The Self in Early Modern Literature: For the Common Good

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FIVE Milton ❖ Self-Defense and the Drama of Blame John Milton’s pride in being chosen to defend the new English republic against attack was unabashed. He welcomed “the glorious task of defending the very defenders” of “civil life and religion .”1 His A Defence of the People of England (1651)2 earned widespread European approval, and even after the republican moment faded, his pride in this First Defence remained unabashed. In his layered characterization of himself as a defender of defenders can been found an essential truth of his nearly 20 years as a prose polemicist, stretching from his prelatical tracts to his last futile attempts to stave off restoration of the Stuart monarchy. His is an increasingly defensive self defined by participation in an adversarial community: a centered Protestant vocational self engaged in holy war along with other defenders of truth, pursuing a strenuous Protestant ideal of common good. The implications of this conception reach beyond the prose works of his “left hand”3 to his late poetical works. 259 260 The Self in Early Modern Literature Such defensiveness came naturally. The period of Milton’s active political involvement was intensely adversarial, both before and after the death of Charles I. Milton’s self-representation as an epic hero in A Second Defence of the English People (1654) assumes a holy war with both sides exploiting the militant infrastructure of Christian thought. Paul’s warfaring Christian warrior4 and John’s polarized battle between Christ and Antichrist5 clearly informed the adversarial, contentious thinking on both sides in this holy war. Not even the strategic hypocrisies of European realpolitik could erase the sense of a cosmic opposition between good and evil. With other militant defenders of the Reformation, Milton viewed not only the papacy as the Antichrist, but also the English alliance between the monarchy and the prelacy. Battle lines were clearly drawn in pamphlet warfare, where the practices of defense dictated both literary form and working vocabulary. The formal prose defense is only the most obvious example. The adversarial stance taken by Milton after his return from Italy in 1639 dominated his middle years until the Restoration. At first anonymous in his defense of the Smectymnuans against the church hierarchy, Milton progressively established his fame throughout Western Europe as the bold defender of church reform, divorce, regicide, and the new republican government. He characterized that boldness as the programmatic defense of religious, domestic, and civic liberty;6 and the full force of his commanding sense of vocational and prophetic duty is at work. But the stated ideals justifying his boldness cannot mask a pugilistic aggression, leading to counterattacks which, in turn, called forth his abusive and combative self-defense.7 To understand his disposition, at times flagrantly unleashed as in his misguided attack on Alexander More, is to better understand Milton’s conception of the vocational self serving the common good. This chapter examines the ways in which Milton’s defensive vocational stance informs his works. The formal defenses written during his life as a polemicist are essential in this discussion, but we find elements in that defensive stance emerging as early as Lycidas and revisited as late as the great poems of his matur- ity. Some broad similarities to Jonson provide a useful backdrop here. Both writers acted from a sense of personal responsibility for the common good; both took an aggressive stance in the public sphere that deliberately elicited strong responses from their audiences; both defended themselves aggressively, sustained by a strong sense of centered self; both reflected critically on their personal behavior in their works. The differences are equally informative. For Jonson, the self is centered in a notion of “truth” that stabilizes his humanistic sense of social responsibility; for Milton the center is Protestant self-esteem as God’s chosen, vocational servant recognized by others. His aggression and defensiveness are inextricable from his self-esteem, as are the related issues of blame, justice, and deserved fame that distinguish his sense of vocation. In the great poems of his maturity, we find Milton reflecting critically on the often excessive defensiveness of his earlier vocational experience in contentious pamphlet warfare. Habits of Blame Nowhere does Milton defend himself so combatively and lengthily as in two works published in 1654–55, the justly admired A Second Defence and the underrated A Defence of Himself Against Alexander More.8 In early 1650 Milton was...