the spirit as well as generators of a response from God; they become, in other words, the affective tools that consciously create the conditions that render communication with the divine possible. This affective method of relating to the divine, a psychosomatic discourse with unique communicative powers, what can be called ‘holy breathing’, is what Milton depicts in Adam and Eve’s prayers before and after the Fall. Milton shows Adam consciously making the decision to pray physically and emotionally: “what better can we do, than to the place / Repairing where he judged us, prostrate fall” (X. 1086–7). Adam, although self-­ declared unskilled in an efficient prayer method, is aware that a passionate petition holds promise for being heard by God. This degree of awareness is similar to Donne and Herbert and is not uncommon in early modern petitioners who indulge in addressing God fervently in hope that the spiritual relationship will follow suit. Alan Sinfield has noted that, “though there are striking instances of people being thrown into despair by protestant

108  Hymns, Sighs, and the Materiality of Prayer doctrine, most found it rather satisfactory […] The idea was not to relax, but to savour the nuances of one’s own spiritual condition.”82 This process often involved “an intentionally exaggerated and vivid self-imagining along lines set out by the theological discourse of spiritual psychology.”83 The subjects in prayer therefore, as advised by religious writers too, have to create externally and internally what they are hoping to achieve spiritually. The sighs and tears that ensue are not just the external evidence of human internal suffering, but they become a language for this suffering. Though inarticulate, they create a new means of addressing God and they allow human subjects to fully participate in this address by experiencing it as embodiment. The physical body in prayer ensures that the devotion is experienced by the individual rather than occurring without their consent in a state of self-negation. Like Herbert’s speaker, Adam and Eve’s prayer is a performance that guarantees they are fully aware and responsible for seeking God’s audience. The inarticulate means of devotion emerge as reliable signifiers of human repentance, and the body allows for an understanding of how a prayer can be heard. The performance of prayer here points to a corporeal subjectivity where one’s sense of the self is intrinsically bound to their sense of bodily participation in devotion, but the body is not only the medium of praise or simply a representation of the internal and spiritual address to God but it very much makes this address possible. Embracing the physical and emotional, Milton’s model of worship escapes the confines of Pauline dualism. According to Paul’s teachings, the body, as enslaving and corrupt flesh, has to be inferior to the liberating and pure inner spirit: That the righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit. For they that are after the flesh do mind the things of the flesh; but they that are after the Spirit the things of the Spirit. For to be carnally minded is death; but to be spiritually minded is life and peace. (Romans 8.4–6)84 Instead, for Milton flesh appears as the natural extension of the spirit, and not subordinate to it, but equally pivotal in one’s relationship to God. It is the performance of breath (either in hymns or in sighs) of the inward devotional state that emerges as Milton’s petitionary model in the epic. Indeed, in Paradise Lost it is sighs and groans that lead to regeneration. Satan’s soliloquy in Book IV exposes how inadequate inwardness alone might be: Oh then at last relent: is there no place Left for repentance, none for pardon left?

Hymns, Sighs, and the Materiality of Prayer  109 None left but by submission; […] Ay me, they little know How dearly I abide that boast so vain, Under what torments inwardly I groan; While they adore me on the throne of hell, With diadem and sceptre high advanced The lower still I fall, only supreme In misery; such joy ambition finds (IV. 79–92) In his admission that “inwardly I groan” (IV. 88), Satan is the paragon of hypocrisy. Unlike Adam and Eve’s sincere and natural sighs and groans, Satan’s are not embodied and the external remains obstinately separate from his internal disposition. The “submission,” which Satan fears, requires the awareness the body provides to the petitioner to be voluntary and acceptable to God.

Notes 1 Regina M. Schwartz, Remembering and Repeating: Biblical Creation in Paradise Lost (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 63. Other critics that have considered the epic and in particular its invocations as prayer include Walter Schindler, Voice and Crisis: Invocation in Milton’s Poetry (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1984), Michael Fixler, “The Apocalypse within Paradise Lost,” in New Essays on ‘Paradise Lost’, ed. Thomas Kranidas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 131–78, Thomas B. Stroup, Religious Rite and Ceremony in Milton’s Poetry (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1968), 15-47, Stanley Fish, “With Mortal Voice: Milton Defends Against the Muse,” ELH 62 (1995): 509–27. 2 Whereas the term ‘Psalms’ refers primarily to the Old Testament Book and the term ‘hymns’ to poems of praise with origins in Greek and Roman poetry, hymns in the period are usually considered as types of psalms and the boundaries between them are not clearly fixed. See for instance Hannibal Hamlin, Psalm Culture and Early Modern English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 3–6: The Protestant tradition tended to distinguish between psalms and hymns yet many of the ‘hymns’ in later hymnals are in fact psalm paraphrases […] Neither can one recognize formal distinctions between the ‘songs’ in the Book of Psalms and those found elsewhere in the Bible. (5) In this chapter, hymns and psalms are both used to refer to biblical songs of praise. 3 I am here referring primarily to Mary Ann Radzinowicz, Milton’s Epics and the Book of Psalms (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), and Barbara K. Lewalski, Paradise Lost and the Rhetoric of Literary Forms (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), Chapter 9. 4 For the significance of the bower as “a source of life” see Ken Hiltner, Milton and Ecology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 25–8 (26). For

110  Hymns, Sighs, and the Materiality of Prayer its roots in the Spenserian “Bower of Bliss,” see Donald Maurice Rosenberg, Oaten Reeds and Trumpets: Pastoral and Epic in Virgil, Spenser, and Milton (London: Associated University Presses, 1981), 191–209 (quote above is found on 205). 5 Fenton, Milton’s Places of Hope, 107 (Fenton’s italics). Regarding prelasarian sex, Dennis Danielson, “The Fall and Milton’s Theodicy,” in The Cambridge Companion to Milton, ed. Dennis Danielson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 144–59, writes: “throughout history, many commentators have seen sexual intercourse as a result of the Fall, or have seen the Fall itself as resulting from sexual temptation. However, Milton not only assumes but also boldly presents prelapsarian sexual relations that take place fully within the divine plan of creation” (154). See also, Hughes, CP, p. 294, fn. 744, and Fowler’s comment on p. 264, fn. 743–3. Adam and Eve’s sex, in its physicality and performance, is important in understanding that Paradise for Milton is as much external as internal and there is no division of the two, as I argue is the case for prayers too. For the view that after the Fall occurs a division between outward signs and the spirit of sexuality that entraps Adam and Eve, see Donald M. Friedman, “Divisions on a Ground: ‘Sex’ in Paradise Lost,” in Of Poetry and Politics: New Essays on Milton and His World, ed. Paul Grant Stanwood (Binghamton, NY: Medieval & Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1995), 203–12. 6 Lewalski, Paradise Lost and the Rhetoric of Literary Forms, 193. 7 Ibid., 194. 8 See also the Christian Doctrine: “as for the place of prayer, any place is suitable” (CPW 6:673). For an analysis of Milton’s discussion of external worship in his theological treatise, see Stephen Honeygosky, Milton’s House of God: The Invisible and Visible Church (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1993), 62–6. 9 Although considerations of place in Milton’s works are important, the discussion of space in this book is inevitably limited. For a discussion of cosmological space in the epic, see John Gillies, “Space and Place in Paradise Lost,” ELH 74 (2007): 27–55. For a deep analysis of the national identity inherent in place and Milton’s views on the land in relation to nation, see Fenton’s, Milton’s Places of Hope. 10 Demaray, Milton’s Theatrical Epic, 82. 11 Lewalski, Paradise Lost and the Rhetoric of Literary Forms, 202. 12 For the centrality of movement in this prayer, see Joseph H. Summers, The Muse’s Method: An Introduction to Paradise Lost (London: Chatto & Windus, 1962). Summers breaks the hymn down to sections and argues that motion is the driving force of the hymn in each one: the hymn “is neither insistently sacramental nor personal; it does insistently celebrate the ways, the motions of God. In movement is praise” (82). 13 John Leonard, Naming in Paradise: Milton and the Language of Adam and Eve (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990), 236–7. 14 Hannah Newton, “Holy Affections,” in Early Modern Emotions: An Introduction, ed. Susan Broomhall (London; New York: Routledge, 2017), 67–70. 15 Thomas Carew, The Poems of Thomas Carew, ed. Arthur Vincent (London; New York: Routledge, 1899), 70–5. Written probably in the 1620s, the poem was published first in Carew’s collection of poems in 1640. 16 Thomas Traherne, “The Rapture,” in George Herbert and the Seventeenth-­ Century Religious Lyric, ed. by Mario A. Di Cesare (New York: Norton, 1978), 189.

Hymns, Sighs, and the Materiality of Prayer  111 17 William Kerrigan and Gordon Braden, “Milton’s Coy Eve: Paradise Lost and Renaissance Love Poetry,” ELH 53 (1986): 27–51 (42 and 49). 18 This is the standard meaning of the word in this passage from Paradise Lost, see Fowler’s edition, pp. 289–90. See also Ryrie, Being Protestant, 89. 19 Lewalski, Paradise Lost and the Rhetoric of Literary Forms, 205. 2 0 Marie-Louise Coolahan, “Redeeming Parcels of Time: Aesthetics and Practice of Occasional Meditation,” The Seventeenth Century 22 (2007): 124–43 (128). 21 Fenton, Milton’s Places of Hope, 114. See also Summers’s point: “no one ritual can suffice for the praise and thanksgiving due to God for the dazzling multiplicity of His perceived creation” (75). 22 For a full account of the ceremonial overtones in this passage see Stroup, Religious Rite and Ceremony in Milton’s Poetry, 28–32. 23 Downame, A Godly and Learned Treatise of Prayer (London, 1640), 118. 24 Fowler, (ed), Paradise Lost, 289–90, fn. 145-52. 25 Stroup, Religious Rite and Ceremony in Milton’s Poetry, 65. 26 Schwartz, Remembering and Repeating, 76. 27 Radzinowicz, Milton’s Epics and the Book of Psalms, 7. 2 8 Ernest Sirluck, “Milton’s Idle Right Hand,” The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 60 (1961): 749–85, summarizes Milton’s psalm translations: “in the spring of 1648 he translated nine psalms. He had paraphrased or translated two psalms when he was fifteen, and had done one into Greek in 1637 (…) Now he translates nine psalms, and in 1653 eight more” (770). 2 9 Graham Parry, The Arts of the Anglican Counter-Reformation: Glory, Laud and Honour (Rochester NY: Woodbridge, Boydell & Brewer, 2006) and Noel O’Regan, “The Church Triumphant: Music in the Liturgy,” in The Cambridge History of Seventeenth Century Music, ed. Tim Carter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 283–323 (289). Not all Puritans denounced music in worship; see Percy Scholes, The Puritan and Music in England and New England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1934). 30 Parry, The Arts of the Anglican Counter-Reformation, 157. 31 Although the topic of Milton and music is too big to be sufficiently addressed here, it is worth noting the inconsistencies found in Milton’s earlier poetry and his representation of heavenly music in Paradise Lost. Works such as Il Penseroso, “At a Solemn Music,” “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity,” and the creation’s song of praise to God in Book VII of Paradise Lost (VII. 594–634) make room for organ and choir singing. This endorsement of organ music and polyphony in worship is probably part of Milton’s attempt to imagine and come to terms with the divine music now lost to man after the Fall, rather than forthright acceptance of liturgical conventions. See Sadra Corse, “Old Music and New in L’Allegro and Il Penseroso,” Milton Quarterly 14 (1980): 109–13, Erin Minear, Reverberating Song in Shakespeare and Milton: Language, Memory, and Musical Representation (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), Chapter 7, and Liam D. Haydon ‘“I Sing”? Narrative Technique in Epic Poetry’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Manchester, 2012), 108–37. 32 Gretchen L. Finney “‘Organical musick’ and Ecstasy,” Journal of the History of Ideas 8 (1947): 273–92 (277). 33 See Paula Loscocco, “Royalist Reclamation of Psalmic Song in 1650s England,” Renaissance Quarterly 64 (2011): 500–43. 34 “Few volumes of verse had a wider circulation over a longer period than the ‘Sternold and Hopkins’ psalter, and, whatever its literary quality, it had significant impact on English literature and culture.” Hannibal Hamlin,

112  Hymns, Sighs, and the Materiality of Prayer

35 3 6

37 38 39 4 0 41 42 43 4 4

45 4 6 47 48 49

50 51 52

53 54 55 56

“‘Very Mete To Be Used of All Sortes of People’: The Remarkable Popularity of the ‘Sternold and Hopkins’ Psalter,” The Yale University Library Gazette 75 (2000): 37–51 (39). See also, Ginn, The Politics of Prayer in Early Modern Britain, Chapter 8. For an introduction to the impact of the Psalter in early modern English writing, see Lewalski, Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric, 39–53. Green, Print and Protestantism, 546. Robert L. Kendrick, “Devotion, Piety and Commemoration: Sacred Songs and Oratorios,” in The Cambridge History of Seventeenth Century Music, ed. Tim Carter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 324–37 (337). Sharon Achinstein, Literature and Dissent in Milton's England, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 211. Ibid., 212. Ian Spink, “Music and Society,” in The Blackwell History of Music in Britain: the Seventeenth Century, ed. Ian Spink (Oxford: Blackwell Press, 1992), 1–65 (45). Schindler, Voice and Crisis, 73. Lewalski, Paradise Lost and the Rhetoric of Literary Forms, 166. Minear, Reverberating Song, 241. Joad Raymond, Milton’s Angels: The Early-Modern Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 313–4. Thomas N. Corns, Milton’s Language (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), argues that the word “emphasizes with a peculiar precision the immateriality of prayer” (100). He quickly, however, points out the inconsistency of such reading: “the immaterial incense lends a mysterious substantiality to the prayers which Christ may then present to his enthroned Father” (101). Nuttall, Overheard by God, 33. Henry King, A Deep Groane, fetch’d at the funeral of that incomparable and glorious monarch, Charles the First, King of Great Britaine, France and Ireland (1649), 1–2. Jerome De Groot, Royalist Identities (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2004), 171. ‘From A Sermon Preached April-June 1623’, in Donne, Major Works, 329. Ann Hughes, “Men, the ‘Public’ and the ‘Private’ in the English Revolution,” in The Politics of the Public Sphere in Early Modern England, ed. Peter Lake and Steven Pincus (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008), 191–212 (206). David Zaret, Origins of Democratic Culture: Printing, Petitions, and the Public Sphere (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 179. Sharon Achinstein, “The Politics of Babel in the English Revolution,” Prose Studies 14 (1991): 14–44 (18). Achinstein, 14. For comprehensive studies of the Universal Language Movement see James Knowlson, Universal Language Schemes in England and France 1600–1800 (Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, 1975) and Robert E. Stillman, The New Philosophy and Universal Languages in Seventeenth Century England: Bacon, Hobbes, and Wilkins (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1995). John Wilkins, A Discourse Concerning the Gift of Prayer (London, 1651), 47. Ibid., 48. Ibid., 48–9. Wilkins, An Essay towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language (London, 1668), 13.

Hymns, Sighs, and the Materiality of Prayer  113 7 5 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 6 6 6 7 68 69

Taylor, A Discourse Concerning Prayer Ex Tempore, 31. Preston, The Saints Daily Exercise, 44. Downame, A Godly and Learned Treatise of Prayer, 140. Featly, Ancilla Pietatis, 107. Bunyan, I Will Pray with the Spirit, 89–90. Henry Lukin, The Interest of the Spirit in Prayer (London, 1674), 72–33, 81. Ibid., 75. Heiko A. Oberman, “Simul Gemitus et Raptus: Luther and Mysticism,” in The Reformation in Medieval Perspective, ed. Steven E. Ozment (Chicago, IL: Quadrangle Books, 1971), 219–51 (237–8). Martin Luther, “Commentary on St Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians,” in Select Works of Martin Luther: An Offering to the Church of God, translated by Henry Cole, vol. I (London, 1826), 305. Ibid., 306. Ibid., 315. John Calvin, Commentaries on the Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Romans, trans. by John Owen (Edinburgh: The Calvin Translation Society, 1849), Chapter VIII, Verse 19–22 (306). Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. by Henry Beveridge (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 2008), Book II, Chapter 1, p. 148. In the Institutes Calvin reads groaning as a sign of the human fallen state and as an expression of humility and the desire to reclaim the kingdom of God. Here groaning becomes a sound of lamentation for the lost paradise and our previous state, a constant exercise of memory intended to recognize man’s dependence on God: It is not the will of God, however, that we should forget the primeval dignity which he bestowed on our first parents […] for what is our original? One from which we have fallen. What the end of our creation? One from which we have altogether strayed, so that, weary of our miserable lot, we grown, and groaning sigh for a dignity now lost.

70 71 7 2 73 74 75 76

Groaning turns into a constant plea to return and reunite with God. Although not experienced simultaneously with the mystical bliss advocated by Luther, groaning in Calvin is not one of despair but humility necessary to be heard by God and bring about desirable union. If “the woman’s groaning marked the liminality, the in-between-two-worlds quality of the process” of bringing a child to this world, the subjects’ groaning that Paul and Calvin refer to reflects their occupation of the liminal space between the earthly and the divine sphere. Richard Cullen Rath, How Early America Sounded (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), 123. For the spaces, customs, and medicinal context of childbirth, see Amanda Carson Banks, Birth Chairs, Midwives, and Medicine (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999). René Descartes, The Passions of the Soule in Three Books (London, 1650), 88. Ibid., 104–5. Ibid., 106. Francis Bacon, Sylva Sylvarum or a Natural History in Ten Centuries (London, 1670), 150. Walter Charleton, Natural History of the Passions (London, 1674), 148. Jean-François Senault, Man Become Guilty, or, The Corruption of Nature by Sinne, According to St. Augustines Sense (London.1650), 58. Thomas Willis, Two Discourses Concerning the Soul of Brutes (London, 1683), 47.

114  Hymns, Sighs, and the Materiality of Prayer 77 Herman Hugo, Pia Desideria, or, Divine Addresses in Three Books, trans. by Edmund Arwaker (London: 1690), B3. 78 Ibid., B2. 79 John Donne, The Oxford Edition of the Sermons of John Donne, Volume III: Sermons Preached at the Court of Charles I, ed. David Colclough (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 16. 8 0 Richard Strier, “Against the Rule of Reason: Praise of Passion from Petrarch to Luther to Shakespeare to Herbert,” in Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion, ed. Gail Kern Paster, Katherine Rowe, and Mary Floyd-Wilson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 23–42 (40). 81 Michael C. Schoenfeldt, Prayer and Power: George Herbert and Renaissance Courtship (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 130. 82 Alan Sinfield, Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 159. 83 Kate Narveson, “‘Profession or Performance?’ Religion in Early Modern Literary Study,” in Fault Lines and Controversies in the Study of Seventeenth-­ Century English Literature, ed. Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002), 111–29 (128). 84 See also, Galatians 5.16–17: “This I say then, Walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfil the lust of the flesh. For the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh: and these are contrary the one to the other: so that ye cannot do the things that ye would.”

4 “As One Who Pray’d” The Iconoclastic Prayer of Samson Agonistes

The previous chapter examined how Adam and Eve’s worship in Paradise Lost is structured on emotional, physical, and communal acts of embodiment, whether in the form of hymn singing or sighing. Regeneration in the epic is both grafted on and produced by the passionate human body, which connects nature, humans, and the divine. In this chapter, the ideas explored so far relating to Milton’s anxiety about embodied and disembodied expression, set and extempore prayers, and active participation as opposed to passive spectatorship, all meet in his closet tragedy, Samson Agonistes. Given the political context of the tragedy, the failure of the English Revolution and the restoration of Charles II’s monarchy, we anticipate that Milton seeks to address again the effect of tyranny on the nation, as he did in his antiprelatical tracts and in his renunciation of Eikon Basilike.1 Due to the religious context of the tragedy, the commands of the Clarendon Code and the imposition of set liturgies, we expect Milton to contest idolatry and conformity in worship, as he did in his masque, his prose, and Paradise Lost. 2 Finally, considering the aesthetic context of his tragedy, i.e. the Restoration spectacles, we imagine that Milton revisits his concerns about divine and earthly audiences that he had articulated in his masque, and that he returns to the iconoclastic agenda his Eikonoklastes had introduced.3 If Samson Agonistes is the culmination of Milton’s lifelong struggle with differentiating between sincere and corrupt religious practices, the drama promises some tentative conclusions with regard to Milton’s representation of prayer as an embodied performance. Milton certainly confronts sincere and insincere devotion in his tragedy. Nevertheless, unsurprisingly for a text that has consistently divided critics’ opinions, the drama offers no easy resolution and its treatment of prayer resists interpretation. Here, there is little—if any—assurance that “God raines down new expressions” (CPW 3:505) or that the “spirit itself maketh intercession for us” (Romans 8.26) as it did for Adam and Eve. The relationship between man and God is absent, or at least marginalised to the point that it undermines any assurance of divine inspiration. The scene in question is Samson’s problematic prayer in his final moments alive on the stage of the Philistine Temple. In the aftermath of

116  “As One Who Pray’d” Samson’s violent and bloody destruction of the Temple, the Messenger in Samson Agonistes is charged with the challenging, and eventually awkward, task of reconstructing Samson’s final moments for the immediate audience of Manoa and the Chorus, and the wider community of Milton’s readers. The Messenger’s initial reservations about communicating the terrible tragedy indicate an attempt to regulate unruly emotions and retrieve a coherent narrative dictated by reason: “It would burst forth, but I recover breath / And sense distract, to know well what I utter” (ll. 1555–6). Witnessing the event is not enough; the Messenger has to take caution to recreate it with a full sense of understanding and responsibility. As it turns out, the possibility that he might not “know well” what he utters is a very real one: the Messenger’s seating arrangement amongst “the throng / on banks and scaffolds under Sky” (ll. 1609–10) results in a less privileged viewpoint, which undermines the authority and accuracy of his description, while the parenthetical comment “(for so from such as nearer stood we heard)” (l. 1631), with its introduction of Chinese whispers, disturbs both the text and the account. The physical and epistemological distance between us and Samson’s actions that the Messenger is asked to bridge actually widens, obscuring among else the rendition of Samson’s ultimate prayer to the Old Testament God, omitted, yet gestured at, by Milton: He unsuspicious led him; which when Samson Felt in his arms, with head a while inclin’d, And eyes fast fixt he stood, as one who pray’d, Or some great matter in his mind revolv’d. At last with head erect thus cryed aloud. (ll. 1635–9) The omission of the Judges prayer has been interpreted either as evidence of Samson’s inward regeneration and spiritual restoration of his faith in God, or conversely as proof of his permanent alienation from God’s will and of his private, vengeful motives in destroying the Philistine Temple.4 The aim of this chapter is to replace revisionist and regenerationist readings by proposing that Milton’s tragedy succeeds in creating a fully-embodied and passionate model of devotion in which prayer is conceptualized as violence. Samson’s posture and speech in front of the crowds in combination with God’s unsettling absence evoke the insincerity and theatricality Milton had accused Charles I of, but the description of the cataclysmic disaster that follows reveals prayer as a violent and iconoclastic emotional force. The chapter suggests that in Samson’s final moments, Milton creates an immersive experience of prayer that follows his redefinition of Aristotelian catharsis in the prefatory note: prayer in his tragedy is reconfigured from an “action” to a “passion” well imitated.

“As One Who Pray’d”  117 In the article that elevated Milton’s Samson Agonistes from an inconclusive anti-Restoration drama to a tragedy disturbingly relevant to the politics and ethics of the twenty-first century, John Carey read Samson Agonistes in light of 9/11 and went as far as to suggest the text should not be taught in schools for fear of validating terrorism. Carey discussed the moment in the play that Samson does not follow the biblical account in Judges 16.28: Perhaps he prays, perhaps not, all through this last phase Milton hides Samson’s thoughts and, for that matter, God’s. When he destroys the theatre Samson may think he is carrying out God’s will, or he may be following his purely human impulse to revenge. If he does believe he is carrying out God’s will, he may be correct or he may be mistaken (as his father thinks he was mistaken earlier in attributing his marriage to “divine impulsion”). There is insufficient evidence to eliminate any of these possibilities. 5 Carey here allows Samson two probable motivations for the destruction of the Temple and his enemies: either Samson thinks he is obeying God or he is acting on a violent instinct to take revenge on the Philistines. The first of these choices (and for Carey’s revisionist position, the least likely one) is subdivided into two further hypothetical clauses, that “he may be correct or he may be mistaken,” with the “mistaken” hypothesis reinforced by Carey’s parenthetic point. When Carey, therefore, reaches the conclusion that we cannot “eliminate any of these possibilities,” he has already implicitly suggested we eliminate one. If Samson only thinks he is being devout, then surely his final actions are not divinely ordained, but humanly prompted. For Carey, Samson’s actions can only really be attributed to human motives: he can either be adopting a state of self-­ delusion, or he might be after revenge, but at no point are we to infer divine endorsement for his acts. There are two issues implicitly raised by Carey in the brief extract and that widely dominate criticism on Milton’s tragedy. The first is the ambiguity regarding Milton’s choice to omit the prayer of the Judges account. Although Milton’s use of the Scriptures in his work is never one of direct and uncomplicated borrowing, pinning down his motives for the omission of the prayer in Samson Agonistes has been a difficult task.6 As Tobias Gregory has asked, “when is omission to be understood as correction—the source is wrong, this is how it happened—and when as a detail that the retelling author chose not to include but assumes we know?.”7 The ambiguity of the prayer, therefore, is linked to the obscurity of Milton’s motives. Whatever the motivation, Milton’s choice is always referred to as a cautious, doubtful experiment. Schwartz, for instance, argues that “Milton not only omits this motive [of revenge], he alludes to prayer nervously, even ambiguously, with a third-person report that Samson looked ‘as one who prayed’.”8

118  “As One Who Pray’d” The character of the Messenger and his limited perspective intensify this sense of uncertainty that surrounds the prayer and distances us further from any safe conclusions. The inconclusiveness of the scene leads to the second problem arising from Carey’s work: the critical preoccupation with joining one of the two scholarly sides, regenerationists versus revisionists, that appeared in the field of Milton studies ever since the publication of important works such as Ann Mary Radzinowicz’s and Joseph Wittreich’s.9 Those in the “regeneration camp” argue that Milton’s protagonist undergoes an inward transformation during the tragedy, whereby his faith in God and in his role as God’s servant is restored.10 Those on the “revisionist side” have reacted to the notion of spiritual regeneration and have condemned Samson to a failed human abandoned by God.11 The ambiguous prayer scene is central to both sides. If Samson is praying inwardly, then this scene can be the culmination of his reaching self-awareness and regaining God’s grace in his plan for destruction. If Samson is not praying, then the violence is not, could not be, divinely sanctioned. This chapter adopts an approach more consistent with critics such as Elizabeth Sauer and Dennis Kezar who have resisted the temptation to pick sides and have offered new contexts for studying Milton’s drama.12 As Sauer has argued, “to problematize Samson Agonistes is to oppose the strong tendency in Milton studies to resist textual indeterminacy and difference.”13 Sauer has explored the ways Milton’s tragedy, by not being staged, foregrounds the interpretive role of the reader. Kezar has studied Samson Agonistes’s theatricality as following the conventions of the Renaissance art of dying. Their contribution lies with their attempts to define what the tragedy says about performance, how the tragedy balances the traditional notion of performance (connected to the stage) and new emerging models of the seventeenth century that expand the term to include acts of printing, reading, and dying. The intention in what follows is to read Samson Agonistes in light of the embodiment of the prayer. My focus is not on the omission of the Judges prayer, but on its substitute—the performance. What is absent has been often commented on, but what is present deserves more attention. Writing against critics working “within a hermeneutics of discovery” in Milton’s poetry, Fleming has suggested that “the point is not, despite all strong-­ intentionalist accounts—pro-Samson, anti-Samson, and uncertain—­ what Samson means to do. The point is that he means by doing. Milton writes SA as a venue in which this point comes to matter.”14 The discussion in this chapter also centres on expression rather than intention. The Messenger’s words, “as one who pray’d, / Or some great matter in his mind revolv’d” (l. 1637–8), suggest that Samson’s posture before the destruction of the Temple is readily identifiable as one of petition or meditation. Where the voiced prayer should have been, we and the Messenger encounter Samson’s performance of prayer: Samson does not

“As One Who Pray’d”  119 pray prior to the destruction but through it. Whether divinely ordained or not, prayer becomes an iconoclastic force and man’s only means of uniting with God.

Samson’s Posture In Milton’s tragedy, Samson’s final moments occur in a Temple called “a spacious Theatre” (l. 1605), raising questions regarding the character’s motives and his relationship with the divine before the catastrophe, while inviting the reader to reflect on Milton’s metatheatrical commentary. The Messenger’s account is intent on the body of Samson, trying to decipher the captive’s psychological state based on signs such as Samson’s gestures and his interaction with those around him. The lines that have replaced the biblical prayer emphasize Samson’s corporeality: his head is slightly bowed on the side, his eyes fixed in a meditational and thoughtful manner, and before his final speech he holds his head erect. This image of Samson amongst the roaring multitude of an unbelieving crowd is reminiscent of Christ on the cross, with the loud cry before the final breath found in Matthew, Mark and Luke.15 While discussions of interiority remain conjectural, Samson’s devotion incorporates here a physical demonstration that seeks to seduce us and the Philistines. His devotion incorporates a very physical body language that seduces us and the Philistines by its performance, while discussions of interiority remain conjectural. As Stanley Fish argues, There is at this moment an inverse relationship between information and revelation. The more we are told, the less we know, because there is a hole at the center that has the effect of distributing its absence over the fields of facts designed to fill it.16 The ambiguity of Samson’s last prayer has met with equally ambiguous responses from critics. Radzinowicz urges us to ignore the ambiguity in “stood, as one who pray’d, /Or some great matter in his mind revolv’d.” She notes that Milton “even equates prayer and thought by making it indifferent at the moment of catastrophe that activity engages the hero.”17 Peter Herman’s study of the Miltonic ‘Or’ allows us to connect, rather than separate the two actions. Herman argues that “if Milton uses ‘or’ to conflate difference, he also uses ‘or’ to provide a choice between different items but without indicating a preference between them.”18 That Milton here does not make a choice between prayer and contemplation could indicate that he is not interested in their differences, but in their similarities, and in how they are manifest on the body in particular. Radzinowicz’s rejection of any significance in Samson’s assumption of the role of either petitioner or intellectual complies with her interpretation of Samson’s inner regeneration. What matters for Radzinowicz is

120  “As One Who Pray’d” that Samson is engaging in an inward act: “buried in the description are phrases indicative of the mental clarity with which positive action was accomplished.”19 ‘Mental clarity’ also matters in an early study by John Huntley, which stresses how the inner world of Samson corresponds with his outer condition: “in a work never intended for the stage, Milton shadows Samson’s spiritual development by symbolic changes in his posture.”20 Yet, Huntley does not seem preoccupied at all with Samson’s posture before the destruction and he does not question how and why a posture of petition could be given in explicitly dramatic terms. He writes: “when Samson bowed his head in prayer or thought, he not only regained his total spiritual vision, but regained his total freedom.”21 Posture for Huntley is simply the manifestation of the regeneration that has occurred within Samson. The external is the result of an internal condition we have not seen. What actually seems to matter in this scene is not inwardness, but the physical expression of Samson’s devotion or meditation. The moments leading up to the prayer in the Temple emphasize how conscious Samson is of his part as an actor, since by this stage he already suspect of insincere acting. At length for intermission sake they led him Between the pillars; he his guide requested (For so from such as nearer stood we heard) As overtir’d to let him lean a while With both his arms on those two massy Pillars That to the arched roof gave main support. He unsuspicious led him (ll. 1629–35) Although the Messenger has been addressed as the playwright of the last scene, here it is Samson directing the play. 22 This dramatization of Samson’s interaction with his Guide is not found in the Judges account where one line summarizes Samson’s request: “And Samson said unto the lad that held him by the hand, Suffer me that I may feel the pillars whereupon the house standeth, that I may lean upon them” (Judges 16.26). Milton’s additional stage directions – the exaggerated “overtired” and the “unsuspicious” Guide – alert us to the possibility of a Samson sacrificing pious, inward devotion at the altar of idolatrous pose. Since it is Samson’s well-orchestrated moves creating, and undercutting, the authenticity of the scene, the cautious reader would hesitate to interpret the prayer or meditation as genuine. In fact, the scene’s focus on gesture is reminiscent of the hypocritical prayer of Archimago encountered in Chapter 1, where gesture, props, and dress combine in Spenser’s villain (and in Milton’s Comus) to create the illusion of devotion. Here, Archimago’s posture, “and all the way he prayed, as he went, / And often knockt his brest, as

“As One Who Pray’d”  121 one that did repent” (Canto I, XXIX, 253–61), is mirrored in Samson’s ambiguous actions implying that Samson could be as guilty of devotional pretence as Comus or Archimago. Although Samson does not “knock his brest,” he does adopt the physical signs of devotion and seems to re-enact prayer. If, in other words, Samson is feigning exhaustion, perhaps he is capable of feigning devotion, too. Exposed in the eyes of many spectators all gathered at a temple to worship their deity, this theatrical act of prayer has overtones of Pharisaic devotion, seeking to impress a human audience instead of being directed to God. In a tragedy without evidence of God listening, Samson might be as guilty of indulging in a spectacle for an earthly audience as Charles I in Eikon Basilike. Posture and physical signs were integral in the early modern art of rhetoric in which delivery was essential to persuasion. Samson’s gestures before his final act can be interpreted as participating in a tradition that valued an orator’s physical performance as central to the accomplishment of the persuasive speech. The two primary rhetorical texts for study in the renaissance were Cicero’s De Oratore and Quintilian’s Institutia Oratoria, both advising on the importance of gesture for the successful delivery of a speech. Cicero commanded that for “he control and training of voice, breathing, gestures and the tongue itself (…) we have to study actors as well as orators.”23 Quintilian placed even higher emphasis on gesture: “I ask you whether it is not absolutely necessary for the orator to be acquainted with all these methods of expression that are concerned firstly with gesture.”24 Following the examples of Cicero and Quintilian, Milton’s idea of rhetoric also valued gesture highly. In his Of Education he writes that “there would then also appear in Pulpits other visages, other gestures, and stuffe otherwise wrought then what we now sit under” (CPW 2: 406). Trying to reform the educational system involved for Milton reshaping the teaching of rhetoric, and this in turn relied on a reform of gestures that would be more persuasive to the public. Since rhetoric was an art created for the persuasion of men, if Samson’s gestures in prayer are deemed rhetorical they threaten to reduce his prayer to a performance directed to capture the Philistines’ imagination and to persuade them, not God, of his devotion. Nevertheless, rhetorical gestures in prayer may not always be a sign of inauthenticity. John Bulwer’s famous discussion of gesture in the early modern period, Chirologia, connects rhetorical practices with devotion: For, the lineaments of the Body doe disclose the disposition and inclination of the minde in generall; but the motions doe not only so, but doe further disclose the present humour and state of the minde and will; for as the Tongue speaketh to the Eare, so Gesture speaketh to the Eye […] For, after one manner almost we clappe our Hands in joy, wring them in sorrow, advance them in prayer and admiration. 25

122  “As One Who Pray’d” Bulwer is aware that the use of gestures in prayer can accentuate the rhetorical impact of the address. Prayer is only one of the multiple human conditions where gesture is called upon to offer an indication of the “state of the minde.” What is interesting about Bulwer’s inclusion of prayer in his treatise is that it implicitly suggests that gesture can make one’s prayer be heard. The idea that “as the Tongue speaketh to the Eare, so Gesture speaketh to the Eye,” when applied to prayer, may refer to the eyes and ears of God. Rhetorical skills, therefore, could infiltrate the practice of devotion. In this respect, rhetorical gestures create a vocabulary of addressing God that does not rely exclusively, or at all, on voice and language. In fact, for early modern petitioners acting and relying on gestures was not incompatible with praying to God. For the post-Reformation subject, the use of the outward gesture in prayer was not necessarily be a sign of inauthentic behaviour and the participation of the physical body in one’s address to God was often deemed a secure prayer. The insistence on the outward physical demonstration to match the inward state of the soul was found for instance in early modern devotional works and it verified prayer as a show. The body was meant to be a signifier and the petitioner was awakened to its signifying potential. For example, Oliver Heywood wrote that “he will be worshipped with the outward as well as inward man (…) both evidence and assistance in the bodie’s humble gesture.”26 George Downame implored that “where he requireth the inward worship of the soul in prayer, as honorem facti, the honour of the deed, there also he requireth the outward of the body.”27 Similarly Edward Wetenhall argued that “my prayer wants their due solemnity, if not performed in a posture of worship.”28 The petitioners were advised to think of themselves as actors on a stage in front of God. Richard Brathwait, for instance, advised his female readers to “make your chamber your private Theatre, wherein you may act some devote scene to God’s honor.”29 Thomas Brooks’s point is even clearer: “Never tell me, how handsomely, how neatly, how bravely, this or that man acts his part before others; but tell me, if thou canst, how he acts his part before God in his closet.”30 Prayer relied on the awareness that a form of worshipful acting was necessary to secure divine audience and that the body was central in such worshipful performance. As Narveson argues, “the discourse employed by early modern Protestants did not equate artificial with inauthentic.”31 An affected performance did not necessarily exclude authenticity of emotion.

Samson’s Rhetoric If his posture proved problematic in resolving uncertainties, Samson’s final speech is more promising in offering an answer regarding pious or insincere prayer. While the speech appears to fluctuate between theatrical

“As One Who Pray’d”  123 and devotional expression, it distinguishes between two audiences. Loewenstein has argued that, “heavily ironic, Samson’s final words contrast the spectacle he has just performed in with the spectacle he is about to enact.”32 Samson’s differentiation between two performances reveals an awareness of two separate audiences: the performance directed to those present in the Temple is juxtaposed with the performance directed to God. By drawing the line between his two audiences, Samson’s prayer escapes theatricality in which the inner and outer might not coincide. Instead, his final, external, and destructive action is for Milton the ultimate performance of one’s address to God. Regarding Samson’s last spoken words, Wittreich has noted that “what was in Judges a prayer is here a thinly veiled threat; what was there a plea for divine infusion and sanction is here a declaration that what is done is done of my own accord.”33 Samson’s final speech, however, is not to be understood as replacing the biblical prayer, but needs to be examined for the dramatic effects it generates. In his last words, Samson differentiates between two performances, one that has produced “wonder or delight” and one that will produce amazement: Hitherto, Lords, what your commands impos’d I have perform’d, as reason was, obeying, Not without wonder or delight beheld. Now of my own accord such other trial I mean to show you of my strength, yet greater; As with amaze shall strike all who behold (ll. 1640–5) Anne Ferry has concluded against the importance of this speech: [Samson] uses words with his characteristic sense of their inappropriateness to his inward experience, but now he chooses them because they are irrelevant, and therefore can mislead men who belong to the outward world and who apprehend only the immediate, ordinary human references of language.34 If not altogether “irrelevant,” the language of spectacle in these lines can be perhaps interpreted as an ironic comment on the highly elaborate spectacles offered by the Restoration stage when Milton was writing Samson Agonistes. Yet, Samson’s emphasis on the effects of his performance suggests that these lines are not to be discarded as ironic or irrelevant. Here Samson constructs two separate audiences and two separate dramatic effects. Sauer believes that in the tragedy “the tension between playing an assigned part and intentionally assuming a role is heightened in this final scene.”35 This tension is not specific to the protagonist, but it extends to the effect on the audience: the “assigned part” of Samson

124  “As One Who Pray’d” ends with “wonder and delight,” while the role he assumes will end in amazement. In a metatheatrical manoeuvre, Milton/Samson is addressing his readers/audience in a rhetorical speech. In the first part of the chapter I analysed how Samson’s posture at the Temple evokes a rhetorical performance. His speech can be seen as supporting such view because it fits—albeit conditionally—the parts of classical oration as outline by Cicero in his Rhetorica Ad Herrenium: exordium, narration, division, confirmation, confutation, and conclusion.36 “Hitherto, Lords, what you commands impos’d / I have performed” (l. 1640) may be read as the exordium, where the audience is established and their attention is grabbed. “I have perform’d, as reason was, obeying, / Not without wonder or delight beheld” (ll. 1641–2) is the narration as it summarizes what has happened so far. “Now of my own accord such other trial I mean to show you” (ll. 1643–4) introduces the new topic and marks a difference to what has gone before, serving hence as the division. Confirmation is implicit in Samson’s suggested outcome, “as with amaze shall strike all who behold” (l. 1645), that materializes after his speech. Samson’s promise of a “yet greater” strength (l. 1644) and the following disaster might be interpreted as the refutation of his opponents, while conclusion is replaced by his destructive actions. That Samson engages here in a rhetorical performance undermines claims of divine inspiration since Samson seems preoccupied with the spectacle he has provided for the Philistines rather than his performance in the eyes of God. In fact, Samson’s confidence that the show he put on for the Philistines has delivered “wonder or delight” (l. 1642), suggests his full awareness of his participation in a tragedy. Yet, whether this tragedy is closer to an idolatrous, spectacular show or to the divine drama Milton envisaged remains ambiguous. In the metatheatrical framework in which we read Samson’s last scene (a play within the play), the dramatic effects of “wonder and delight” in a tragedy need further consideration. Bradburn has argued that the use of wonder and amazement in Milton’s work evokes different audience responses: Internal audiences in Paradise Lost who respond to spectacles with amazement become morally incapacitated, unable to change direction and recover from their fallen stupor, whereas those audiences who respond with wonder set in motion a process of spiritually regenerative responses. They are moved by theatre. 37 Bradburn’s theory of internal audiences, where wonder is a positive force and amazement a negative, can be fruitfully extended to Samson Agonistes and to Samson’s last speech where he differentiates between two audiences and two responses to the spectacle.

“As One Who Pray’d”  125 Wonder and delight, or pleasure, had been the cause of philosophical debate throughout the ages. For Aristotle, wonder was linked to learning and it produced pleasure: “learning things and wondering at things are also pleasant for the most part; wondering implies the desire of learning, so that the object of wonder is an object of desire.”38 In the Middle Ages, Thomas Aquinas in his theological treatise also asserted that wonder and delight are engaged in a cause-and-effect relationship, since wonder involves a search for learning, and such search results in pleasure: ‘Wondering’ means ‘wanting to know something’: it is aroused when a man sees an effect and does not know its cause […] wondering therefore can cause him pleasure when it carries with it a real prospect of finding out what he wants to know. This is why anything that arouses wonder can give pleasure.39 The association of wonder with a desire for knowledge and learning was influential in the Renaissance, and particularly through the figure of Horace. Horace, who relied extensively on Aristotle’s teachings, had focused on instruction and delight as the duty of the poet in his Ars Poetica: “but he hath every suffrage, can apply / Sweet mix’d with sowre, to his Reader, so / As doctrine, and delight together go.”40 The Horatian principle of instruction and delight was reinvented in Sidney’s Apology for Poetry. Sidney had argued that so these Poets, “imitate both to delight and teach: and delight to move men to take that goodness in hand, which without delight they would fly as from a stranger.”41 In the context of rhetoric, then, “of moving men,” delight was not perceived only as the effect of learning and understanding but also their cause. Delight could serve as the means of persuasion towards education. Milton shares the classical and early modern belief in the close relationship between learning and delight. In Book IX of Paradise Lost, for instance, Adam states that God’s intention for mankind was pleasure through reason, the capacity for knowledge: “For not to irksome toil, but to delight / He made us, and delight to reason joined” (IX. 242–3). The sentiment that goodness has to involve delight to be appealing to men is revisited in a discussion of drama. In the Reason of Church Government, while outlining the role of those few with “the inspired gift of God,” Milton includes “teaching over the whole book of sanctity and virtu […] with such delight to those especially of soft and delicious temper who will not so much as look upon Truth herselfe, unlesse they see her elegantly drest” (CPW 1:817–8). For Milton, teaching needs to produce delight to be an effective tool in the quest for truth. The above comment comes after Milton’s examples of tragedies the nation should be educated in: Whether those Dramatick constitutions, wherein Sophocles and Euripides raigne shall be found more doctrinal and exemplary to a

126  “As One Who Pray’d” Nation the Scripture also affords us a divine pastoral Drama in the Song of Salomon, consisting of two persons and a double Chorus, as Origen rightly judges. And the Apocalyps of Saint John is the majestic image of a high and stately Tragedy. (CPW 1:814–5) Hence, the value of tragedy for Milton is that it cultivates in people models to imitate that are “doctrinal and exemplary.” Later in his tract, he argues that the purpose of performance “at set and solemn Paneguries, in Theaters, porches, or what other place” should be ‘recreation and instruction’ (CPW 1:820). In this respect, since wonder is equated with knowledge and instruction, Samson’s final words of “wonder or delight” echo Milton’s ideal purpose of drama: to instruct and delight. In the preface to Samson Agonistes, the concepts of mental development and delight are linked in the very definition of tragedy: “therefore said by Aristotle to be of power by raising pity and fear, or terror, to purge the mind of those and such like passions, that is to temper and reduce them to just measure with a kind of delight.”42 Although not staged, Milton’s tragedy follows closely the Aristotelian theory in its purpose to combine moral instruction with aesthetic pleasure.43 The first performance Samson refers to in his final lines, his show in front of the Philistine audience, includes the feats and sports executed according to their demands. But how could such a performance result in delighting the audience and in moving them towards learning? The Philistine audience might be an unbelieving crowd, but Samson does recognise the potential in some of the spectators to experience the ‘wonder or delight’ of his tragedy. If we consider the fact that after the destruction of the Temple some of the audience, “the vulgar who stood without” (l. 1659) manage to survive the catastrophe, it is evident that Milton is not as absolute as the Bible on the impossibility of the spectators at the Temple being transformed. This could explain why, despite Samson’s initial fears of his treatment at the hands of the Philistines in the feast of Dagon, there are in fact no degrading instances reported by the Messenger. By participating in the feast, Samson participates in a tragedy that has the potential to transform and educate its audience, both those present and the imagined readers. Milton’s ‘or’ in this instance exposes an uncertainty over whether Samson’s tragedy will be interpreted appropriately and invites the reader and spectator to consider the impact of the performance on them.44 Once Samson has signalled the end of his tragedy for his immediate audience, he embarks on the second performance: “Now of my own accord such other trial / I mean to show you of my strength, yet greater; / As with amaze shall strike all who behold.” (ll. 1643–5). Samson’s second performance starts with the phrase that has caused much critical debate: “of my own accord.” Wittreich has argued that “such a phrase is an unhappy choice if the poet means to suggest that Samson receives a

“As One Who Pray’d”  127 divine commission with which he chooses to cooperate.”45 However, as Rudrum points out, “Samson is under no compulsion to reveal his intentions to his enemies.”46 Yet perhaps Samson acts following his “own accord,” not because he is concealing divine inspiration but because he is seeking it. These last lines and the destruction that follows is Samson’s final address to a different, divine audience. Despite these lines following his address to the “Lords,” it is Samson’s Lord who is invited to observe the performance alluded to in the second part of the exclamation. “You” and “all who behold” are evidently distinguished, and Samson here clearly decides to begin a new and different performance. These lines evoke the Lady’s performance in front of a divine audience in Milton’s Mask. There the Lady had claimed a divine spectator for her actions: “Eye me blest Providence, and square my trial / To my proportione’d strength” (ll. 329–30). The trial of strength that Samson promises will follow his theatrical performance for the Philistines is directed to what earlier he identified as “his eye / Gracious to re-admit the suppliant” (ll. 1672–3), separating earthly from divine audience. Samson’s performance to God described as a “trial” alludes to Milton’s ideal Christian as expressed in Areopagitica: He that can apprehend and consider vice with all her baits and seeming pleasures, and yet abstain, and yet distinguish, and yet prefer that which is truly better, he is the true warfaring Christian. I cannot praise a fugitive and cloister’d virtue, unexercis’d & unbreath’d […] that which purifies us is triall, and triall is by what is contrary. (CPW 2:514–5) Samson’s “trial of strength” implies that he embodies the “warfaring Christian” Milton had envisaged in his prose. The trial that the protagonist undertakes is not simply the resistance to the pleasures or compromises that Manoa, Dalila, and Harapha offer him, but involves a powerful address to God. Samson’s second performance that is intended for God cannot be understood by the present audience. Those who “beheld” Samson’s first performance and are about to “behold” his second are represented by the figure of the Messenger who exemplifies man’s failure to comprehend Samson’s acts. When the Messenger finds Manoa and the Chorus he exclaims: O whither shall I run, or which way fly The sight of this so horrid spectacle Which erst my eyes beheld and yet behold? (ll. 1541–3) “Beheld” is later connected to the spectacle of “wonder or delight” that the Philistines were offered, while what he still “beholds” is the

128  “As One Who Pray’d” confusion of the “horrid spectacle” addressed by Samson to the divine, and thus incomprehensible to the Messenger. The horror the Messenger and the gathered audience fail to interpret is a reconfiguration of the “amaze shall strike all who behold,” and this dramatic effect suggests, in Bradburn’s terms, that they are “morally incapacitated, unable to change direction and recover from their fallen stupor.”47 Samson’s address to God, then, is a powerful practice with destructive results for an audience driven by the idolatry of spectacle. Samson’s assurance regarding the power of his performance to God on earthly audiences is better understood next to other moments of similar conviction in Milton’s prose and poetry. Milton had previously suggested that addressing God may obliterate (literally or metaphorically) an unfit audience both in his masque and in his antiprelatical tracts. In An Apology against A Pamphlet Milton defends himself against Bishop Joseph Hall’s accusation that the prayer Milton inserted at the end of the Smectymnuus’s pamphlet was a long, tedious, theatricall, big-mouthed, astounding Prayer, put up in the name of the three Kingdomes; not so much either to please God, or benefit the weal-publike by it, as to intimate your owne good abilities to her that is your rich hopes.48 In the Preface to his tract, Hall had portrayed his enemy as one who frequents “the Play-Houses, or the Bordelli, for there I have traced him; among old Cloaks, false Beards, Tyres, Cases, Periwigs, Modona Vizzards, nightwalking-Cudgellers, and Salt Lotion.”49 Hall set out to attack Milton in terms of performance as is evident from his address to the reader: “To make up the breaches of whose solemn Scenes, (it were too ominous to say Tragicall) there is thrust forth upon the Stage, as also to take the eare of the lesse intelligent, a scurrilous Mime, a personated, and (as himself thinks) a grim, lowring, bitter fool.”50 The debate between the clergy and Smectymnuus seems to occur in a theatrical arena where Milton is attacked as an unworthy actor. Milton’s response in his tract did not refute the performance of his petition, but endorsed it. It was theatricall, he sayes. And yet it consisted most of Scripture language: it had no Rubrick to be sung in an antick Coape upon the Stage of a High Altar. It was big-mouth’d he sayes; no marvell; if it were fram’d as the voice of three Kingdomes: neither was it a prayer so much as a hymne in prose frequent both in the Prophets, and in humane authors; therefore the stile was greater then for an ordinary prayer: It was an astounding prayer. I thank him for that confession,

“As One Who Pray’d”  129 so it was intended to astound and to astonish the guilty Prelats; and this Confuter confesses that with him it wrought that effect. (CPW 1:930) Milton here attributes to prayer those elements that inform the vision of prayer found in his later works. Prayer is inspired by the Scriptures, yet it rejects uniformity. Rubrick, the liturgical directions written in red, authoritative ink, symbolizes the tyranny of set forms of worship, as made more explicit in Eikonoklastes: “for was it not he [Charles], who […] with his Sword went about to score a bloody Rubric on their backs?” (CPW 3:488–9).51 Moreover, prayer for Milton is a “hymne,” signalling the importance of hymns in addressing the divine that Adam and Eve demonstrate in Paradise Lost. Finally, Milton fully embraces Hall’s accusation of an “astounding” prayer. Milton had used the powerful dramatic effect of “astound” in his earlier dramatic composition. The Lady in the Mask defies evil fantasies evoked by the darkness of the forest, by affirming that “these thoughts may startle well, but not astound / The virtuous mind” (ll. 201–2). The virtuous Lady, the opposite of the “guilty Prelats,” suggests that for Milton, amazement depends on the conscience of the audience. Milton’s prayer was “astounding” to the bishops because of their spiritually corrupt state. In Samson Agonistes, Samson’s words express his conviction that his performance will also offer astonishment or amazement to those guilty of idolatry. Milton seems to be responding again to Hall’s accusations by showing Samson’s aversion to the spectacle in which he is invited to participate: Although thir drudge, to be thir fool or jester, And in my midst of sorrow and heart-grief To show them feats, and play before thir god, The worst of all indignities, yet on me Join’d with extreme contempt? (ll. 1338–42) Hall’s argument against Milton concerned the latter’s role as a player, a hypocrite, on the stage that the enemies of the church had built. In the tragedy, Milton appropriates Hall’s attack and reverses the terms: Samson does not reject the role of the fool that Hall had associated with Milton, but rejects the present audience. Samson does not want “to show them feats,” “to make them sport,” “to be thir fool or jester,” or “to play before thir god at thir public Mill.” Samson’s repetition of the third-person plural pronoun suggests that the protagonist is suspicious of those at the receiving end of the performance and not of the performance as such.

130  “As One Who Pray’d” Milton, then, in his Apology, and Samson in the tragedy willingly perform the role of a fool that need not be Hall’s or the Philistines’ fool. The degrading idea of the fool for the audience of the Philistines that Samson strives against before going to the Temple evolves into Paul’s ideal of the fool as expressed in the Corinthians: For I think that God hath set forth us the apostles last, as it were appointed to death: for we are made a spectacle unto the world, and to angels, and to men. We are fools for Christ’s sake, but ye are wise in Christ; we are weak, but ye are strong; ye are honourable, but we are despised. (I Corinthians 4.9–10) Anna Nardo has read Samson as Milton’s “trickster” and has concluded that “the performance is the meaning, which the fool and the trickster can articulate in no other way.”52 In adopting the fool’s position Samson creates a meaningful performance, and what is more, voluntarily so. Samson, Nardo writes, “distinguishes his next trick, which he agrees to, from his earlier performance at the feast.”53 Samson’s performance at the Temple is not idolatrous because it circumvents the immediate audience who would constitute him a fool in earthly terms and creates a spectacle for the audience of readers and of God. Samson’s speech, therefore, differentiates between two audiences and marks two separate dramatic effects. The theatrical behaviour of Samson in the Temple is directed to his immediate audience and is very much concerned with the dramatic effect on them. “Wonder or delight” betray Samson’s awareness that he is part of a tragedy, while the threat of ‘amazement’ links his Philistine audience with the prelates whom Milton charged with corruption. Samson is aware he is participating in a tragedy directed first to earthly audience and then to the divine audience. This suggests that although what follows is iconoclastic it is still a performance, though this time incorporated in an address to God. The ambiguous physicality examined in the first part becomes explicitly directed to the divine, reforming theatre by substituting a different spectacle for it: a violent prayer. Samson finds then a new way to address God, away from voicing the prayer of the Judges, and embodied in the violent act of destruction.

Samson’s Violent Prayer What follows Samson’s final speech is extreme violence. That Milton chooses to omit Samson’s verbal address to God might initially indicate that he is not comfortable with the violence that follows Samson’s communication with God in the Bible. Personal revenge for Milton does

“As One Who Pray’d”  131 not constitute a legitimate reason for devotion. In his The Christian Doctrine, in the chapter “Of External Worship,” Milton writes: Among the errors connected with petitions and prayers come rash curses, by which we invoke God or the devil to destroy any particular person or thing. This is a sin. Rom. xii. 14. bless and do not curse not; The godly themselves sometimes fall in this way. (CPW 6:677) Prayer and revenge appear irreconcilable, complicating our understanding of Samson’s final moments. Revenge and violence in the biblical story of Samson were a cause of concern for most writers who envisaged Samson’s narrative as drama. In sixteenth and seventeenth century versions of the story prior to Milton’s, the prayer is present and sometimes audible. For instance, Hieronymus Zieglerus’s Samson, in his Latin school-play Tragoedia Nova (1547), cries out: O Lord, my God, remember me this day, And give me back the strength that once I had, So that on impious foes I may take vengeance And reap a penalty for loss of eyes. 54 Zieglerius remains faithful to the Bible in his inclusion of the prayer for revenge. According to Kirkconnell, the two major plays that dealt with the theme of Samson before Milton’s were Wunstius’s Simson, Tragoedia Sacra (1600, 1604) and Vondel’s Samson, of Heilige Wraeck, Treurspel (1660). In Wunstius’s classic drama, Samson’s last moments are reported by a boy messenger, and even though the prayer before the destruction is not included in the report, the boy understands from Samson’s body language, his breath and groans, that he is addressing the divine: He bore those mockeries with agitation, Heaving deep groans from out his inmost breast, And breathed petitions to his Heavenly Father. 55 Verbal prayer is absent, yet the groans and “breathed petitions” are securely observed as Samson’s address to God. Such depiction of prayer expresses once again the reliability of body language to deliver the message to God, and reminds us of Adam and Eve’s contrite condition and physical petitionary model in Paradise Lost. In Vondel’s version, Samson speaks twice before he dies: He raised his face, Fronting the vault of heaven, and cried aloud:

132  “As One Who Pray’d” ‘My God, my God, come down and walk below! Protect Thy name now, and reclaim mine eyes! Now is the time to show Thy strength in me!’ Then tugged he cross-wise at the two chief pillars With both his arms, so that they bent, and cried: ‘Die now, my soul, with all the Philistines!’56 The show of strength that Vondel’s Samson puts on is similar to the one by Milton’s Samson, yet the commanding and melodramatic tone in the speech would have attracted little admiration from Milton. Francis Quarles’s The Historie of Samson (1631) has Samson speaking only to God’s ears: “With that, the pris’ner turnd himselfe and prai’d / So soft, that none but heaven could heare, and said.”57 What is peculiar in Quarles’s version is Samson’s almost patronizing tone in his address to God. Instead of seeking vengeance for the wrongs the Philistines have inflicted on him, Samson seeks to convince God of reasons for the deity to take revenge on them. I am thy Champion, Lord; It is not me They strike at; Through my sides, they thrust at thee: Against thy Glory ‘tis, their Malice lies; They aym’d at that, when they put out these eyes: Alas their blood bedabbl’d hands would flie On thee, wert thou but cloth’d in flesh, as I: Revenge thy wrongs, great God; O let thy hand Redeeme thy suffring honour, and this land: Lend me thy power; Renew my wasted strength, That I may fight thy battells; and, at length, Rescue thy Glory; that my hands may doe That faithfull service, they were borne unto: Lend me thy power, that I may restore Thy losse, and I will never urge thee more:58 Of these examples, the biblical account where Samson prays for his loss of eyesight to be avenged is followed closely only by Zieglerius. The rest of the dramatists opt for creative enhancements of the original text, which either silence the motive (in Wunstius’s case) or do not fail to include God and his best interests as part of it. The emphasis on the Philistines’ abuse against God’s name and glory might suggest that these writers were as uncomfortable as Milton was with the biblical Samson’s personal reasons for revenge. Nevertheless, the assumption that Milton does not include the prayer because he does not advocate Samson’s violence cannot be sustained. Destroying “any particular person or thing” might be against Milton’s prescription of devout prayer. However, if that person is an enemy of

“As One Who Pray’d”  133 God, then destruction is strongly adhered to. As stated in his theological treatise, “we are even commanded, in public prayer, to curse the enemies of God and the Church […] the same thing is permissible in private prayer” (CPW 6:675). As already pointed out, in the First Defense, Milton explicitly mentions that Samson did pray and that he thought it pious to destroy the Philistine Temple. Moreover, recent scholarship has suggested that the violence of Samson’s act, though against our modern moral sensibilities, is in agreement with seventeenth-century polemic discourse that Milton and other radical writers were representative of. Feisal Mohamed, in his response to Carey’s article, highlights the significance of reading Samson Agonistes within a historical framework of religious enthusiasm: “the religious violence that Carey would see as part of an ‘outmoded’ Jewish heroism […] is thus very much a part of the discourse of the revolution in which Milton was engaged.”59 Mohamed places Samson’s destructive act within Milton’s agenda of radicalism: Milton shows an ideology marginalizing the humanity of nonadherents-­ just as he did in his satisfaction over the beheading of Charles, in his triumphalism over Cromwell’s Irish slaughters, and in his advocacy in the final days of the republic of military suppression of the “inconsiderate multitude [‘s]” desire for monarchy.60 Loewenstein’s work has been fundamental in exploring Milton’s radicalism. He is aware of ‘this discomfort with the violence and passion of Milton’s iconoclasm’ experienced by those critics who reject Samson’s violence as divinely ordained.61 Regarding the tragedy, he writes: “Samson Agonistes thus expresses yet again this aggressive, violent impulse we so often encounter in Milton’s polemical tracts.”62 Both Mohamed and Loewenstein’s works build on the influential book of Christopher Hill, The Experience of Defeat. Hill demonstrates the gap between our understanding of religious violence as condemnable and seventeenth-­ century radical understanding of religious violence as sponsored by divine will: “We would find it difficult to justify hating, conquering and crushing God’s enemies quite as cold-bloodedly as Milton and Bunyan did because we have not been through what they went through.”63 According to Hill, “Milton did believe it a Christian duty to hate God’s enemies.”64 Samson, therefore, in his final moments, does not shy away from violence and revenge. That Samson does not speak the prayer does not suggest ambiguity over whether the destruction is divinely ordained or not. Rather, it encourages us to view the destruction as the culmination of Milton’s vision of prayer as performance. God might be absent from this play, yet Samson’s attempt to reach him is present in this violent demonstration, which is consistent with Milton’s militant iconoclasm, as explained by Loewenstein and Hill.

134  “As One Who Pray’d” The description of the destruction after Samson’s final words evokes a violent prayer. This utter’d, straining all his nerves he bow’d; As with the force of winds and waters pent When Mountains tremble, those two massy Pillars With horrible convulsion to and fro He tugg’d, he shook, till down they came, and drew The whole roof after them with burst of thunder Upon the heads of all who sat beneath (ll. 1646–52) Milton’s portrayal of Samson’s final acts gives the impression of a natural disaster, which reflects a fierce human emotional energy. The “force of winds and waters pent / When Mountains tremble” suggests that the annihilation of Dagon’s temple mirrors an earthquake.65 In this respect, the iconographical connection between Christ on the cross and Samson that we observed in the description of lines 1635–9 is reinforced: Samson’s sacrifice, like Christ’s, is followed by an earthquake. This extraordinary natural manifestation of Samson’s act also relates to Adam and Eve’s fall. In Paradise Lost the earth shook and “nature gave a second groan” (IX. 1001) upon Adam and Eve’s eating of the fruit. In Samson Agonistes, the Chorus describes the impact of Samson’s violent act as a “universal groan / As if the whole inhabitation perish’d” (ll. 1511–2). By introducing an earthquake in the moment of destruction, Milton stretches the limitations of the artificial Philistine Temple and shows Samson’s act to have an impact in the natural as much as the human world. As in the previous chapter, natural and human sufferings meet in prayer. The violence of the natural landscape reflects the intensity of Samson’s body during the moments of the destruction. The physicality involved in his tearing down of the Temple exhibits elements of the extreme and aggressive corporeality often found in one’s private prayer in the early modern period. Although Samson is directing all his destructive energy to the pillars, Milton emphatically separates the object (“those two massy Pillars”) from Samson’s action (“with horrible convulsion to and fro / He tugg’d, he shook”), allowing for a reading where the action returns to the subject. Thus, these lines can be interpreted as a violent prayer in the tradition of religious writers like Donne. In Donne’s Holy Sonnets the physical symptoms of devotion are as fierce and extreme as the ones we meet in Samson. In his “Oh, to vex me” sonnet, Donne describes his relationship to the divine as habitual physical suffering and he ends his poem by acknowledging that his fear of God and its corporeal manifestations are indeed the petitioner’s only consolation and escape from despair: […] So my devout fits come and go away

“As One Who Pray’d”  135 Like a fantastic ague: save that here Those are my best days, when I shake with fear.66 The experience of “devout fits” and “shaking with fear” invoke prayer as an emotional condition that may also apply to Samson’s convulsion and shaking. If we accept that his second performance is directed to God, Samson’s intense physical labour in the Temple certainly resembles an extreme, yet customary, model of petition, and one that Milton had advocated in his previous works. This imagery of violent suffering foregrounds the role of the body in prayer in more than one ways. Apart from alluding to an intense pious state experienced corporeally, it also bears connotations of childbirth. Boesky has claimed that “the spectacle at the temple becomes a recapitulation of birth”: “if Samson is figured as ‘great deliverer’ of the Israelites, he must also be seen here as the great deliverer of himself, dying in a scene that recreates childbirth as a kind of embodied revenge.”67 If in Milton’s earlier works, physicality produced prayers to be directed to God, here such physicality can only address God with destruction. Embodied prayer turns into embodied revenge. While alluding to reproduction and the violence of the meditative process, Samson’s “horrible convulsion” emphasizes the religious suffering of the body by implicitly relating to the intense physicality found in possession narratives. Convulsions in the early modern period were regularly used as an attack against the female body and they were often treated as one of the symptoms of witchcraft.68 Not arguing for a possessed Samson, the interaction between the physical and the spiritual that was observed in demonic possession bears resemblance to Samson’s drama at the Temple. His apparent affliction might be the externalization of a spiritual condition. Furthermore, if convulsion was associated with the female body, then Samson’s convulsion invites a consideration not only of possession, but also of prophetic narratives that reversed the accusation of witchcraft. In this case, the body’s disease was not a symptom of a demonic spirit conquering the female, but proof of the woman’s enlightenment by the spirit of God. For instance, Anna Trapnel, a female prophet in the 1650s, wrote: Now thou art upon thy Temple-work, shall they be building great Palaces for themselves? The Souldiers slight thy handmaid, but she matters not, they shall and must consider in time; they say these are Convulsion-fits, and Sickness, and diseases that make thy handmaid to be in weakness; But oh they know not the pouring forth of thy Spirit, for that makes the body to crumble, and weakens nature.69 Trapnell here declares convulsions to be the physical expression of being inspired by God’s spirit, and not evidence of madness as her opponents claimed.70 The body’s “crumble,” therefore, as in Donne’s sonnet, indicates

136  “As One Who Pray’d” a psychosomatic experience of the divine. Milton’s depiction of the catastrophe at the Temple highlights that Samson also partakes of such an experience and that his physical performance in front of the divine does not replace the Judges prayer, but it becomes Samson’s prayer. This physical performance is one where images of reproduction and possession meet to define it as a particularly gendered performance, and in doing so to strengthen the dramatic and devotional affinities between Samson and the Lady of the Mask. If the intense (“straining all his nerves”) physical show Samson participates in is a prayer, it finds a biblical equivalent in Psalm 18. Psalm 18 is David’s cry to God for strength in defeating his enemies: “In my distress I called upon the Lord, and cried unto my God” (Psalm 18.6). The loud cry to God by David shares with Samson’s prayer the impact on the natural surroundings: “Then the earth shook and trembled; the foundations also of the hills moved and were shaken, because he was wroth” (18.7). God’s response to David’s address includes the thunder that is also heard in Milton’s tragedy as “burst of thunder” (l. 1651): “The Lord also thundered in the heavens, and the Highest gave his voice” (18.13). The outcome of the petition in both the Psalm and Samson’s drama is the defeat of the enemy: David exclaims that “I have wounded them that they were not able to rise: they are fallen under my feet” (18.38), while Samson “drew / The whole roof after them with burst of thunder / Upon the heads of all who sat beneath” (ll. 1650–2). Milton uses Psalm 18 in a discussion of revenge in the Christian Doctrine. Expanding on the “opposite of trying to save our neighbor’s life,” Milton includes “blows, wounds, maiming […] even quick-temper […] and revenge” (CPW 6:754–5). Under revenge, he notes “Psal. Xviii 38–43: I pursue my enemies… and so smash them till they are like dust” (CPW 6:755). For Milton, then, Psalm 18 is integral in discussions of revenge, and its influence in the description of Samson’s actions accentuates the violence of the scene. The previous chapter analysed the importance Psalms held for Milton and how they embodied elements of an ideal prayer. In this respect, the scene’s echoes of Psalm 18 reinforce Samson’s violence as prayer. Violence and prayer are not incompatible, but co-exist. That Samson prays not for violence but through violence means we can avoid questions of intention that remain inevitably unanswered and focus on matters of action, and see his ultimate performance at the Temple as an emotional and violent prayer. Reading Samson’s iconoclastic act as prayer challenges both regenerationist and revisionist criticism of the drama. Samson is perhaps neither regenerated nor in despair when he performs at the Temple. His “rousing motions” capture his attempt to be reunited with God, yet for this union to be complete Samson must paradoxically destroy the body that he uses to address God. In Samson Agonistes, although God is absent, the body is enlisted for its affective potential to communicate with the divine. The only way Samson can

“As One Who Pray’d”  137 restore his relationship with God is via the voluntary submission of his body through his violent prayer. Paradoxically, then, his remark earlier in the tragedy that “this one prayer yet remains, might I be heard, / No long petition, speedy death” (ll. 649–50) might not be expressing a suicidal wish, but it could be foreshadowing what Samson’s final prayer is: death. Milton’s Samson does not pray for death, but prays by dying, embodying his prayer as an iconoclastic passion. Furthermore, in Milton’s closet tragedy, the performance of prayer is not a representation of an inner and inaccessible spiritual condition. Instead, prayer becomes a performance of violent iconoclastic force. If Milton reinvents tragedy by obliterating spectacle and the idea of an earthly audience, in the process he reinvents prayer as an act of iconoclasm. Here, the materiality of prayer that we encountered in Milton’s earlier works, his belief in a model of prayer that includes both body and spirit, is pushed to the limits. Samson Agonistes affirms prayer as performance yet it is a performance that ultimately requires the annihilation of the self. Like closet drama, prayer is not to be seen on a human stage (as in Charles’s case) but to be violently embodied and finally to crash that body on a divine stage. Regarding Milton’s iconoclasm, Loewenstein has argued that “for all its attendant violence, then, Milton’s iconoclasm is simultaneously poetic, theatrical, and liberating. Both an act of power and a kind of poetics, his iconoclasm cannot be divorced from his sense of drama or literary activity.”71 Prayer in Milton’s work is also deeply linked with his “sense of drama and literary activity.” Understanding prayer as iconoclastic performance is one more of the challenges Milton’s tragedy poses for us. Finally, Samson Agonistes offers a problematic portrayal of prayer because it does not shy away from its theatricality. Critics of the tragedy usually conclude that “if Samson does pray, he does so in a figurative closet of private devotion where no human being may ‘witness’ the performance of his soul.”72 Such conclusions encourage the view that Milton’s choice of closet drama is oppositional to the Restoration spectacles. According to Jose, “‘it is more likely that the work never was intended for the stage because that stage would have meant the Restoration stage.”73 Jose links the Restoration to the Philistine state as “inauthentically imperial, outwardly showy, theatrical, martial and false and transient.”74 Rosenberg believes Samson Agonistes to be Milton’s “poetic and political rebellion against the assumptions of the Restoration theatre, which he believed reflected the ethos of court culture, its repression, egoism, and materialism.”75 Whereas such approaches are contextually significant, they are problematic because they refuse to admit any theatrical aspect in Milton’s tragedy and they do not consider Milton’s theatrical construction of Samson’s prayer and the high degree of visibility alluded to in the final moments of Samson’s life. “It is the Philistine world,” Jose writes, “which has theatrical qualities, and these are signs of falsity. Samson is forcibly given

138  “As One Who Pray’d” a theatrical identity, while in reality his true being seems divorced from the whole material creation.”76 The always important “seems” undoes Jose’s argument. We can continue hypothesizing about Samson’s “true being,” which “seems” immaterial, or we can begin to accept Samson as embodying a very material emotional and theatrical identity. Samson Agonistes is certainly an anti-Restoration drama, but that should not detract from its constant call to observe Samson’s body and the vision of performance inherent in it. Theatricality is not necessarily a “debasement,” but actually redeemed in Milton’s final effort to imagine man’s relationship with God.77

Notes 1 For the politics of Samson Agonistes, see Loewenstein, Milton and the Drama of History, Tobias Gregory, “The Political Messages of Samson Agonistes,” Studies in English Literature 50 (2010): 175–203, Laura Lunger Knoppers, Historicizing Milton: Spectacle, Power, and Poetry in Restoration England. 2 For Samson Agonistes and religious dissent, see Joan S. Bennett, Reviving Liberty: Radical Christian Humanism in Milton’s Great Poems (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), Achinstein, “Samson Agonistes and the Drama of Dissent,” Milton Studies 33 (1996): 133–58, and “Samson Agonistes and the Politics of Memory,” in Altering Eyes: New Perspectives on ‘Samson Agonistes’, ed. Joseph Wittreich and Mark R. Kelley (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2002), 168–91, David Gay, “Prayer, Temporality, and Liberty,” in Milton, Rights and Liberties, ed. Christophe Tournu and Neil Forsyth (Bern: Peter Lang, 2007), 355–68. 3 For the relationship between Samson Agonistes and Restoration drama see Sauer, “Closet Drama and the Case of Tyrannicall-Government Anatomized,” in The Book of the Play: Playwrights, Stationers, and Readers in Early Modern England, ed. Marta Straznicky (Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2006), 80–98, John Cox, “Renaissance Power and Stuart Dramaturgy: Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden,” Comparative Drama 22 (1988): 323–58, Nicholas Jose, Ideas of the Restoration in English Literature, 1660–71 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1984), Donald Maurice Rosenberg, “Milton, Dryden, and the Ideology of Genre,” Comparative Drama 21 (1987): 1–18, and Burbery, Milton the Dramatist. 4 Judges 16.28: ‘And Samson called unto the LORD, and said, O Lord God, remember me, I pray thee, and strengthen me, I pray thee, only this once, O God, that I may be at once avenged of the Philistines for my two eyes.’ 5 John Carey, “A Work in Praise of Terrorism? September 11 and Samson Agonistes,” Times Literary Supplement (6th September 2002): 15–16 (15). Carey’s article invited a response from Feisal G. Mohamed, “Confronting Religious Violence: Milton’s Samson Agonistes,” PMLA 120 (2005): 327–40, whose views on Samson’s violence I revisit in the final part of this chapter. 6 For Milton’s use of the Bible, see Radzinowicz, “How Milton Read the Bible: The Case of Paradise Regained,” in The Cambridge Companion to Milton, 202–18, and Schwartz, “Milton on the Bible,” in A Companion to Milton, ed. Thomas N. Corns, 37–54. 7 Gregory, “The Political Messages of Samson Agonistes,” 180.

“As One Who Pray’d”  139 8 Schwartz, “Samson Agonistes: The Force of Justice and the Violence of Idolatry,” in The Oxford Handbook to Milton, ed. Nicholas McDowell and Nigel Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 632–48 (633, see fn. 1). 9 Ann Mary Radzinowicz, Towards Samson Agonistes: The Growth of Milton’s Mind (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), Joseph Wittreich, Interpreting Samson Agonistes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986) and Shifting Contexts: Reinterpreting Samson Agonistes (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2002). For an overview of the two critical approaches, see Alan Rudrum, “Milton Scholarship and the Agon over Samson Agonistes,” Huntington Library Quarterly 65 (2002): 465–88. 10 Apart from Radzinowicz, other examples include Loewenstein, Milton and the Drama of History, Anthony Low, The Blaze of Noon: A Reading of Samson Agonistes (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974), and Bennett, Reviving Liberty: Radical Christian Humanism in Milton’s Great Poems. 11 Apart from Wittreich, examples include John Carey (see above), Irene Samuel, “Samson Agonistes as Tragedy,” in Calm of Mind: Tercentenary Essays on ‘Paradise Regained’ and ‘Samson Agonistes’ in Honor of John S. Diekhoff, ed. Joseph A. Wittreich (Cleveland, OH: The Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1971), 235–57, and Derek N.C. Wood, “Exiled from Light”: Divine Law, Morality, and Violence in “Samson Agonistes” (Toronto, ON: Toronto University Press, 2001). 1 2 Sauer, “The Politics of Performance in the Inner Theater: ‘Samson Agonistes’ as Closet Drama,” in Milton and Heresy, ed. Stephen B. Dobranski and John P. Rumrich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 199–215, Dennis Kezar, “Samson’s Death by Theater and Milton’s Art of Dying,” ELH 66 (1999): 295–336. 13 Sauer, 204. 14 James Dougal Fleming, Milton’s Secrecy and Philosophical Hermeneutics (Farnham: Ashgate, 2008), 4 and 121. 15 Luke 23.46: ‘And when Jesus had cried with a loud voice, he said, Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit: and having said thus, he gave up the ghost.’ Mark 15.37: ‘And Jesus cried with a loud voice, and gave up the ghost.’ Matthew 27.50: ‘Jesus, when he had cried again with a loud voice, yielded up the ghost.’ 16 Stanley Fish, How Milton Works (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001): 447–8. 17 Radzinowicz, Towards Samson Agonistes, 357. 18 Peter C. Herman, Destabilizing Milton: “Paradise Lost” and the Poetics of Incertitude (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 44. 19 Radzinowicz, Towards Samson Agonistes, 61 (my italics). 0 John Huntley, “A Revaluation of the Chorus’s Role in ‘Samson Agonistes’,” 2 Modern Philology 64 (1966): 132–45 (142). 21 Ibid, 143. 2 2 Sauer, “The Politics of Performance in the Inner Theater,” 206. 2 3 Cicero, De Oratore, with an English Translation by E.W. Sutton (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1942), 107. 2 4 Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, Books I–III, trans. by H.E. Butler (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1920), 171. 2 5 John Bulwer, Chirologia, or, The Naturall Language of the Hand Composed of the Speaking Motions, and Discoursing Gestures Thereof : Whereunto is Added Chironomia, or, The Art of Manuall Rhetoricke, Consisting of

140  “As One Who Pray’d”

2 6 27 28 2 9 3 0 31

32 33 34 35 3 6 37 38 39 4 0 41 42 43

4 4

the Naturall Expressions, Digested by Art in the Hand, as the Chiefest Instrument of Eloquence (London, 1644), extract is taken from ‘To the Reader’. Oliver Heywood, Closet-Prayer a Christian-Duty, or, A Treatise upon Mat. 6, 6 (London, 1671), 184. Downame, A godly and learned treatise of prayer, 117. Wettenhall, Enter into thy Closet, or a Method and Order for Private Devotion, 73. Richard Brathwait, The English Gentlewoman (London 1631), 48. Thomas Brooks, The Privie Key of Heaven, or, Twenty Arguments for Closet-­Prayer (London, 1665), in The Works of Thomas Brooks, vol. II, ed. by Rev. Alexander Balloch Grosart (Edinburgh: J.Nicholl, 1866), 162. Narveson, “Profession or Performance? Religion in Early Modern Literary Study,” in Fault Lines and Controversies in the Study of Seventeenth-­ Century English Literature, ed. Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002), 111–129 (127). Loewenstein, Milton and the Drama of History, 140. Witttreich, Shifting Contexts: Reinterpreting, 74–5. Anne Davidson Ferry, Milton and the Miltonic Dryden (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968), 172 (Ferry’s italics). Sauer, “The Politics of Performance in the Inner Theater,” 207. Cicero, AD C. Herennium (Rhetorica ad Herennium), trans. by Harry Caplan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1954), 8–11. Elizabeth Bradburn, “Theatrical Wonder, Amazement, and the Construction of Spiritual Agency in Paradise Lost,” Comparative Drama 40 (2006): 77–98 (80). The Complete Works of Aristotle, The Revised Oxford Translation, vol. 2, ed. Jonathan Barnes, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984, reprint. 1995), Book I, Chapter 11, 2183. St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Vol. 20 ‘Pleasure’, trans. by Eric D’Arcy (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1975), 51. Horace, Of the Art of Poetrie, Made English by Ben Jonson, in Ben Jonson, vol. VIII, ed. Charles Harold Herford, Percy and Evelyn Simpson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1947), 305–37, (329), ll. 514–6. Sidney, The Defence of Poesy (1595). In The Broadview Anthology of British Literature, Vol. 2, edited by Joseph Black et al. (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2006), 271–97(273). ‘Of that Sort of Dramatic Poem which is Called Tragedy’, in Hughes, CP, 549. For an extensive analysis of Milton’s reading of Aristotle’s theory on tragedy, see John M. Steadman, “‘Passions Well Imitated’: Rhetoric and Poetics in the Preface to Samson Agonistes,” in Calm of Mind:Tercentenary Essays on ‘Paradise Regained’ and ‘Samson Agonistes’ in Honor of John S. Diekhoff, ed. Joseph A. Wittreich (Cleveland, OH: The Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1971), 175–207. See also, Michael R. G. Spiller, “Directing the Audience in Samson Agonistes,” in Of Poetry and Politics, 121–9, who argues that the Chorus’s final words are directed to the readers as audience: we depart, at once, calm and purged; but after that, if we revisit the monument of Samson, we will recall his story with delight, and imitate his virtues in action, thus turning word into deed and imagination into virtuous action, as humanist poetic theory traditionally prescribes. (128)

“As One Who Pray’d”  141 45 Joseph Wittreich, “Samson Agonistes: Thought Colliding with Thought,” in Altering Eyes: New Perspectives on ‘Samson Agonistes’, ed. Joseph Wittreich and Mark R. Kelley (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2002), 98–131 (114). 46 Rudrum, “Milton Scholarship and the Agon over Samson Agonistes,” 477. 47 Bradburn, “Theatrical Wonder, Amazement, and the Construction of Spiritual Agency in Paradise Lost,” 83. 48 Joseph Hall, A Modest Confutation of a Slanderous and Scurrilous Libell, Entitvled, Animadversions vpon the Remonstrants Defense Against Smectymnuus (London, 1642), 22. Smectymnuus was the acronym for the antiprelatical group of Puritan ministers Stephen Marshall, Edmund Calamy, Thomas Young and William Spurstowe. The group engaged in heated printed debates against Joseph Hall’s pro-episcopalian treatises in 1641–2. Milton at first contributed to the Smectymnuan pamphlets, but then embarked on his own vehement attack against the prelates. According to Campbell and Corns, John Milton: Life, Work, and Thought, “Milton brought, then, a new, undeferential, incisive, vivid, violent, and vindictive perspective to the Smectymnuan cause” (143). 49 Ibid., ‘To the Reader’, 2. 50 Ibid., ‘To the Reader’, 1. 51 For the authoritative status of red ink, see Sabrina Alcorn Baron, “Red Ink and Black Letter: Reading Early Modern Authority,” in The Reader Revealed, ed. Sabrina Alcorn Baron, with Elizabeth Walsh, and Susan Scola (Washington, DC: Folger Shakespeare Library, 2001), 19–30. 52 Anna K. Nardo, “‘Sung and Proverb’d for a Fool’: Samson as Fool and Trickster,” Mosaic 22 (1989): 1–16 (11). 53 Ibid., 12 (Nardo’s emphasis). 5 4 Hieronymus Zieglerius, Samson, Tragoedia Nova (Basel, 1547), in That Invincible Samson: The Theme of Samson Agonistes in World Literature with Translations of the Major Analogues, by Watson Kirkconnell (Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, 1964), 3–11 (9). 55 Marcus Andreas Wunstius, Simson, Tragoedia Sacra (Strassburg: 1600, Gottingen: 1604), in That Invincible Samson, 12–59 (50). 56 Joost Van Den Vondel, Samson, of Heilige Wraeck, Treurspel (Amsterdam, 1660), in That Invincible Samson, 77–142 (138). 5 7 Francis Quarles, The Historie of Samson (London, 1631), 138. 58 Ibid., 139. 59 Mohamed, “Confronting Religious Violence,” 333. 0 Ibid., 336. 6 61 Loewenstein, Milton and the Drama of History, 146. 62 Ibid., 146. 63 Christopher Hill, The Experience of Defeat: Milton and Some Contemporaries (London: Faber and Faber, 1984), 317. 6 4 Ibid., 317. 6 5 Hughes also cites the simile in PL, I. 230–7, as example Milton and his contemporaries’ “belief that earthquakes are caused by ‘Winds under ground or waters forcing way Sidelong’,” see Hughes, CP, 591, fn. 1647–1648, and 217, fn. 231–7. 66 John Donne, ‘Sonnet 19’, in Donne, Major Works: 288–9. 6 7 Amy Boesky, “Samson and Surrogacy,” in Milton and Gender, ed. Catherine Gimelli Martin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2004), 153–66 (163–4). 68 See for instance Lucinda M. Becker, Death and the Early Modern Englishwoman (Farnham: Ashgate, 2003), Chapter 2, and Jim Sharpe, “Women,

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69 70

71 72 73 74 75 76 77

Witchcraft and the Legal Process,” in Women, Crime and the Courts in Early Modern England, ed. Jennifer Kermode and Garthine Walker (London; New York: Routledge, 1994), 106–24 (115). Anna Trapnel, The Cry of a Stone, or A Relation of Something spoken in Whitehall, by Aanna Trapnel, being in the visions of God (London, 1654), 29. For an introduction to women prophets and their bodies as sites of contestation and power, see Phyllis Mack, Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophecy in Seventeenth-­C entury England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). For Trapnel’s use of her body, see also Naomi Baker, “‘Break Down the Walls of Flesh’: Anna Trapnel, John James, and Fifth Monarchist Self-Representation,” in Women, Gender and Radical Religion in Early Modern Europe, ed. Sylvia Brown (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 117–37. Loewenstein, Milton and the Drama of History, 147. Vanita Neelakanta, “Theatrum Mundi and Milton’s Theater of the Blind in Samson Agonistes,” The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 11 (2011): 30–58 (52). Jose, Ideas of the Restoration in English Literature, 157. Ibid., 155. Rosenberg, “Milton, Dryden, and the Ideology of Genre,” 2. Jose, Ideas of the Restoration in English Literature, 157 (my italics). Ibid., 157.

Epilogue

This book has taken Milton’s work as a case study of how seventeenth-­ century writers imagine prayer to be the product of a physical, emotional, and spiritual performance experienced on and through the petitioner’s body. The first chapter demonstrated how the embodied worship of the Anglican Church is for Milton tyrannical and hypocritical as it results in a disembodied experience of faith for the devotional subject, and how it is juxtaposed with Milton’s belief in an active participatory model of engagement. Drawing on examples from Milton’s prose, and in particular his condemnation of the linen liturgical dress, the chapter outlined the threat material devotion can pose to the individual’s freedom and the extent to which the Lady’s immersive performance in the Mask redefines embodiment.The three subsequent chapters focused specifically on the way Milton’s representation of prayer blends divine inspiration with physicality. The second chapter argued that Milton’s attack against Charles’s theatrical devotions stems partly from an understanding of prayer as a collaborative process where human and divine energies meet on the human body. This chapter offered a reading of Eikonoklastes as a devotional work where the metaphors of manna and reproduction imply a simultaneously intangible and material conception of the relationship between the petitioner and God. Eating, consuming, love-making, and reproducing all inform Milton’s theory of prayer and emphasize the dialectical bonds between human and divine agents. The third chapter outlined the importance of psychosomatic devotion in Paradise Lost. Paying attention to the prelapsarian and postlapsarian prayers of Adam and Eve, this chapter affirmed that the hymns of praise in Eden mirror the reciprocal performance of devotion in Eikonoklastes by keeping physical participation in harmony with inspired song. The analysis of the sighs and posture of prayer in the postlapsarian world showed that Milton shares his contemporaries’ suspicion of language and that he privileges the voluntary submission of the body as a sincere performance compared to vocal prayers. The final chapter demonstrated how the hero of Samson Agonistes pushes physicality to its limits and presents God with a violent and self-destructive performance. By examining Samson’s posture, final

144 Epilogue words, and final actions, the chapter revealed that Samson’s prayer becomes a fully embodied experience that eliminates all audiences apart from the divine spectator. In this respect, the ambiguous representation of prayer in Samson Agonistes looks backward to Milton’s anxieties regarding hypocritical or sincere performance in front of God and forward to the non-conformist demands of the culture of Dissent where the external and physical performance of prayer can be interpreted as a powerful call to action. In the context of Dissent, where performance was suppressed and uniformity imposed, Samson’s physical performance of prayer complicates the assumption that solely inner belief should be enough for the individual. Gay has shown that in the tragedy “lies Milton’s solidarity with dissenting groups that resisted the imposition of the Book of Common Prayer after 1660,” but he has read Samson’s prayer as “internal, momentary, and wordless to the public.”1 The reading of the prayer scene in this book, however, has shown how significant the physiological performance of inner belief is for Milton and how Samson’s example advocates action rather than passive inward devotion. As Achinstein has argued with regard to Samson Agonistes,“external action, how one ‘performs’ in the world, matters.”2 The current study has attempted to identify how action, emotion, and performance in prayer matter to Milton in a number of his works where the workings of the body are considered a secure and necessary sign of inward devotion. In the context of nonconformist writing the “paradise within” demands to be embodied, seeking to undo the oppressive circumstances of those against the imposition of ceremonial worship. Inner faith can affirm its liberating potential only when the individual is free to perform worship voluntarily. Arguing that Milton imagines prayer as a practice experienced spiritually, emotionally, and physically, the current study has contested the notion of inwardness in Milton and has opened up new ways of studying his texts in light of material culture, embodiment and affect theory, and the history of emotions, all exciting new fields to converge with Milton studies. Moreover, by paying attention to prayer and embodied performance in Milton’s work, the book has allowed for new perspectives on each of his individual texts, but it has also placed Milton within a tradition of writing that attempted to define humans’ relation to God. The Lady’s, Charles I’s, Adam and Eve’s, and Samson’s performances to God all capture the anxiety of seventeenth-century subjects (conformist and non-conformist ministers, theological writers, poets, dramatists) over how prayers are—and should be—performed. Consequently, the book has produced a reading of Milton’s poetry and prose as constitutive of the devotional culture of his time. It has shown how Milton’s texts participate in and challenge seventeenth-century debates about authentic and insincere worship in public, set and extempore prayers in private, and gesture and voice in devotion. In doing so, it has demonstrated the contemporaneity of Milton’s thoughts on prayer and the tension shared

Epilogue  145 by early modern writers over how to address God and over what the role of the physical, material body is in that address. Milton’s case study has shown that the inclusion of the body in prayer is not merely the means of reflecting the inward devotional condition of the petitioner, but a prerequisite in fully experiencing devotion. In imagining prayers and how they can reach God, early modern subjects confirm that their bodies are agents of the devotional experience as much as their spirits are. The choice to concentrate on how early modern subjects like Milton imagine prayer has left out a sustained discussion of Paradise Regained. Milton’s brief epic revolves around Jesus, “Son both of God and Man” (PL, III. 316), and his temptations by Satan. While in the past the epic has been traditionally read as Jesus’s quest for identity, in recent years critics have demonstrated that Jesus’s identity in the epic is explicitly stated, and they have focused instead on the epic’s polemical agenda. 3 Schwartz, for instance, has reformulated the question from Jesus’s identity to “what it means to regain Paradise,” and has answered that regaining paradise involves redemption and ultimately that “redemption is Jesus saying no.”4 Attending to Milton’s short epic offers a different perspective through which the argument of this book, about the embodiment of devotion, may be consolidated. The depiction of Jesus in the desert presents us with a devotional model in which the relationship between the human and the divine is different because Jesus’s body differs. If Samson’s prayer, for example, is violently iconoclastic and expressed physiologically, Jesus’s devotion denies any material considerations in addressing God. Nevertheless, in “saying no,” Jesus chooses to eliminate Satan’s audience and to consciously direct his performance towards God, foreshadowing what Samson is doing at the Philistine Temple. In Book II of Paradise Regained, Jesus finds himself “tracing the Desert wild” (2.109). The desert is the site where Satan tries to tempt Jesus by presenting him with purely material and earthly seductions that Nigel Smith lists as “lust, hunger, kingship, empire, and false learning.”5 The wilderness accentuates the spiritual triumph of Jesus by providing a backdrop of solitude and introspection, and by evoking a tradition of God testing his loyal subjects in the desert. As Keeble suggests, “every wilderness story anticipates the Son’s […] to situate them all in one location is to enact this narratological interdependence by linking type with antitype, Moses or Elijah with Christ.”6 The wilderness is the biblical location of man’s interaction with God and of the trial of their relationship: “God’s preferred arena of spiritual exercises.”7 Jesus engages in such spiritual exercise while in the desert: The while her Son tracing the Desert wild, Sole, but with holiest Meditations fed, Into himself descended, and at once All his great work to come before him set (PR, II. 109–12)

146 Epilogue The introspective plunge reminds us of Milton’s vision of prayer in Eikonoklastes according to which the petitioner has to undergo an inward journey to be able to communicate with the divine: “prayer also having less intercourse and sympathy with a heart wherin it was not conceav’d, saves it self the labour of so long a journey downward” (CPW 3:507). The “downward journey” is reflected in Jesus’s descent “into himself.” That the meditations are “fed” further highlights the conviction found in Eikonoklastes that prayers originate in God and are then, like manna, consumed by the petitioner. Although Jesus is not strictly praying here, his contemplation entails some of the characteristics of reciprocal prayer as outlined by Milton in his prose. While still in the wilderness and fasting for forty days, Jesus engages in a second contemplative soliloquy: Now hung’ring first, and to himself thus said: Where will this end? Four times ten days I have pass’d, Wand’ring this woody maze, and human food Nor tasted, nor had appetite: that Fast To Virtue I impute not, or count part Of what I suffer here; if Nature need not, Or God support Nature without repast Though needing, what praise is it to endure? But now I feel I hunger, which declares Nature hath need of what she asks: yet God Can satisfy that need some other way, Though hunger still remain: so it remain Without this body’s wasting, I content me, And from the sting of Famine fear no harm, Nor mind it, fed with better thoughts that feed Mee hung’ring more to do my Father’s will (II. 244–59) Spiritual nourishment is again emphasized and preferred over material food. The sense of hunger points to Jesus’s physicality by making him aware of his bodily needs, yet these needs are denounced as inconsequential in his effort to align his will with the “Father’s.” Jesus is physically deprived, but mentally “content.” If in the Christian Doctrine Milton defines the act of being content as “that virtue whereby a man is inwardly satisfied with the lot assigned him by divine providence” (CPW 6:728), Jesus’s earlier introspective journey leads here to inward satisfaction. Despite the similarities of these lines to a soliloquy (“and to himself thus said”), the ending of the speech implies that Jesus is not talking to himself but is engaging in conversation: “when thus the Son / Commun’d in silent walk” (II. 260–1). This can be an allusion to Psalm 77.6

Epilogue  147 (“I call to remembrance my song in the night: I commune with mine own heart: and my spirit made diligent search”) and the Psalm’s first verse establishes it as a successful address to God: “I cried unto God with my voice, even unto God with my voice; and he gave ear unto me.” In this respect, Jesus’s spiritual testing in the desert involves a devotional experience that is strictly inward, strictly spiritual, and strictly silent. Jesus’s devotion is physically still, a stillness that in the final temptation secures him victory over Satan: “Tempt not the Lord thy God; he said and stood” (IV. 561). Jesus’s devotion, then, differs strikingly from that of Adam, Eve, and Samson. The corporeal performance they present God with is absent from Paradise Regained and Milton is not interested in representing Jesus’s performance externally. As Neelakanta argues, “Milton’s Jesus is resolutely unhistrionic.”8 His stillness might resemble the Lady’s stillness in the Mask, but there the Lady’s body—even if captured—is central in the drama and a continuous point of contention, while her language threatens with material destruction. In the brief epic, however, the emotional contours of Jesus’s body are not explored in detail because Jesus has achieved the mastery of his passions by his holy affections, or his body is governed by the nobler as opposed to the sensitive part of the soul, which according to Christian psychology is the place of intellect and reason as opposed to emotions.9 Jesus affirms that To know, and knowing worship God aright, Is yet more Kingly; this attracts the Soul, Governs the inner man, the nobler part (II. 474–6) This “nobler part” is what Charleton defines as “the Reasonable Soul, which …[is] stead in higher sphere… looking down… upon all tumults, commotions and disorders hapning in the inferior part of man.”10 Jesus seems to lack an inferior part in his emotional constitution. According to Loewenstein, “this poem does not simply repudiate worldly kingship: it also makes kingship and power inward […] redefining them in terms of a spiritual kingdom of the mind.”11 The same can be said of Milton’s redefinition of the body from his short epic to his closer tragedy. In the 1671 companion piece, we observe Samson’s body language as he fails to convince those witnessing his performance of the intentions of “the inner man” and expresses his prayer to God in a violent, material destruction. While this book opened with instances of prayer that demand and negotiate observation and then identified such instances in Milton’s prose and poetry, Paradise Regained is an invitation to focus on the “unobserv’d” Jesus who “Home to his Mother’s house private return’d” (IV. 638–9). As Rumrich has argued, “the body of Christ plainly fascinates Milton.”12 Milton’s insistence on naming the Son of God Jesus and

148 Epilogue not Christ emphasizes that the hero of Paradise Regained represents an experience of temptation and faith common to all men and that his spiritual victory sets an example for all believers to follow. Moreover, in the Christian Doctrine, Milton makes it clear that God and his Son are not of the same essence (although they share divine substance) and that the Son was generated from God and thus exists in submissive relationship to him.13 Jesus stands for “the perfect Man” that fully aligns his will with God’s and “reigns within himself, and rules / Passions, Desires, and Fears” (II. 466–7). The inconsistency, then, in Milton’s representation of devotion does not imply a rejection of the psychosomatic but differs as the relationship between the human and the divine differs. Milton’s human characters strive to align their will with God’s: the Lady performs choice and for her choice to remain unimpeded she requires the assistance of Sabrina; Adam and Eve perform repentance and for it to be successful they need Christ’s intercession; Samson struggles and engages in a violent prayer hoping that it will be heard by God. Jesus, on the other hand, has knowledge of how to “worship God aright” (II. 474) because he occupies the role of intermediary between man and God. His superiority is not at odds with his physicality but inextricably linked to it and undivided. Jesus’s perfect combination of physicality and spirituality becomes clear in his triumphant rejection of Satan’s call to stand only physically: “Also it is written, / Tempt not the Lord thy God; he said and stood” (IV. 560–1). Jesus’s powerful silence after this line has been read as proof of the redemption of language and of Jesus exercising his reason and patience.14 Yet, the pinnacle scene also offers a model performance for imitation. This is Jesus performing on a divine stage and refusing to perform tangible miracles for Satan. The verb “stood” manifests how despite his unhistrionic posture throughout the epic, here his expression of God’s will is through his body as well as his spirit.15 Rumrich has suggested that “the paradoxical fusion that is the theanthropos is thus made manifest in the standing body of Jesus, Son of God and Mary.”16 In the context of this study, the standing body does not only tell us something about the divine and human nature of Jesus; it also powerfully exemplifies Jesus’s close relation with the human model of addressing God. Like the Lady who refuses Comus’s command to “Nay Lady, sit” (l. 659), like Adam and Eve who “in lowliest plight repentant stood” (PL, XI. 1), and like Samson who with “eyes fast fixt he stood” (l. 1637), Jesus’s standing embraces the spiritual and the physical in a performance conducted on the believer’s terms.

Notes 1 Gay, “Prayer, Temporality, and Liberty,”365. 2 Achinstein, Literature and Dissent, 143. 3 See the articles in Special Issue 42 of Milton Studies that study the epic from perspectives other than Jesus’s identity, and in particular, Regina M. Schwartz,

Epilogue  149 “Redemption and Paradise Regained,” Milton Studies 42 (2002): 26–49, John Rumrich, “Milton’s Theanthropos: The Body of Christ in Paradise Regained,” 50–67, Laura Lunger Knoppers “Satan and the Papacy in Paradise Regained,” 68–85, Neil H. Keeble, “Wilderness Exercises: Adversity, Temptation, and Trial in Paradise Regained,” 86–105, Thomas N. Corns, “‘With Unaltered Brow’: Milton and the Son of God,” 106–21, David Norbrook, “Republican Occasions in Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes,” 122–48. 4 Schwartz, “Redemption and Paradise Regained,” 31 and 44. 5 Nigel Smith, Entry on Paradise Regained, in The Milton Encyclopaedia, ed. Thomas N. Corns (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), 275–6. 6 Keeble, “Wilderness Exercises,” 91. 7 Ibid., 93. 8 Vanita Neelakanta, “Paradise Regained in the Closet: Private Piety in the Brief Epic,” in To Repair the Ruins: Reading Milton, ed. Mary C. Fenton and Louis Schwartz (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2012), 147–72 (170). I am grateful to Vanita Neelakanta for sharing this work with me before its publication. 9 See Thomas Dixon, From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological Category (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 26–61. 10 Charleton, Natural History of Passions, 55–6, quoted in Hannah Newton, “Holy Affections,” in Early Modern Emotions: An Introduction, ed. Susan Broomhall (London and NY: Routledge, 2016), 67–70 (68). 11 David Loewenstein, “The Kingdom Within: Radical Religious Culture and the Politics of Paradise Regained,” Literature and History 3 (1994): 63–89 (74). 1 2 Rumrich, “Milton’s Theanthropos,” 58. 13

What can this imply but that God imparted to the Son as much as he wished of the divine nature, and indeed of the divine substance also? But do not take substance to mean total essence. If it did, it would mean that the Father gave his essence to his Son and at the same time retained it, numerically unaltered, himself. That is not a means of generation but a contradiction of terms. (CPW 6:211–2)

14 Ken Simpson, Spiritual Architecture and Paradise Regained: Milton’s Literary Ecclesiology (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2007), 27–53. 15 Ashraf A. Rushdy, The Empty Garden: The Subject of Late Milton (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992), comments that “standing on the pinnacle is humanly possible, that Jesus does stand by dint of human abilities, that there is no miracle” (267–8). 16 Rumrich, “Milton’s Theanthropos,” 65.

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Index

Achinstein, Sharon 144 Adam 15; performance of prayer in front of God 88–9, 108; praying in sighs 96–102; praying physically and emotionally 107; prelapsarian hymns of 86, 87–92, 94, 143; sighs as expression of repentance 98 Ainsworth, David 10 Alaimo, Stacy 46 anatomy of devotion 2 Andrewes, Lancelot 4 angelic song 95 animatedness of clothes 38 Apology against a Pamphlet, An (Milton) 25, 31, 127 Apology for Poetry (Sidney) 125 Aquinas, Thomas 27, 125 Arcadia (Sidney) 78 Archimago 43–4, 120–1 Areopagitica (Milton) 23, 35, 37, 44, 98–9, 127 Aristotle 125 Ars Poetica (Horace) 125 audience: being immersed 47–8; theory of internal audiences 124–5; two separate audiences for Samson 123 authentic prayer 55 Bacon, Francis 104 Bagchi, David 11 beasts indulging in moral depravity 41 Becon, Thomas 26 Bennett, Susan 48 bishops: as items of clothing 25–30, 33–5, 37; materiality of devotion and 28–35; Milton calling for abolition of 24, 30 Bishops’ Wars 1639–40 6, 57

body: balance with the spirit 9; excesses of 24–5; materiality and 13, 30–5; Milton’s obsession with 24–5; role in devotion 55, 108; role in prayer 2, 10, 135, 144–5 Boesky, Amy 135 Book of Common Prayer 4–6, 11, 27, 55, 56–8, 91 borrowing prayers 77–8 Bradburn, Elizabeth 124, 128 Braden, Gordon 90 Brathwait, Richard 122 breath and prayer 97, 105 Brodwin, Leonora 43 Brooks, Thomas 122 Bulwer, John 121–2 Bunyan, John 9, 101 Calvin, John 103 Calvinist Protestants 5 Carew, Thomas 63, 90 Carey, John 25, 117 Cartwright, Thomas 4 Catholicism 44; being present in linen 37–9; breaking bonds with 28; ceremonialism 6, 8; practices being satirized 29; re-enacting 24; threat of ceremony and uniformity 31; uniformity of prayer and 6 cause and effect between words and passion 66 Charles I, king of England 5–6, 87, 99, 101, 116; borrowing prayers of 77–8; Eikon Basilike and 55, 59–62; replacing set prayers with extemporare prayer 79; on set forms of prayer 66 Charles II, king of England 57 Charleton, Walter 3, 104, 147 Christian Doctrine (Milton) 7, 131, 136, 146, 148

172 Index church: similarities with theatre 42; visualized as a ship 33–4 Church of England 7, 13, 24, 40, 91 Cicero 121, 124 Clarkson, Leslie 27, 33 closet drama 137 clothing 24. see also vestments; animatedness of 38; being satirized 28–9; of bishops and set prayers 55; devotional dress being hypocritical 44; liturgical garments as threat of ceremony and uniformity 30–5; as re-appearance of popery 36; as symbol of idolatrous worship 45 Coelum Britannicum (Carew) 63 Coiro, Ann Baynes 63 commodification of religion 24, 30, 32 Comus 40–8, 90 convulsions being inspired by God 135–6 Corns, Tom 66 corrupt body politic 25 Craig, John 11 Cranmer, Thomas 56, 57 Crashaw, Richard 75, 76 Cummings, Brian 56 Davis, J. C. 24 Dawson, Anthony 10 Dawson, Hugh 38 delight and learning 125–6 De L’Usage des Passions (Senault) 105 Demaray, John 88 De Oratore (Cicero) 121 Descartes, René 103–4 devotion: anatomy of 2; embodied 40–9; embodied in materiality 35; role of body in 55, 108; spontaneous forms of 1 Directory for the Public Worship of God 6, 57, 65, 67 Discourse Concerning the Gift of Prayer, A (Wilkins) 100 Discourse Touching Prayer, A (Bunyan) 9 disembodied experience of religion 24, 35, 45, 48 Dolan, Alice 27 Donne, John 68, 75, 76, 99, 106, 134 Donnelly, Philip 11 Downame, George 8, 91, 101, 122 drama and religion 10

dress. see clothing drinking 43 dualism of body and soul 6–7 earthquake representing commitment of sin 98–9 Edwards, Karen 74 effeminization created by the stage 45 Eikon Basilike 14, 34, 55, 101; denounced by Milton 62–5; as a public devotional 61; rhetoric of privacy in 59–60; set prayer 72; sympathetic intimacy 60–2 Eikonoklastes (Milton) 7, 14, 15, 34, 55, 129, 143, 146; attacking set prayer 91–2; borrowed prayers being stale 77–8; distancing readers from Eikon Basilike 62; prayer as an erotic fulfillment of relationship with God 75–6, 79; recycling prayers 74; replacing set prayers with extemporare prayer 79 eloquence in prayer 101–2 embodiment of prayer 5, 7, 40–9, 76, 79, 86, 95–6, 102–8, 115, 118, 144 English Prayer Book of 1549 56 Essay towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language, An (Wilkins) 100 Eve 15; joint performance of prayer in front of God with Adam 88–9; prayer as a performance 108; prelapsarian hymns of 86, 87–92, 94, 143; sighs as expression of repentance 98 Evening Prayer, Book IV (Milton) 87–9 Experience of Defeat, The (Hill) 133 extempore prayer 1, 2, 4, 9, 14, 65–7, 72–9, 101, 115, 144; of Adam and Eve 91; like manna 56, 76–7 external aids for devotional performance 23 Fallon, Stephen 12–13, 69 Featly, Daniel 8, 101 Fenton, Mary C. 87, 91 Ferry, Anne 123 First Civil War 57 First Defense (Milton) 133 Fish, Stanley 119 Fleming, James Dougal 118

Index  173 food imagery 67–72 formality in prayer 2, 4 freedom of press associated with religious freedom 36–7 Fudge, Erica 41 Gay, David 144 gestures in prayer 121–2 Gigante, Denise 76 God: Adam and Eve performing for 88–9, 108; challenging authority of 41; inspiring convulsions 135–6; potential of language to reach 86; prayer as erotic fulfilment of loving relationship with 75–6, 79; Samson’s performance to 126–30 Gosson, Stephen 42, 43, 45 Gregory, Tobias 117 groans as prayer 102–9 Guibbory, Achsah 6 Hall, Joseph 1, 4, 25, 127 Hardin, Richard 64 Harvey, William 13 Herbert, George 31, 67, 106 Herman, Peter 119 Heywood, Oliver 8–9, 122 Hill, Christopher 133 Historie of Samson, The (Quarles) 132 Hollinworth, Richard 8 holy breathing 107 holy rapture of Adam and Eve 89–91 Holy Sonnets (Donne) 75, 134 Hooker, Richard 4, 14, 65 Horace 125 Hughes, Ann 100 Hugo, Herman 105–6 humoral theory 12 Hunt, Arnold 26 Huntley, John 120 hymns 15, 129; appreciation of 92–3; prayer in 87–92; prelapsarian 86, 87–92, 94, 143; singing of 92–6 iconoclasm 133–8 Inquisition 99 Institutes (Calvin) 103 Institutia Oratoria (Quintilian) 121 internal audiences 124–5

Jesus 148; the wilderness story and 145–7 Jose, Nicholas 137 Karant-Nunn, Susan 11 Kaufman, Peter Iver 5 Kaula, David 29 Keeble, Neil H. 145 Kermode, Frank 26 Kerrigan, William 90 Kezar, Dennis 118 King, Henry 99 Knapp, Jeffrey 26 Kuchar, Gary 12 L’Allegro (Milton) 25 Lambeth Faire: Wherein You Have All the Bishops Trinkets Set to Sale (Overton) 29 language of Canaan 100–1 language’s potential to reach God 86 Laud, William 1, 5–6, 24, 28, 93 learning and delight 125–6 Leonard, John 89 Levine, Laura 45 Lewalski, Barbara K. 87, 91, 95 Licensing Order of June 1643, 35 linen: as examples of embodied uniformity in public devotion 24; related to sailing 33; value of 27 linen vestments: embodying material practices 27–8, 30; haunting memory of Catholicism 37–9; metaphysical power of on believers 35 lining out of hymns 94–5 liturgical prayer. see prayer liturgy: connected with theatre 26; disembodied effect on petitioner 74; justified in Paradise Lost 91–2; Milton’s views on 55–79; participation in 5, 56–8; subjects and audiences in 56–9 Loewenstein, David 123, 133, 137, 147 Lord’s Prayer 66 Lukin, Henry 101 Luther, Martin 102–3 Lycidas (Milton) 31 MacCulloch, Diarmaid 56 Maltby, Judith 56–7 manna: consumption of indicating embodiment 76; as image for false

174 Index texts 78–9; as metaphor for prayer 67–72, 143; potential for both nourishment and waste 73–4; role in fashioning devotional identity 68 Mask Presented at Ludlow Castle, A (Milton) 7, 24, 40–9, 90, 127, 129, 147 masque 40–9 material devotion 35, 143 materialist monism 69 materialist prayer 13 Maus, Katharine 76 McDowell, Sean 12 Mears, Natalie 58 mental clarity 120 Milne, Kirste 29 Milton, Anthony 4 Milton, John. see also titles of specific works: attacking Charles I for use of set prayer 55, 59–62, 66, 79, 91–2; cause and effect between words and passion 66; conformity to church rituals 23; denouncing Charles I’s Eikon Basilike 62–5; exchanges with Joseph Hall 1; haunting apparition of his dead wife 38–9; iconoclasm of 133–8; radicalism of 133 Minear, Erin 95 ministers denounced as actors 25–6 Modest Confutation of Animadversions (Hall) 4 Mohamed, Feisal 133 monism 11 Morning Prayer, Book V 89–92 Nardo, Anna 39, 130 Narveson, Kate 122 Natural History of the Passions (Charleton) 104 nature being connected with prayer 98–100, 134 Neelakanta, Vanita 147 Norbook, David 40 Nuttall, Anthony David 97 Observations (Milton) 32 Of Prelatical Episcopacy (Milton) 78–9 Of Reformation (Milton) 25, 30 O’Regan, Noel 93 Overton, Richard 29

Pamela prayer 63, 78 Paradise Lost (Milton) 7, 15, 31, 70, 75, 77, 124, 125, 129, 134, 143; Evening Prayer, Book IV 87–9; justification of liturgy 91–2; materiality of prayer in 86–109; Morning Prayer, Book V 89–92; praying in sighs 96–102 Paradise Regained (Milton) 70, 72, 145, 147, 148; celebration of hymns 92–3 Parry, Graham 93 Paster, Gail Kern 12 pathetical prayers 1–16 Patterson, Annabel 25 Pearson, Jacqueline 39 Philistine Temple destruction 115–17 Pia Desideria (Hugo) 105–6 Picciotto, Joanna 75 Pierce, Helen 33–4 Poole, Kristen 68 popery and stage 40 postlapsarian prayer 86, 96–102, 143 Potter, Lois 60 prayer: as Adam and Eve’s companionship 88–9; as an embodied performance 115–38; authentic 55; being borrowed and stale 77–8; breath and 97, 105; conceptualized as violence 116–17; connection with nature 98–100, 134; divine inspiration and physicality 143; eloquence in 101–2; embodiment of 3, 5, 7, 144; emotional intensity 2; extempore 2, 4, 9, 14, 56, 65–7, 72–9, 91, 101, 115, 144; feeling and eating 72–9; gestures in 121–2; groans as 9, 102–9; in hymns 87–92; as intercourse 75, 76, 79; in liturgy and public worship 1; as manna 14, 67–72, 73–9, 143; as materialist 13; materiality of in Paradise Lost 86–109; moves the body 8; as organic experience with God 75–6; as pathetical 1–16; as a performance 108; performance by Samson 118–19; as physical intimacy of Adam and Eve 88–9; physiology of 3; pious or insincere 122–3; postlapsarian of Adam and Eve 86, 96–102, 143; private 8, 59–61; as product for consumption 73; recycling

Index  175 74; rejecting uniformity 129; reproductive model of 75–6, 79; revenge and 131; role of body in 2, 135, 144–5; of Samson Agonistes 115–38; Samson’s violent 130–8; sensuality of 88–91; set form of 2, 4, 14, 55, 65, 66–7, 72–9; sighs as 96–102; singing 92–6; voluntary vs. set form 74 prelapsarian hymns 86, 87–92, 94, 143 pre-publication censorship same as custom worship 36 Preston, John 8, 101 priests: hypocrisy of 41; Milton attacking 28–35, 41, 44 print regulations 35–6 private prayer 8, 59–61 Prynne, William 41–2 Psalm 18, 136 psalms 86; as food 68; singing of 92–6 Quarles, Francis 132 Quintilian 121 radicalism 133 Radzinowicz, Ann Mary 118, 119 Rambuss, Richard 10 Rawnsley, Ciara 12 Raymond, Joad 95 Ready and Easy Way, The (Milton) 63 Reason of Church Government, The (Milton) 30, 35, 93, 125 Reformation 11, 102; concerns over idolatry 40 religion: commodification of 30; disembodied experience of 24; drama and 10; emotions and 11; practices and individual identities 5 religious freedom associated with freedom of the press 36–7 repentance indicated by sighs 96–8 reproductive model of prayer 75–6, 79 revenge and prayer 131 Rhetorica Ad Herrenium (Cicero) 124 Rogers, John 13, 78 Rosenberg, Donald Maurice 47, 48, 137 Rosendale, Timothy 4, 5 Rumrich, John P. 147, 148 Ryrie, Alec 3, 4, 11 Samson 15–16; ambiguity of last prayer 119–20; awareness of two separate audiences, one in the

Temple and one to God 123; being regenerated or as a failure 118; devotional pretense of 120–3; performance of prayer 118–19; performance to God 126–30; posture during praying 119–22; praying and 115–38; rhetoric of 122–30; violent prayer of 130–8; wonder and delight in his speech 123–6 Samson, of Heilige Wraeck (Vondel) 131 Samson Agonistes (Milton) 7, 15, 115–38, 143–4; omission of Judges prayer 116, 117, 132 Sanders, Julie 48 Sauer, Elizabeth 118 Schindler, Walter 95 Schoenfeldt, Michael C. 12, 76, 107 Schwartz, Regina M. 92, 117, 145 Scottish Prayer Book 57 Senault, Jean-Francois 105 set forms of prayer 4, 55, 65, 66–7, 72–9; vs. extempore prayer 2, 14, 79 Shirley, James 63 Shore, Daniel 64 Shuger, Debora 44 Sidney, Philip 78, 125 sighs as prayer 96–102 Simson, Tragoedia Sacra (Wunstius) 131 Sinfield, Alan 107 singing prayers 92–6 Smith, Nigel 145 sock and its symbolism 25 songs, angelic 95 Sonnet 12 (Milton) 41 sorrow 12 Spink, Ian 94 spirit’s balance with the body 9 spirituality with emotional identity 2 spontaneous prayer. see extempore prayer Stabile, Susan 37 stage: challenging God’s authority 41–2; popery and 40; transformative effect on individual 42 Sternhold and Hopkins psalter 94 Sterrett, Joseph 10 Stirry, Thomas 33 Strier, Richard 12, 106 Stroup, Thomas B. 92 Stubbes, Philip 43, 45

176 Index Styles, John 27 Sullivan, Erin 3 Sylva Sylvarum (Bacon) 104 Targoff, Ramie 4, 5, 56 Taylor, Jeremy 14, 65, 67, 101 Temple, The (Herbert) 107 theatre: connected with liturgy 26; similarities with church 42 theatrical prayer 10 Traherne, Thomas 90 trans-corporeality 46 transgressive love 75 Trapnel, Anna 135 The Triumph of Peace (Shirley) 63 Tyacke, Nicholas 61 Tyndale, William 26, 27

uphold inward belief 28; seen as theatricality 26 violence: being prayer 116–17; in Samson’s prayer 130–8 voluntary prayers. see extempore prayer

uniformity of prayer 31; close to Catholicism 6; exemplified by linen 24 Universal Language Movement 100

Wetenhall, Edward 8, 122 Wheeler, Elizabeth Skerpan 60 White, Robert S. 12 white garment as material reminder of the afterlife 38 Wierzbicka, Anna 3 Wilkins, John 67, 100–1 Williamson, Elizabeth 10 Willis, Thomas 105 Wittreich, Joseph 118, 123, 126 Wolfe, Don 25 wonder and delight in Samson’s speech 123–6 worship: commodification of 32; disparity between letter and spirit of 24–5 Wunstius, Marcus Andreas 131

vestments. see also clothing: linen 27–28, 30, 35, 37–9; necessary to

Zaret, David 100 Zieglerus, Hieronymus 131, 132