Michael Murrin's Milton and the "Epic Without War": A Review Essay

In his encyclopedic History and Warfare in Renaissance Epic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994; xvi + 371 pp., 21 illus., $37.50), Michael Murrin records the response of Renaissance poets of epic and romance to the changes wrought by technology on the battlefields of the old and new worlds, chiefly those changes brought about by the introduction of gunpowder. ¹ These poets were faced with the artistic problem of representing heroic action in narratives that incorporated that technology. Homeric and Virgilian heroes clashed in individual combat, where victory depended upon strength of arm, undaunted resolve, and boundless courage, not to mention purity of heart and the help of the gods. The melee of the medieval battlefield on which armored knights clashed man-to-man, brandishing the mace and broadsword, offered ample opportunity for poets to display such heroic qualities; but the innovations of the 15th and 16th centuries presented a challenge. The lines of sputtering muskets and rows of roaring cannon defeated their enemy at a distance; and if poets endeavored to embellish their works with firearms they were faced with the difficulty of showing their heroes in episodes of personal combat where they could perform feats worthy of the name.

As Murrin explains, some of these poets chose to ignore the changes altogether, those like Matteo Maria Boiardo, whose Orlando inamorato is a poem in the classic tradition, undisturbed by firearms of any kind. In like manner Torquato Tasso, who based his Gerusalemme Liberata on documented history, could not let modern weapons intrude upon a tale of the Crusades modeled on The Iliad.

Lodovico Ariosto, on the other hand, inaugurated what Murrin calls a “shift to realism” in Orlando Furioso by including images of cannon and exploding mines anachronistically in an account of a medieval siege of Paris during the time of Charlemagne. Still others, like the Iberian poets, Alonso de Ercilla in his La Araucana and Perez de Villagrá in The History of New Mexico, composed long epic poems about mili tary campaigns in which they had personally served; and they incorporated individual firearms into realistic scenes of battle, though admittedly taking some liberties with history (79 ff.).

On the other hand, according to Murrin, English poets of epic and romance responded to the challenge of the contemporary battlefield by ignoring it almost entirely, creating what he calls “the epic without war.” Murrin carefully distinguishes between individual jousts and duels and scenes of general warfare. There were no lack of gentle knights “pricking on the plaine” but few accounts of great armies clashing there. Ben Jonson complained that Samuel Daniel wrote The Civile Wars “and yet hath not one battle in all his book.” Murrin finds three of them but observes that they occupy but seven percent of the work. Sidney, he notes, reduced wars to jousts and duels and “Spenser has almost nothing else.” Murrin finds the origin of this “peaceful epic” in the English experience. As he explains, “the English poets lacked direct experience of war and also lacked an audience for the literature of war” (239–41).

Murrin’s argument seems altogether convincing when applied to the years prior to the outbreak of the English Civil Wars. England was indeed spared the carnage of marauding armies like those that marched across the scorched plains of Europe in the 16th and early 17th centuries. Indeed, not since Bosworth Field had rival forces of significant size fought on English soil. Despite their service in the Dutch wars of liberation in the 16th, and the armies of Gustavus Adolphus in the 17th centuries, English soldiers were slow to adapt to the new methods. In the Trained Bands of London the bow and pike gave way only grudgingly to the musket, and it was not until 1635 that they had a training manual for troops equipped with firearms in William Barriff’s Militarie Discipline: or the yong artillery man. English poets were thus content, according to Murrin, to ignore this new technology and depict only personal duels or, as he puts it, “actions that had occurred long ago in an imaginary...