As the figure of John Keats looks on from his place just outside the Lady Chapel, I wonder what he would have made of our venture to stage John Milton’s Paradise Lost.’ We have put into dramatic form the most famous work of one of Keats’s own literary heroes. As he walked within sight of St John’s, Keats must often have heard echoing in his mind the same sonorous, magical cadences that we now take as our script. Abridged from its 12,OOO lines into a drama barely two hours long, Milton’s poem still retains the compelling power and excitement which we can easily imagine entrancing the mind and inspiring the pen of Keats himself. Like a great verbal opera, the original stretches out to twelve books; our drama bears more resemblance in form to an Elizabethan or Jacobean tragedy, in which the villain is defeated in the space of an hour or two, albeit at terrible cost and only with the help of powers beyond those of humanity.
I wonder, too, what the stones of St John’s would say, if they could speak, about the role played in the drama by the church itself. It is by turns Heaven and Hell, the great palace of Satan constructed on the lines of the temples of the classical world and, finally, the Garden of Eden, the paradise lost by Adam and Eve which waits to be regained by Christ’s Death and Resurrection on Easter morning. At the beginning of the poem and our play Milton declares his aim to justify the ways of God to men’, and we have enlisted the help of the building to portray what Milton has described. We are told of the enthronement in Heaven of God the Son by His Father, of the jealous rebellion against Him by Satan , of Satan’s rebellion and defeat by the forces of the Son; and of Satan’s fall into Hell and the creation of a new world ours to replace the loss of the rebels from God’s love; we witness the struggle of the rebels, led by Satan and Beelzebub, to rise from their burning lake’ and the hatching of Satan’s plans for revenge ( in a parody of the earthly parliamentary debates with which Milton, as Cromwell’s Latin Secretary, would have been so familiar!); we meet the figures of Sin and Death who guard the gates of Hell and whom Satan wins over to his cause; and we witness how Satan loses his fight with the Archangel Gabriel, whose guards have detected Satan at Eve’s ear as she sleeps. Finally, of course, Satan picks on a weaker adversary and wins but he has reckoned without the power of God the Father, who plays what can only be called a practical joke on him at the moment of his greatest triumph. His ultimate defeat awaits him in the context of eternity, as the unconditional love of the Son for Man promises a future release from the deadly grasp of Satan and the grotesque shapes of Sin and Death.
Milton’s own literary debts are also apparent, even in the short space of our drama. His familiarity with and love for both Shakespeare and the classical authors pervade his writing and there are strong echoes of both. As we listen to Satan’s jealousy, we hear Iago in the bitterness of his words and the anguish of his hopeless position; Adam and Eve are as lyrical as Romeo and Juliet in their response to the beauty of the natural world which enhances their love; and Prospero surely informs the figure of Milton himself! The influence on Milton of Homer and Virgil is apparent in everything: in his presentation of the conflict between God the Son and Satan as if it were between two great figures of antiquity where one is designed by fate to lose all; in his virtuoso use of Latinate linguistic structures and vocabulary; and above all, in the constant, impressive march of his dignified and powerful poetry. Yet his aim was to outgun both Homer and Vergil, for his protagonists are the two forces of goodness and evil themselves, his battlefield infinity and his timescale eternity.
Milton was a Puritan, a man of intense beliefs and extraordinary learning, who knew both the Old and the New Testament by heart and spoke Latin as fluently as he spoke English. We have tried at all times to be faithful to his passionate and visionary spirit, we have loved working with his beautiful language and as a footnote to the production- we have used in what we hope is an interesting way Milton’s observation that spirits when they please can either sex assume.’ We hope you enjoy the fruits of our labours
Paradise Lost
Ann Duarte