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Suicidal Revenge and MiltonNeil ForsythWith his unerring ability to name and explore the fundamental emotions that drive our culture, Shakespeare has his hero-villain Shylock claim revenge as a sign of humanity. When asked why he wants his pound of flesh -- "what's that good for?" -- he explains that his enemy
How accurate is this as an assessment of our cultures — Christian, Jewish, Muslim? Is 'revenge' simply 'human', and perhaps even 'legitimate'? Sensitive commentators in the wake of the London bombs of July 7 and 21 have warned against revenge, or at least making an automatic connection between anger and revenge. Members of the British National Party may feel justified in throwing stones and firebombs at mosques, but the rest of us, Muslims included, are supposed not to be free to indulge such primitive reactions. Revenge, though, is clearly part of the motivation for the bombers themselves. The radical Muslims who have come prominently to our television screens these days have often said so. So the apparently god-driven young men who hired a car to Luton, took the train to King’s Cross, and then exploded themselves and fifty others on London Transport, might well reply in the words of Shakespeare’s villain: if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? In which case, the field of our reflection about these terrible events is somewhat enlarged, beyond the restricted world of desperate or fanatical terrorism. Some of our greatest literary texts, after all, imply that it is not simply the BNP or the radicalized Muslims of the Al-Qa’ida network who cultivate and are energized by this most deep-seated of our emotions. It is where we all come from. Even more thoroughly and certainly more systematically than Shakespeare, Milton can show us — disconcerting as it may well be — the secret springs of action in that Christian ideology we inherit and which most of us practice, even if we do not know we do so. Paradise Lost is a poem about the origins of evil both in mythological and philosophical terms; it tells the story of Satan’s fall, and of Adam and Eve in Paradise, but it is also a profound reflection on the meanings of those myths. It tries to account both for the mysterious origin of ‘hate in heaven’ (which in their innocence Adam and Eve cannot understand) and for the those emotions like the desire for revenge which motivate the whole narrative. And even after writing Paradise Lost Milton continued to reflect on the question of revenge: I think the degree to which it still troubled him can be measured by the last great poem he wrote, in which he dramatizes the story of Samson. ‘Revenge is the dominant note of Milton’s last poem’, as Sir Herbert Grierson wrote in the midst of an earlier war.(1) Milton was actively involved in the revolutionary politics of the seventeenth century, but that does not necessarily mean his work is relevant to the politics of our own times. In fact the more we historicize Milton, place him firmly in his time and place, the less his concerns will be easily seen as ours. That has been the paradoxical effect of some of the best recent Milton criticism, written usually in the wake of Christopher Hill’s efforts to make reading Milton again a seriously political act. Nonetheless there are other ways to make present use of such revered literature. Indeed the most spectacular connection between the great canonical texts of English literature and recent political events was surely made by the article that one of the finest scholars of our time, John Carey, published in the Times Literary Supplement for September 6, 2002: ‘A work in praise of terrorism? September 11 and Samson Agonistes’. The article proposed that Milton’s Samson behaved exactly like a suicide bomber. He experiences mysterious but ‘rousing motions’ (1382) which prompt him to go to the big fête in response to the Philistines’ request for some kind of strongman show, and indeed he gives them one. It had often been seen as mildly problematic that Samson kills himself at the same time as he pulls down their theatre on his enemies (indeed Milton was careful to call this an ‘accident’ in the Argument of the poem). Now in the post-September 11 world, still more in the post 7/7 world, the political issues — far more than suicide — that Milton’s poem raises are insistent and obvious. Samson believes that his massacre is an expression of God’s will, just like those who believe they have been acting recently in the name of the god of Islam: indeed Samson’s opponents are the Philistines, etymological ancestors of today’s Palestinians. The verbal link is even present in the poem: ‘And a thousand foreskins fell, the flower of Palestine’ (144). It may well be anachronistic to speak of Samson as a terrorist, but to say so will not make the issues raised by the comparison go away. Indeed Milton’s evident sympathy for Samson, ‘Eyeless in Gaza at the mill with slaves’ (41), may help us understand what happened in our own time and countries. A flurry of responses to Carey’s piece soon appeared. Some were appalled to find Milton, still more a Christian hero such as Samson (so called in Hebrews 11), linked to contemporary terrorism. Others cheered, whether because it made Milton ‘relevant’ again, or because they had ‘always thought’ that Samson was a violent and despicable person, and that Milton thought so too. One or two even reminded us that Milton had written an early Latin poem about the Gunpowder plot, in which the evil Pope directs his followers to blow up Parliament, king and all, ‘to scatter their dismembered bodies through the air [hos tu membratim poteries conspergere in auras], and to burn them to cinders by exploding nitrous powder under the halls where thy will assemble’ (119-21). A long and thorough essay by Alan Rudrum(2) reviewed the situation, pointing out somewhat dyspeptically that almost every time he taught Samson Agonistes something happened to make the poem seem contemporary - Indira Gandhi is assassinated by her Sikh bodyguard, or a right-wing Israeli kills Yizhak Rabin on God’s orders. Interpretations of the poem, Rudrum showed, going well back before Carey’s terrorist, can be divided into ‘traditional’ versus ‘revisionist’. The traditional view lines up God, Samson and Milton all on the same side: Milton’s poem shows how Samson goes through a process of psychological regeneration which eventually turns him into the ‘hero of faith’ he was for the author of the Letter to the Hebrews (11.32). And even those radical readers who put Milton firmly into his own political context are to be found on this side. For David Loewenstein ‘Milton makes it possible for his radical godly reader — a reader less likely to be morally repulsed by the drama’s apocalyptic violence — to perceive the vengeful Samson as a valiant saint moved by the Spirit [sic] to carry out God’s militant work against idolatrous and uncircumcised enemies’.(3) And Sharon Achinstein, in an essay written shortly before 9/11, argues for a poem which performs ‘collective communal work’ for Restoration dissenters by recalling the traumatic memory of violent defeat, and perhaps giving them hope for a comeback.(4) Revisionists call all this in doubt: however rich and complex are Christian readings of the story, Milton’s poem must not be understood simply as repeating their theology. Whether because the work itself is ambivalent (it is a poetic drama so there is no narrator to tell us what to think), or because Milton himself abhorred the barbaric violence of Samson’s act, Milton deliberately undermines the traditional view. As Irene Samuel put it, ‘if Samson Agonistes demonstrates its protagonist’s election in his final vengeance on God’s enemies, it can do so only if its author thought such vengeance admirable’.(5) But Milton was a peaceable chap: he abhorred violence. At all costs we must save Milton’s poem from the memorable charge of Samuel Johnson: this, he wrote, ‘is the tragedy that ignorance has admired and bigotry applauded’. Are we to side with traditional or revisionist readers? Or is that distinction too simplistic? The Old Testament Samson of the Book of Judges certainly acts, as he says, ‘that I may be avenged of the Philistines for my two eyes’ (Judges 16.28), but his reasons for acting in Milton are not quite so clear: at the same point of the story, Milton’s Samson ‘stood as one who pray’d/ Or some great object in his mind resolved.’ He does not, like the Samson of Judges, call explicitly for God to help him in his revenge.(6) And in any case Samson is an Old, not a New Testament hero: Milton would not collapse the difference. His most recent reference to Samson had been at the moment when Adam and Eve awaken to their shame after the Fall: ‘so rose the Danite strong/ Herculean Samson from the harlot-lap/ of Philistean Dalila’ (Paradise Lost IX 1059-61). Hardly flattering. Granted that it has always been difficult for most ordinary readers to resist seeing some degree of identification between the blind Milton and his blinded hero (‘O dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon’, 80), no-one should be so naïve as to assume a blanket endorsement of all the blind man’s acts. And in any case, though it may explain in part Milton’s own interest in Samson, that line of thinking will certainly not tell us whether Samson’s vengeance is endorsed by the poem. Nor will it help us to refer to the poem’s ‘Argument’, written presumably by Milton to help his readers: it says there that Samson finally goes along with the summons to attend the festival because he is ‘at length persuaded that this was from God’. So Samson thought God wanted him to do it: the problem is whether Milton thought so, and/or God. And even if they all agree, they are not therefore to be taken as models for our own thinking about these issues. That would be, as John Carey put it, ‘a licence for any fanatic to commit atrocity’. Nor were all Milton’s contemporaries uncritical readers of Samson’s story: even Andrew Marvell, in the dedicatory poem he wrote in praise of Paradise Lost, says he was afraid when he began reading it that Milton, ‘the Poet blind’, would ‘ruin (for I saw him strong) / The sacred truths’ … (So Samson grop’d the temple’s posts in spite) / The world o’erwhelming to revenge his sight’ (7-10). Revenge as a motive evokes varying reactions in different areas of our cultural and political traditions. Warrior traditions, whether Japanese, African or ancient Greek, often hail it as the necessary spring of action. From the Iliad to the Roland it is a central preoccupation: it is what Quentin Tarantino has such great fun with in Kill Bill Vol 1. In the Japanese sequence of the film he even has his heroine obey the convention whereby the villain is destroyed with his own weapon (as in Beowulf, or the Cyclops episode of the Odyssey). Yet Hamlet, perhaps the central, certainly the most thought-filled of revenge tragedies, presents it as a throwback to an outmoded and melodramatic fashion. As he imagines himself into the role his dead father imposes on him, Hamlet sees himself as the ‘rugged Pyrrhus’ of a bygone era, or as a kind of Senecan stage villain, crying as from The True Tragedy of Richard III: ‘Come, the croaking raven doth bellow for revenge’ (III ii 253-4). In the concluding scene of Twelfth Night, exactly contemporary with Hamlet, Feste comments ‘thus does the whirligig of time bring in his revenges’, which is the occasion for Malvolio’s parting line — ‘I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you’. However much we may have come to sympathize with him in the course of his mistreatment and imprisonment, Malvolio is still faintly ridiculous: in that brief exchange he personalizes what Feste, finally, had allowed to be the work of an impersonal agent, ‘time’. In Greece, we must remember, the Oresteia reaches its bizarre conclusion on the Areopagus by proposing an end to the cycle of revenge killing within the family of Atreus. The rule of law substitutes for the duty to revenge. Many philosophers have indeed understood the origins of our legal systems to lie in the efforts to overcome the potentially endless effects of personal animosities.(7) In the dominant ideology of our tradition, the injunction of Paul at Romans 12.19— ‘It is written, Vengeance is mine, I will repay, saith the Lord’ — is often taken as the last word on the subject. So most of us think, I would guess. But the effect is to place the Old Testament and vengeful God at the centre of the Christian tradition. ‘Come on then God, shoot the bastards, why don’t you?’ Or as Milton put it somewhat more decorously in his passionate sonnet about the death of the Waldensians at the hands of the Piedmontese in 1655: ‘Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints’. But that displacement upwards is surely vital, whether towards God or ‘time’ or the law as arbiter— and it was followed up by Locke in the Second Treatise on Government (Ch 2: 13): the legally constituted civil authority may kill, not you or me. Indeed Locke, like many theorists of the social contract, sees the need to cope with the desire for revenge, normal in the state of nature, as the beginnings of law and civil society. Milton had already explored revenge as a motive for action in Paradise Lost. It is what Satan is up to most of the time, trying by corrupting mankind to have his revenge on God. He even calls his state of mind a ‘study of revenge, immortal hate’ (I 107). Given his wonderfully complex character, he is fully aware, as he tells himself at the height of the action in Book IX, that ‘Revenge, at first though sweet, / Bitter ere long back on it self recoiles’. But he can’t stop himself. ‘Let it; I reck not, so it light well aim'd’ (IX 171-3). Soon he catches sight of Eve alone in the garden, when the narrator tells us in a marvellous passage,
Notice there how the word ‘revenge’ comes at the end of the line and as a climax to the series of briefly discarded emotions. ‘But’ now, the narrator goes on,
Satan experiences Hell even in heaven, we are here told, and his current motivation is clear: he is the archetypal voyeur, himself excluded from the pleasure he catches sight of. Quickly he talks himself back into the pursuit of his revenge. And the crisis of the poem soon comes on. But in one remarkable passage of Paradise Lost Milton makes explicit use of the motivating power of revenge, not for Satan and his devils, but for mankind. Obviously this can happen only once the apple has been eaten and Adam and Eve have become like us, knowing good and evil. Hate is no longer unimaginable to them, as it was when they heard the angel’s story of the War in Heaven. What happens is this. Fired by the power of the fruit they have eaten, Adam and Eve make wild, passionate love, then, when they wake from their drugged stupor (like Samson, as we just saw), begin to experience their regrets. God comes down to punish them, as well as the absent serpent. Then much of Book X, after God’s departure, is taken up with the story of Satan’s triumphant return to Hell and with Adam’s heated denunciation of Eve, including those hurtful lines with which he tries to dismiss her from him now that it is too late. ‘Out of my sight, thou serpent’ (X 867) he cries, and calls her in those memorable words ‘this fair defect / Of nature’ (891-2). They are as far apart, at this moment, as any couple could be. Eve, however, begs Adam’s forgiveness, and offers to take all the blame on herself, even proposes to sacrifice herself. Indeed some critics have seen Eve’s role here as vital: she it is who reconciles them and allows them to come back together towards redemption. Adam is impressed by Eve’s ‘anguish and regret’ (1018), and realizes there is more to her than the serpent-as-Eve he was just denouncing. And it is indeed just at this moment that Adam’s brain begins to work properly, he finally connects the dots and puts the story together. He links everything Raphael had told them about the Satanic war in heaven with the story Eve has told him about the snake, and for the first time identifies the enemy as Satan. At the same time he recalls God’s obscure prediction, from some 850 lines earlier, about the serpent’s head and bruises. To the (absent) serpent, God had said, somewhat mysteriously,
Suddenly Adam sees something of what those words mean. Though he does not yet know the ‘seed’ is Christ, he realizes what has happened to them both, and he turns to Eve and reminds her: ‘thy seed shall bruise/ The serpent’s head’—‘piteous amends’, he calls that punishment, unless
So he realizes that the serpent in God’s curse (and therefore the serpent in Eve’s story) must have been ‘our grand Foe/ Satan’. He had supposed before, at the moment Eve tells him gleefully what she has done, that “some cursed fraud/ Of Enemie hath beguil’d thee, yet unknown” (IX 904-5), but he now makes the key intellectual move and realizes the meaning of the story he is living out. Putting the story of Satan’s rebellion together with the story of the Genesis serpent, he launches the long process of constructing the Christian mythology of evil as the intervention of a supernatural enemy — a mythology that is still invoked by some at least of our political leaders. At the same moment, knowing Satan is the enemy, Adam feels a new emotion: ‘to crush his head/ Would be revenge indeed’ (X 1035-36). He even shifts from ‘bruise’ to ‘crush’ as he does so.(8) The intellectual link and the emotional response come together and are necessary to each other. Adam recognizes Satan in the serpent, and immediately wants revenge. Or rather, it is actually the other way round: if it’s to be a proper revenge, it must be over Satan, not just the serpent. It is not the love of Eve that works the magic transformation in their emotional mood: it is Adam’s desire for revenge. Quickly he can now envisage a different way of behaving, and proposes to renounce ‘all violence’ (ie Eve’s idea of a joint suicide), to accept the new terms of the human condition, invent fire and so forth, and turn instead to God for forgiveness. Adam can now say that they have a good reason to live. ‘Revenge indeed’. Underneath this emotional transformation is, I think, another major shift. From wanting to cast Eve as the enemy (‘Out of my sight, thou serpent!’) Adam has now connected the serpent with Satan and he can shift the target of his anger. Indeed this is what allows the emotion to become revenge. Revenge over that serpent Eve? Well, no. Over the Satan-serpent? Yes, fine. Suicide is no longer an option. Human history continues for the sake of revenge over Satan. Moments like this are common in literature. That peculiar genre, revenge tragedy, is full of them, and Hamlet’s shift is characteristic — from languidly wishing his too, too sullied flesh would melt to ghost-driven avenger. There are similar moments in much detective fiction, which inherits some of the features of revenge tragedy, and which also tends to look for the structural balance that revenge can bring. In one of Cecil Day-Lewis’ novels, written under the pseudonym of Nicholas Blake, The Beast Must Die, (1938, p 30) a father determines to track down the hit-and-run driver who killed his child. At first, he admits, he had no wish to go on living, but ‘my will to live somehow grew strong as my will to kill flourished'.(9) The difference between these episodes is important, of course; in the one case the revenge is sought against the devil, in the other, against another human being, pursued in a cat-and-mouse game throughout the novel. But the source of the desire to live, the anger, is the same. So it is for the Uma Thurman character as she suddenly awakens in her hospital bed in Kill Bill. It was Aristotle who defined anger, in the Rhetoric, as ‘a longing, accompanied by pain, for a real or apparent revenge’ (1378a). Seneca acknowledged the link of anger and revenge, but challenged the link as useless or ineffective. (De Ira 1.ix 1-2). It leads to madness, as in his own tragedies, such as Thyestes, where furor is likened to the raging demon, indeed a Fury, that pursues Atreus and spurs him to revenge. ‘Let no work of anger here be found excessive’, cries the Fury (39), and so signals one of the principal themes of revenge tragedy, that revenge necessarily leads to excess, indeed ‘is itself an act of excess’.(10) But Seneca’s Christian followers, like Lactantius, who also wrote a treatise on anger, had little trouble justifying it, since the God of the Old Testament is so often full of wrath. Lactantius tried manfully to square those instances of divine wrath with a desire to restrain or punish man’s faults,(11) but it is clear that retribution, as often in Christian theology, is the excuse for God’s anger. It is not only Satan who hates, but God. ‘Hate in heaven’ can break both ways. We learn in the next book of Paradise Lost, Book XI, that the emotional transformation of Adam and Eve was all done by God, that this was the moment at which ‘prevenient Grace descending/ Had removed the stony from their hearts’ (XI 3-4). But if we recognize the importance of the intermediary step, to get back at Satan, then we realize that Milton’s God has once again exploited the idea of Satan to save mankind. In The Satanic Epic, I argued that, in the theological structure of Paradise Lost, Satan is, surprisingly enough, responsible for man’s salvation. Although Satan and his helpers are damned, mankind ‘shall find Grace’, as God says (III 131), because he fell tempted not by himself but by Satan. And just as Satan’s temptation allows for mankind’s salvation at one end of the myth, so his presence in the narrative allows mankind, and history, to continue, at the other. Without the desire for revenge, Adam and Eve would have continued bewailing their fate, contemplating joint suicide, perhaps even committing it. What moves them on to the next stage at which they ask forgiveness is identifying ‘our Grand foe/ Satan’, and wanting to ‘crush’ him. And God claims explicitly, using the same semi-technical theological language as we find again in Samson Agonistes that these are ‘My motions in him (XI 91).(12) This is a clue, I think, to the main reason Milton went on to write Samson Agonistes. Even though revenge over Satan is central to apocalyptic expectations, and indeed to most redemption theology, Milton wanted to explore further, from the human point of view, that kind of sudden motivation. At the key moment, Samson feels those ‘rousing motions’ that eventually prompt him to attack the Philistines during their Dagon festival and pull down the theatre around them and himself. But the poem does not, this time, reassure us that those rousing motions come from God. What has happened here is that Milton has shifted the focus of revenge from myth to legend. What that means, in the way those generic terms have been defined by scholars working on folk narrative, is that we move from otherworldly characters or gods who live out their lives in the formative times of the beginnings, like the world of Paradise Lost, to human beings who live in a time like ours. Legend belongs to the same world and time as history. The distinction is important. It is one thing to move his mythic hero, Adam, by the desire for revenge over Satan, an enemy of a different order of cosmic reality. But it is quite another to write about a legendary hero, and to move him to exact revenge over his human enemies who differ mainly in that they worship another god. And this time, far from avoiding suicide through his vengeful anger, as Adam quite explicitly does, Samson’s revenge requires his own immediate death. Visits from his enemies prompt Samson gradually towards his act until finally he feels that inner impulse. As to whether it comes from God, or is ‘endorsed’ by the poet, well, consider that irredeemably ambiguous phrase: ‘Samson hath quit himself / Like Samson’ (1709-10). Everything turns on what is meant by ‘Samson’. For that we have only the language of the poem to tell us, and it tells us different things at different times. Of course, since these words are his father’s, the speech understandably continues by admiring the deed: ‘and heroicly hath finish'd /A life Heroic, on his Enemies/Fully reveng'd, hath left them years of mourning’. The father’s endorsement is not necessarily the poem’s: it is not even likely to be. To cause ‘Years of mourning’, even for one’s enemies, is an unpleasant motive for anyone, though understandable in a bereaved father at such a terrible moment. But we have no privileged way to judge. If Manoa is wrong about what ‘Samson’ means, who is right? The chorus, befuddled, anxious, unreflectingly patriotic, cannot be authoritative, even though in the technical sense they have the poem’s last word. Dangerously enough, they look forward in time to what ‘Samson’ is going to mean, and imagine a monument hung with his trophies, to which ‘all the valiant youth resort, / And from his memory inflame their breasts / To matchless valour and adventures high’ (1734-40). We all know to our cost where that leads. What matters in the end is not whether Milton, or his god, endorsed Samson’s act, but how clearly he points up the issues involved at their deepest levels. He gives us tools to think with. Milton has pushed on beyond the epic and mythic world of Paradise Lost to a tragic world (Samson Agonistes is modelled on Greek tragedy): this is a much more problematic, because more evidently and recently human, site for his moral explorations. In the rhetoric of some extremist Muslims, according to one recent analysis, ‘everything is sacred, nothing is secular, and retribution is their paramount duty’.(13) The rhetoric of the Old Testament, and of some Protestant sects, has on occasions been very similar. It is important, surely, to register that similarity. Samson Agonistes shows it as clearly as one could wish. Milton’s world was rife with violent talk of God’s vengeance, of the need for dissenters to resist persecution.(14) Yet so moving and beautiful a poem cannot be simply the revenge fantasy of a disillusioned and aging revolutionary after the defeat of the Good Old Cause. To read it as only that is to miss the point, indeed to miss the point of most great literature. Even if Milton’s portrait of Samson is broadly sympathetic, even if it is psychologically profound as it probes the possibilities for a maimed and beaten man to discover a way towards regeneration, it is still plausible that he was troubled by Samson’s deed, as troubled as he so clearly was by civil war and self-serving politicians by the time he wrote Paradise Lost. Milton had written earlier that ‘no man can know at all times [the spirit] to be in himself’ (Of Civil Power, CPW 7: 246) and there is no obvious reason why the situation should be different for Samson. The messenger who recounts the destructive event calls it a ‘horrid spectacle’ (1542). Even Manoa, Samson’s father, says ‘O lastly overstrong against thyself! / A dreadful way thou took’st to thy revenge.’ (1590-1). And whatever Milton himself thought (we cannot know), we can ourselves see how desperate Samson becomes, sympathize with his predicament, and yet still find his act repellent. Perhaps something like that is what we now need to do. Milton gives us tools to think with, and yet that thinking is difficult, painful, tentative at best. But it is how tragedy requires us to think. We swing between extremes, and both, as Hegel saw about tragedy, are right. To recognize the reality of a revenge motive on the part of terrorists is to be branded a soft-headed liberal who refuses to face the deadly danger of fundamentalist Islam in its terrorist mode. The alternative seems to be the black-and-white bone-headed militant vengefulness of the Bush administration that cannot see its own reflection in vengeful Islam. Because political events change the ways in which we read, it has become possible to conceive of Samson as a suicide bomber, in the wake of the New York, Washington, Madrid or London atrocities. Indeed Israelis were apparently making the comparison, with black humour, even before 9/11.(15) How we feel about the parallel will depend to some extent on how we feel about suicide bombers. Perhaps the parallel seems different to some of us now than it did in 2002 when John Carey first made his case. But the case would never have been worth making if Milton’s poems were not worth reading. What I have tried to show here is why it should be so. The bombs may affect our reading, but the poems may also change or enlarge our feelings about the bombers, once we allow for the parallel. I’m not sure about that. Perhaps it is too soon to say. Certainly the parallel will change how we read the emotion of revenge. For Milton faces the problem of revenge in a much more direct and thorough way than even Shakespeare had done. Indeed he places it unflinchingly, as I have tried to show, at the origin of history. Shylock is not in a tragedy, though he has often been acted that way. He is one of Shakespeare’s great comic villains. Yet what he says about revenge has its obviously tragic quality. He claims that revenge unites us, Jew and Christian alike, and yet what it pushes him to do, to demand quite literally a pound of his enemy’s flesh, is as divisive a gesture as it could possibly be. The paradox is undeniably tragic. Portia’s intervention allows for a clever way out of the legal dilemma, and insists that law is larger than revenge. That is in part what makes the play ultimately a comedy. As usual with a Shakespeare comedy, we risk tragedy but manage to circumvent or overcome it. Our current situation, though, seems to correspond more closely to Milton’s tragic puzzle, profound, moving, apparently insoluble. (1) Herbert Grierson, ‘Milton and Liberty’, MLR 39
(1944) 106.
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