"To change in scenes and show it in a play": Paradise Lost and the Stage Directions of Dryden's The State of Innocence and Fall of Man

Introduction

Dryden's decision to "tag" Milton's verses and create a dramatic version of Paradise Lost is, as Michael Lieb has recently written of Milton's encounter with Galileo, an "irresistible" episode in literary history (Lieb 65). As Aubrey recounts, Dryden approached Milton, who "received him civilly, & told him he would give him leave to tagge his Verse" (Darbishire 7). This meeting between the two dominant poets of the seventeenth century becomes a cipher for literary history itself. The younger poet's request and the older poet's reply embody a powerful narrative of literary inheritance. Milton's transfer of literary authority to Dryden is analogous to the historical progression of Renaissance to Restoration, a generic shift from epic to drama, the replacement of the baroque sublimity of "the sense variously drawn out" with the order and concision of the heroic couplet. Likewise, the texts that have their origin in this moment—The State of Innocence, of course, but also Milton's "On the Verse," Marvell's "On Paradise Lost," Dryden's "Apology for Heroique Poetry; and Poetique License," and even Samson Agonistes and Paradise Regained¹—are a virtual laboratory for the literary controversies of the age: rhyme and blank verse, the nature of heroic poetry, the problem of genre, the relationship between art and politics.

Most accounts of the relationship between Milton and Dryden (including mine above) are shaped by our retrospective sense of their relative significance. Indeed, Andrew Marvell's contemptuous reference to Dryden as the "town-Bayes," who "like a pack-horse tires without his bells" (qtd. in Milton 54), sets the tone for many modern assessments of The State of Innocence and the Fall of Man, which has been described as a "vulgarization" of Paradise Lost because it reduces, contracts, and contains the matter of Paradise Lost in order to fit the expanse of the epic into the scenes of a play.² Even an advocate of Dryden's poetry such as Earl Miner describes Dryden's decision to write The State of Innocence as "fundamentally misguided" (10). From this perspective, The State of Innocence is at best a trivialization and at worst a betrayal of Milton's achievement. When Milton describes his poetics as "an example set, the first in English, of ancient liberty recovered to heroic poem from the troublesome and modern bondage of rhyming" (qtd. in Milton 55), Dryden's rhymed couplets represent not only literary values opposed to Milton's, but contrary cultural and political values as well. As Stephen Zwicker has argued, it is likely that Dryden recognized the comic deflation of Paradise Lost accomplished by The State of Innocence. In many ways, Dryden's adaptation is a deliberate challenge to Milton's poetic and political commitments in his epic of choice. Dryden's intent is "not simply to neglect the ideology of his great original or to indulge in a recondite form of ridicule; it is utterly to deny its spiritual and ideological authority" (Zwicker 156).³

But if The State of Innocence cannot now be read innocently, as it were, of Milton's epic, the record of its early circulation and publication suggest that the reception of Dryden's play was not necessarily determined, and certainly not hindered, by its derivative relationship to Milton's epic. The play circulated widely in manuscript and was published in nine quarto editions between 1677 and 1700. In this context, Marvell's fear that "some less skilful hand" might "presume the whole Creation's day/ To change in scenes, and show it in a play" (Milton 53) alerts us to the very real possibility that more seventeenth-century readers may have encountered Milton through a dramatic redaction than the epic original.⁴ In this essay I take Marvell's hint and propose that Dryden's "scenes" are as important to his adaptation of Paradise Lost as his translation of blank verse into heroic couplets. Scholars, following Marvell, inevitably remark on the generic mismatch between Milton's epic and Dryden...