Milton, Dryden, and the Ideology of Genre

1 COMPAKATIVE ? ama Volume 21Spring 1987Number 1 Milton, Dryden, and the Ideology of Genre D. M. Rosenberg Samson Agonistes was Milton's creative response to the political and social forces that shaped the values of the Restoration theater. These forces included the domination of Crown and Court, the ideological predilections and beliefs of the courtier playwrights and their coterie audience, and the prevalent literary taste and stage practices. The rhymed heroic play, especially as it was developed by John Dryden, poet laureate and royal historiographer, most clearly exemplifies the varied social and theatrical elements that constitute the ethos and ideology of early Restoration drama.1 Samson Agonistes has many of the characteristics of a counter-genre. As a poetic drama it resembles the Restoration heroic play, particularly with regard to heroic themes and neoclassical canons of style. However, Milton uses the heroic play as a genre to dissent from its conventions and shared norms. Samson Agonistes, in other words, relates to the heroic play by antagonism and reformation.2 This study will thus compare the characteristic qualities of two kinds of poetic drama, analyzing their common and distinctive modes in order to understand D. M. ROSENBERG is Professor of English at Michigan State University and is the author of Oaten Reeds and Trumpets: Pastoral and Epic in Virgil, Spenser, and Milton (1981). 1 2 Comparative Drama better Milton's work in his dissenting, antagonistic relation to the ideology of Restoration theater. In his preface to Samson Agonistes, published eleven years after the return of Charles ? and the re-opening of the London theaters, Milton declared that his play "never was intended" for the stage. This in itself is a significant part of the meaning of Samson Agonistes in the context of Restoration culture. The reader of a printed play is very much on his own, independent of theatrical interpretation and embodiment, for the individual reader must use his intellect and imagination to set his own stage, cast the characters, and watch the drama unfold with his mind's eye. The reader must, then, interiorize thoughts, emotions, and images communicated on the printed page. This "interiorization" of meaning is an integral part of the experience of Milton's dramatic poem. The difference between Dryden's collective externalization and Milton's individual interiorization underscores the opposition between the ideologies of orthodoxy and dissent. Milton's performance, his publication of Samson Agonistes in 1671, is a poetic and political rebellion against the assumptions of the Restoration theater, which he believed reflected the ethos of court culture, its repression, egoism, and materialism. In the Restoration period, therefore, Dryden's heroic plays and Milton's Samson Agonistes give clear evidence of cultural polarization and fragmentation. Dryden's plays were written for a coterie and court stage; Milton's play was not intended for the stage at all. However, Dryden and Milton write contemporaneous poetic dramas that define and represent heroic virtue and deeds; and these plays treat similar themes, the conflict between the individual and external authority, and between love and honor. Both closely adhere, moreover, to neoclassical and humanistic norms of rhetoric and decorum and thereby exclude the popular and native traditions of English drama. Nevertheless, these dramas are markedly different with respect to the interrelation of theater, society, and dramatic art. So markedly different are they that one may view Milton's dramatic poem as a deliberate rejection of the heroic play. Milton, like his own Samson, renounced, resisted, and defied his antagonist. In writing a play not intended for stage performance , the poet withdrew from the social function of Restoration theater; in writing a religious drama he militantly resisted the secular maincurrents of the cultural establishment; and by ere- D. M. Rosenberg3 ating a hero who in an iconoclastic and revolutionary act destroys the theater of the Philistines, he defied the courtly culture of the ruling class. Through the example of his own play, Milton attempted to replace the Restoration theater of Dagon with a new theater, purified and truly restored because it was consecrated to God. A distinctive genre of the Restoration stage, the rhymed heroic play, presupposed and expressed the sympathies and loyalties bequeathed by the Court. It was a...