He was hardly making steady progress toward this goal. Long periods would pass without his producing anything of value. But, though he was living, as he put it, in “obscurity and cramped quarters,” and though he granted that he should be blushing, he nonetheless felt stirring within him a sense of possible greatness. And in the fall of 1637 he was not, after all, without a reason to hope. He had already penned several works of extraordinary beauty: “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso,” companion poems about joy and melancholy; “Lycidas,” a poignant elegy on a college friend who had drowned; and, most ambitiously, a dramatic poem known as Comus, commissioned for the wealthy and powerful Earl of Bridgewater and performed at Ludlow Castle on September 29, 1634.
Comus was what was called a masque, a theatrical entertainment created for a single formal occasion. The occasion was a gala celebration of the earl’s appointment as the chief administrator of Wales, and the performers included the earl’s own children, his fifteen-year-old daughter Alice and her two younger brothers. The Bridgewaters were near the top of the English social hierarchy, but they had a skeleton rattling noisily in their closet: a few years earlier the earl’s brother-in-law had been executed on charges of sodomy and rape. The details were the stuff of film noir: greed, sexual perversity, incest, and murder all tangled together. At the sensational trial that led to his conviction, the principal witness against him was his wife.
The scandal was recent enough to make the Bridgewaters highly sensitive to the potential stain on their public image, and they may therefore have directed the young poet to write something in praise of sexual propriety. Milton, who was in his mid-twenties at the time, clearly found the theme congenial and could well have come up with the idea on his own: a masque that celebrates the special power of chastity. His plot centers on a girl—called simply “Lady”—who, together with her two brothers, becomes lost in the woods on the way to meet their parents. When the brothers go off to search for food and water and fail to return, she falls into the hands of the evil sorcerer Comus. Comus leads the unsuspecting virgin to his pleasure palace where, once seated on an enchanted chair, she finds herself unable to move, fixed to the spot with “gums of glutinous heat.” The wily sorcerer, praising the pleasures of sensual indulgence, offers her a drink from his magical cup, but she spurns his “brewed enchantments” and invokes the aid of temperance and chastity. Protected by her steadfast virtue, she is eventually rescued, reunited with her brothers, and led to her loving parents.
Milton turned this fairy-tale story of a young girl’s triumphant virginity into a magnificent display of learning and poetic skill: he presented the Bridgewater family over a thousand lines of gorgeous verse, rich in classical allusions and musical effects. Comus was a grand public spectacle in honor of the elite recipients, and not the author’s private statement. Yet Milton’s one venture in the masque form was charged with a peculiar and deeply personal intensity. When the “lewd and lavish act of sin,” the Lady’s brother warns, “Lets in defilement to the inward parts,/The soul grows clotted by contagion.” The “lewd and lavish act of sin” must at all costs be avoided. Comus was a display of the poet’s commitment to preserving his own virginity and keeping his soul from becoming clotted.
The mockery he encountered from the fellow undergraduates who called him “Lady” makes it clear that Milton’s view was not typical of the young men of his day. Then, as throughout most of history, concern with virginity focused on unmarried girls. Milton believed that this focus was a reversal of what should rightly be the case. He had, he later wrote, thought it all through. If unchastity in a woman is a scandal, then it must be even more dishonorable in a man, who is “both the image and glory of God.”
Augustine and his friend Alypius would have entirely approved: in taking monastic vows, they committed themselves to lives of sexual continence. Yet, though he had kept his virginity intact throughout his twenties, Milton was not arguing for the Catholic ideal of the monastery and nunnery. As a good Protestant, he embraced instead the ideal of “married chastity.” The purity he longed to protect and preserve in himself was, he believed, fully compatible with sexual intercourse, provided that this intercourse was sanctified by marriage. He must preserve his virginity until his wedding night.
The fervid evangelical religious climate of the early seventeenth century aroused similar anxieties and similar convictions in other earnest young men, though they remained a distinct minority. What was altogether unusual was any link to poetry. Milton’s fear that the “lavish act of sin”—premarital sexual intercourse—would threaten his poetic inspiration and compromise his dream of immortality was distinctly peculiar. Then, as for many centuries before (and after), poetry was inseparably bound up with erotic longing and fulfillment. Creative power was ordinarily thought to be heightened by sexual desire, not extinguished by it. Steeped in Ovid and Catullus, Shakespeare and Donne, Milton grasped this perfectly: his sorcerer Comus speaks the seductive language of carpe diem. But the Lady—the Lady in the masque and the Lady of Christ’s—would firmly resist the seduction.
Milton’s effort to preserve his virginity for marriage may have been a difficult one, first at Cambridge, then London, and then in the country. The brothels were open for business on the outskirts of Cambridge, prostitutes plied their trade at the London theaters that Milton frequented, and the bookish young man must at least on occasion have gazed longingly at the pliant milkmaids. But he resisted. In one of his later works, he remarked, presumably glancing back at himself, that it is possible to control sexual desire through diet—avoiding certain foods believed to provoke lust—and exercise. And, of course, he cultivated his intense male friendships, buried himself in books, and surfaced to write at least some of the poetry that this sexual restraint was meant to protect and enhance.
The real test must have come in 1638 when the thirty-year-old Milton, accompanied by a servant, embarked for the Continent. After a brief stop in Paris (which he seems not to have liked), he traveled on to Italy, where he remained for more than a year, visiting many cities and staying for extended periods in Florence, Rome, Naples, and Venice. Fluent in Italian, the cultivated Milton was welcomed by an impressive array of intellectuals, poets, artists, and scientists, along with their aristocratic patrons. In Florence he called upon the seventy-five-year-old Galileo, under house arrest for life, “a prisoner,” as Milton put it, “to the Inquisition, for thinking in astronomy otherwise than the Franciscan and Dominican licensers thought.” Everywhere he went in Italy, he toured rich libraries, attended concerts, and exchanged Latin poems with newfound friends. In the letters he sent home to his nephew and others, he praised the natural beauty of the landscape, the splendid climate, the refinement of the language, “the nobleness of the structures, the exact humanity and civility of the inhabitants.”
In the many surviving traces of this extended trip, there is absolutely no hint of sexual adventures. This may not seem so surprising: why would any such hints survive? But, by Milton’s own account, he returned to England from this extended sojourn abroad with his virginity, as well as his Protestantism, safely intact. If true (and there is no reason to doubt it), then Milton may have been among the very few young Englishmen of his day who came back from such travels in a state of sexual innocence. For English gentlemen on the Grand Tour, Italy was the world of Marcantonio Raimondi’s Modi (celebrated engravings of sexual positions, accompanied by Aretino’s lubricious sonnets); of paintings by Giulio Romano, Annibale Carracci, Correggio, and many other masters of erotic arousal; of sculptures that captured in stone the touch of fingers on warm flesh. And the pleasures were not only virtual: contemporary English travelers to Italy routinely bore witness to the beauty of its women and, more to the point, to the sophisticated delights of its courtesans.
Though he moved easily in Italian high society, from literary and scientific academies to aristocratic salons to the courts of cardinals and bishops, Milton seems to have gone out of his way to signal what he took to be
his moral superiority. In Counter-Reformation Italy of all places, he should hardly have been outspoken about his religious convictions—he was, after all, a guest, received with extraordinary graciousness by his Catholic hosts—but he evidently refused to be discreet. In a letter to a friend, the Dutch poet Nicolas Heinsius reported that “the Englishman”—Milton—“was hated by the Italians, among whom he lived a long time, on account of his over-strict morals.” The ardently Protestant thirty-year-old virgin made it clear that he would not be seduced.
Milton was in Naples, contemplating extending his travels to Sicily and Greece, when he heard disquieting reports from England: the political situation, already tense when he departed, had deteriorated, and the country seemed to be drifting into increasingly dangerous waters. He decided that, rather than voyaging out still further, he would return home. All the same, he did not hurry. He had not resolved the vocational problem that had been weighing on him. He clearly loved being in Italy, “the lodging place,” as he put it, “of humanitas and of all the arts of civilization.” And he may not have felt ready to face directly a grievous personal loss: at some point after August 1638 he had received word that his beloved friend, his soul mate Charles Diodati, had died.
Shortly after he returned to England, in the summer of 1639, Milton sat down and commemorated his friend’s death in a long pastoral elegy in Latin. The conventions of the genre—a lamenting shepherd and his flocks in an idyllic, classical Greek landscape—create a kind of formal distance from the real world, but the poem is nonetheless intense, intimate, and revealing. When the terrible news reached him in Italy, he wrote, he did not fully allow himself to register its reality. It was only at home that he experienced the full immensity of his grief. Was it so important, he now asked himself, to travel far away in order to see “Rome in its grave” and to stay away so long, when he could have remained in the company of his dearest friend? Had he not put such a distance between them, he would at least have been able to touch the hand of his dying companion and say farewell. Now he was left with a sense of unutterable loneliness. The consoling thought to which Milton clung at the end of his poem is that Charles—“a youth without stain”—must have ascended in glory to the heavens. “Because the joy of the marriage bed was never tasted,” Milton addressed his dead friend, “virginal honors are reserved for you.”
How much consolation the thirty-two-year-old Milton’s own “virginal honors” seemed to him at this point is not clear. He was no longer a promising youth at the threshold of a brilliant career, but what exactly was he? Money was not really the issue: his moneylending father had assigned some loans to his son’s name, so that Milton, who set himself up in London, now had a small independent income. He supplemented that income by undertaking to educate a few private pupils, starting with his two nephews. But all of that obsessive study and the massive learning and immense intellectual ambition—would it wind up in a schoolmaster whipping a handful of young charges for failing correctly to conjugate Latin verbs?
The dream of literary immortality had not died in him. Milton filled pages of notes—they survive in the library of Trinity College Cambridge—with the titles and brief outlines of possible literary projects, most of them for tragedies on biblical themes. There are multiple sketches of a five-act play on the fall of man, one of them titled “Adam unparadiz’d” and another, “Paradise Lost.” Milton carefully listed the characters: they would have included Adam and Eve, of course, along with a range of figures from Lucifer to Moses, and from Mercy to Discontent. Then he crossed the whole list out. He would no doubt have found it a difficult play to write, given his scant experience of women. In any case, Milton did not get far with any of his projects. History intervened.
The country was falling apart, bitterly divided between Charles I, who dreamt of absolute rule, and a hostile, increasingly intransigent Parliament. As in the chaotic months leading up to the French or Russian revolutions, there were innumerable factions, jostling opinions, failed attempts at compromise, unlikely allies, shifting enmities. But to Milton in the early 1640s, there was a single great struggle: the godly against the ungodly. At the center of the ungodly, in his view, were the bishops of the Church of England: wealthy, worldly, cynical, swollen with conceit, and hopelessly mired in error. At the center of the godly were the enlightened visionaries of radical religious reform, men and women sometimes called by their enemies Puritans. These brave reformers had allies in Parliament who were willing to stand up to the armed legions controlled by the bishops and the king.
In the early 1640s matters began to come to a head. In the City of London, not far from Milton’s house, Puritan-inspired mobs rioted, demanding “Root and Branch” reforms to save England from popery by abolishing the episcopacy. Accounts of arrests, demonstrations, Parliamentary grievances, troop movements, and massacres filled the broadsheets that clandestine printing presses ground out in enormous numbers.
Immersed in his books and occasionally surfacing to drill his pupils in Greek, Latin, and Hebrew, Milton had thus far been observing the growing turmoil from the sidelines. But beginning in 1641 he could no longer hold himself back in watchful waiting. In five long treatises, written and published in a remarkably short time, he unleashed upon the bishops and their apologists all of the contempt and rage, along with the massive learning, that had been bottled up within him. The long apprenticeship spent honing his sarcasm in response to the teasing of his boozing, wenching classmates and the intellectual aridity of his overbearing teachers suddenly made sense: the two enemies, in his imagination, fused into one. The bishops, he wrote, typically were men who “spend their youth in loitering, bezzling [i.e., boozing], and harlotting, their studies in unprofitable questions and barbarous sophistry, their middle age in ambition and idleness, their old age in avarice, dotage, and diseases.”
But what justification did Milton offer for setting himself up as the judge of those so high above his station and venting upon them what he called a “sanctified bitterness”? Who was he—a perpetual student who had written a masque on chastity and taken a Grand Tour to Italy—to weigh in on the fate of the nation? His answer, in a work he published in April 1642, lay in the same deep reading and moral discipline on which he hoped to found his career as a great poet. His authority and inspiration, he asserted, came not solely from his intellectual rigor but from his purity. He had never been defiled by sex out of wedlock with any woman. He was a thirty-three-year-old virgin. That was his moral authority.
Little more than a month after he published this account of himself, Milton rode to a manor house called Forest Hill, near Oxford, concerning an outstanding loan, one of those investments that his prudent father had made on his behalf. The borrower, Richard Powell, had received £300 and had agreed to pay 8 percent interest in two yearly installments. The nation remained tense with the possibility of civil war—Milton himself had been training with a militia—but the roads between London and Oxfordshire were open, and the interest on the loan was due. Milton arrived at Forest Hill in June and returned to London in July. Whether he had obtained the £12 owed to him is not known. What is known is that he brought home with him a wife, the eldest daughter of the man who owed him money, seventeen-year-old Mary Powell.
Marriages between people of means in the seventeenth century were often more like protracted business negotiations than romantic courtships, but the suddenness of this one suggests, at least on Milton’s part, something other than calculation. True, Milton had been long thinking about the nature of love, the moral qualities he hoped to find in a bride, the chastity compatible with the joys of the marriage bed, and so forth. But this was hardly the calculation typical of the marriage market. Rather, on the June afternoon when he first encountered the young girl, Milton seems to have felt the tantalizing possibility of bliss. And true, when the whirlwind courtship was concluded, Milton had a pledge from the girl’s father for a dowry of £1,000, a very handsome sum indeed. But there had been no time for due diligence; the arden
t suitor knew nothing about his father-in-law’s solvency. In fact, Richard Powell was a shady land speculator who had no prospect of repaying the original £300 loan, let alone honoring the marriage settlement he expansively promised.
What the bride knew about her husband may have been equally negligible. Her family was staunchly Royalist in sympathies, and Milton had quickly established himself as one of the most fiercely outspoken enemies of the bishops. At a moment when the whole country was about to explode, could they really have avoided the subject altogether at the dinner table at Forest Hill? Perhaps Richard Powell, eager for the match, told his daughter and everyone else in his family to keep a wide berth of politics; and perhaps Milton, dazed and happy, gave his rage a rest.
However much or little they actually knew each other, John and Mary arrived, a married couple, at the small house on Aldersgate Street. The teenaged bride was accompanied to London by some of her relations—probably her parents and a few of her many siblings—who came to celebrate the nuptials. After several days the visitors left, and the newlyweds had time to begin to think about what they had done.
Milton had not, he fervently believed, compromised the chastity on which, for so many years, he had founded his sense of himself, his moral authority, and his poetic vocation. “Marriage,” he wrote, “must not be call’d a defilement.” God Himself had instituted it before the Fall, in the Garden of Eden, when Adam and Eve were still perfectly chaste and pure. A wedded couple could enjoy the state of innocence granted to Adam and Eve. When he married Mary Powell of Forest Hill, Milton could have said to himself, in Adam’s words, “This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh.” And if on the threshold of the bedroom he experienced a twinge of anxiety, he could have recalled the words that followed in Genesis: “And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed.”