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  • "Fit entertainment":The Coronation Entry in Milton's Paradise Lost
  • Denys W. Van Renen

In this essay, I examine how John Milton represents Satan's adaptation of English processional entries and pageantry to claim ownership of territory through the signification of physical matter as space. Milton, in fact, links Satan's first disobedience to the ceremonial forms of a coronation entry. While these forms are not necessarily exclusive to Royalists—after all, Cromwell's "coronation" was memorialized with its own stately procession—Milton draws attention to these elaborate displays because they reconceive of the physical environment as symbolic markers, emptying it of its substance and, through this process, the Father's "vital vertue."

Although I will briefly discuss other pageants, including Lord Mayor's shows, I will center on John Ogilby's Entertainment of Charles II because of its particular resonance with Milton's epic poem. As Paula Backsheider explains, the procession, through the overt celebration of monarchical practices and symbols, endeavored to create continuity with the past and to quell increasingly restive citizens who looked abroad to enrich England. The city of London, she argues, while dutifully reaffirming the legitimacy of the new king, encouraged him to adapt to the new order. Backsheider specifically frames this underlying tension as a split between a feudal system and a global economy: "Charles's primary efforts were concentrated upon reclaiming English history, not toward directing a breakaway future. But as he and his immediate circle attempted the former, the foundation of imperial England was already being laid." "Imperial England" denotes a system of global trade endorsed by Londoners in which the city served as the hub. Indeed, in a Lord Mayor's show mounted after the entry for the Queen, Backsheider observes "signs [End Page 69] of the strain of competing ideologies," including the city's display of Asian merchants to promote global trade.

The City, though, far from urging an unwilling Charles to support a vision of imperial England, actually saw him as a threat (the Crown vies with merchants, offering a different vision of global exchange). In the pageant mounted by the City of London, for example, London's Glory Represented by Time, Truth, and Fame (5 July 1660), John Tatham, the City Poet from 1657 to 1664, effusively praises the King as a ruler who restores English traditions, circumscribing, in effect, the boundaries of his power. In the pageant, he metaphorizes the King as the "beams" which "Giv[e] growth" to his subjects and as a mint which impresses, like coinage, his royal image on "all hearts." This imagery seems harmless, but Tatham had used the same language two decades prior to censure the court of Charles's father. Take, for example, his dedication to Richard Brome's A Jovial Crew (1642):

Ingrateful Negro-kind, dart you your rageAgainst the beams that warm'd you, and the stage!This malice shows it is unhallowed heatThat boils your raw brains, and your temples beat.Adulterate pieces may retain the mouldOr stamp, but want the pureness of the gold.

While Tatham indicts the English audience as the "Ingrateful Negro-kind" because they flock to plays influenced or written by foreigners, he targets Charles I's consort Queen Henrietta Maria and her court who demand French drama; this "unhallowed heat" racializes the English. As the successor to Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, Brome seems passé to the court but, for Tatham, he reaffirms English culture. Juxtaposing this dedication with London's Glory, then, underscores that Tatham's glorification of Charles II contains some subtle criticisms of Stuart rule and, from the outset, delimits the spheres of city and court. Even though, in short, Tatham gestures at the wider world in London's Glory, he, to reformulate a phrase from Andrew Marvell, isles Charles on his isle. That is, Tatham invokes "Egyptian mist" and "benumb'd Muscovians" to flatter the King that he repatriates the English; however, his metaphors suggest that he limits the King's power to domestic matters.

Despite the Entertainment's celebration of feudal and monarchial forms Ogilby, in contrast to Tatham, promotes a version of power that grafts monarchical despotism to colonial ventures. I argue that Milton...

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