What strange parallax or optic skill”: Paradise Regained and the Masque

Summary

Book 3 of Paradise Regained begins as follows:

So spake the Son of God, and Satan stood

A while as mute confounded what to say,

What to reply, confuted and convinced

Of his weak arguing, and fallacious drift;

And there in a nutshell is the problem for the entire poem, dramatically speaking: there can be no tension when it is clear how easily divinity sees through every contrivance of the Adversary. The lukewarm response of many critics to Milton's poem is well known, provoked in part by this lack of authentic emotional confrontation, and also by the verse in which the matter of the poem is expressed, so much lower in voltage than that of Paradise Lost. Roy Flannagan, in his introduction to the brief epic, gives a convenient sample of adjectives which have been applied to it: plain, bald, unadorned, flat, colorless, dry, muted, bleak. To be fair, though, we should recall that Samuel Johnson, thought by many to be relentlessly hostile to Milton, remarked of Paradise Regained that “it is in many parts elegant, and every-where instructive,” and that “had this poem been written not by Milton, but by some imitator, it would have claimed and received universal praise.”

As it happens, there was a category of literary expression that flourished in the seventeenth century and that was also entirely lacking in dramatic tension or forward motion, namely the Stuart court masque. From the first couple of masques on, as soon as the form established its identity, it was clear what the climax would be; and as masque designer Inigo Jones became more and more ingenious, it was equally clear that the pleasures of the masque would be mostly the pleasures of visual surprise, as sudden dissolves, scene changes, descending clouds, opening rocks, and heaving mountains astonished the spectators. If there was conflict in the masque, it was pro forma—the conflict of the antimasques, which became part of the spectacle early on and which existed solely to be effortlessly banished.

Milton's own attempt at the masque was, of course, noticeably different, in that it was not dependent on visual spectacle and included a fairly extensive philosophical discussion at its core.