Envy, Beelzebub, and Paradise Lost

Scholars have long appreciated the centrality of envy to Satan’s characterization in Paradise Lost, and they have sometimes extended the importance of envy to Beelzebub, his closest associate. This note, however, argues that scholars have failed to appreciate the full significance of Beelzebub’s connection with envy in the poem because they have not yet acknowledged the rich cultural association between Beelzebub and envy that existed in early modern literary culture. After surveying Beelzebub’s connection to envy in the poem, Bradley J. Irish unpacks the linkage between Beelzebub and envy in early modern culture—a thematic resonance that is unfamiliar to us but that would have been immediately apparent for many of Milton’s original readers.