...each heart
Hath from the leaves of thy unvalued book
Those Delphic lines with deep impression took  
            — “On Shakespeare,” l. 10-12


1.

Does Love’s Labor’s Lost work as a parody of the youthful Milton? The comedy’s subject is a group of young men who commit themselves to a chaste period of study but are forsworn by love and love poetry. They are placed between the comic extremes of the pedants Holofernes and Nathaniel and the coarse Costard and Jaquenetta; the former pair overesteem learning (particularly Latin), the latter loving, or love-making. The excesses of the first culminate in their pathetic, premature performance as the Nine Worthies, while the comedy of the latter peaks in a premarital pregnancy. The aristocats achieve no such consummation, ending the play by delaying marriage another year.

            Are these not the young Milton’s greatest fears—premature action (sexual or artistic), and perpetual inaction? After seven years at Cambridge, he sequestered himself for another six in the countryside, studying Latin and Greek writers. His first dramatic work (and first longer poem in English) exalts chastity, yet most of the poetry of his late adolescence and early 20s is in the genre of Latin love-elegy; much of it is highly erotic. The movement in his poetry and self-conception is roughly opposite to that of the protagonists of Love’s Labor’s Lost: he curbs his exuberance, renouncing erotic verse in favor of chaste study. The dilemmas of Shakespeare’s play seem closely to resemble those preoccupying the young Puritan: to remain chaste, or seek sexual experience? to live a hermit, or participate in the world? to study antique poetry, or write it? in Latin, or in English?

            The conceit that Shakespeare spoofs Milton’s early life must be abandoned if we consider Milton’s early poetry, which names Shakespeare and constructs a literary identity in reaction to him. Yet in fashioning himself as the sort of person the young Shakespeare mocked, Milton engages my anachronistic conceit: he creates the impression that he is both anterior and antithetical to the dramatist, as though the latter’s (likely) first play is already a falling-off from the Miltonic solmenity.


2.    

Milton develops—from his first published English poem, to the invective of Il Penseroso, to the duplicitous Bacchic reveler of Comus—a polemic against Shakespeare, remarkably close in design to his later polemics. Its twin axes are unfreedom/freedom, and wantonness/chastity.

            In “On Shakespeare,” Milton engages both themes[1]; in framing the problems experienced by Shakespeare’s reader (a Milton surrogate), he introduces most of the tropes that will animate the polemic across subsequent works. He imagines the reader as imprisoned in a structure that he compares to “hallowed relics,” a “pyramid,” “pomp,” and a “tomb” for a “king,” made of “marble” and provoking “wonder and astonishment,” thus rapidly linking Shakespeare with the specters of (respectively) Catholicism; Egypt, and Asia more broadly; imperial Rome, or monarchy more broadly; and visual splendor. In contrasting the playwright’s “flow” of “easy numbers” (which cause “too much conceiving”) with the reader’s “shame,” Milton links Shakespeare with profligacy or wantonness, and himself with chastity. He depicts the fictive reader’s mind as at once inflamed and entrapped, giving Shakespearean fancy both a licentious and a coercive charge. It is worth noting, lastly, that the imprisoning structure is a magical illusion created in the mind of the reader.

            Milton carries this set of associations, nearly intact, into Il Penseroso and Comus.[2] The former poem’s speaker damns “vain deluding joys” to “dwell in some idle brain, / And fancies with gaudy shapes possess”; this is another image for the reader’s paralysis by the writer’s unchecked imagination. The “idle brain” evokes the statue-like reader of Shakespeare, “gaudy” evokes “pomp,” and “fancies,” “fancy.” Melancholy’s accusation against Mirth differs little from the Miltonic reader’s accusation against Shakespeare.

            While the epitaph and L’Allegro name Shakespeare outright, Comus need not do so.[3] Fond of “revelry, / Tipsy dance and jollity,” its Bacchic villain reenacts Shakespeare’s transgression: he imprisons the chaste Lady in a “marble venomed seat.” The word “marble,” suggestive both of immobility and luxury, directly links the ‘reader of Shakespeare’ with the victim of Comus. Yet this imprisonment is still in an important sense imaginary, a spell being all that is required to liberate the Lady. Comus both repeats the polemic’s elements and dramatizes them. (Note the perspectival sleight-of-hand in Milton's adoption of the dramatic form: though Comus, and by extension Shakespeare, is depicted as impinging upon the Lady, Milton is in fact hijacking Shakespeare’s artistic medium.)

            Il Penseroso extends the motifs of the epitaph, but it also introduces a new polemical strategy: the manipulation of the significances of light and dark. It associates Shakespeare with light and Milton with dark, but reverses the conventional polarity so that each word takes on a radically new significance. Rather than examine every instance of the motif, I will choose the paradigmatic one: the speaker of Penseroso hails “divinest Melancholy, whose saintly visage is too bright / To hit the sense of human sight; / And therefore to our weaker view / O’erlaid with black, staid Wisdom’s hue...” Milton derides human sight as the wrong perspective from which to evaluate lightness or darkness: ordinary vision is a “weaker view” than his, and one from which the true, “saintly” “brightness” of “wisdom” cannot be seen.

            Is this plain paradox? No. Milton achieves this reversal by introducing into his account of light a second variable: the invisible or spiritual realm. Thus light is not absolutely opposed to dark: rather, visible light is one with invisible dark, while material dark corresponds to spiritual light. Strangely, for the monist Milton, his chief intervention in the poetic representation of light seems dualist: he is able to privilege dark over light, in conventional terms, only by imagining a fissure between the material and spiritual worlds, and privileging the latter.


3.

Milton is not without precedent in reversing light and dark: he borrows the technique from Berowne of Love’s Labor’s Lost.[4] The central emblem of this reversal, for Berowne, is Rosaline, whom I will refer to as the Dark Lady. Berowne, like the speaker of Penseroso, effectively contrasts his “stronger view” to his companion’s “weaker view”: he alone can see that Rosaline is fair.

             In fact, Berowne takes Rosaline’s fairness as suppositional, and language must be reorganized in order to accommodate the fact. This supposition demands that all conventional polarities must be reversed: if Rosaline is not fair, he says, “beauty doth beauty lack,” his “eyes are then no eyes, nor [he] Berowne,” and crucially, “day would turn to night” (IV.3.252-273). What justification can he give for such arbitrary and dramatic revisioning? Like Milton, he vindicates his inversion by distinguishing between appearance and essence, or matter and spirit, and endowing appearances with a sinister edge: what looks like beauty may be a “false aspect… painting and usurping,” what look like “spirits of light” may be “Devils” (IV.3.277-280). The corollary is that apparent ugliness is essential fairness, and material dark, spiritual light.

            Neither Milton’s chaste Lady nor Berowne’s Dark Lady is the agent of the dark-light inversion; they are merely the prime illustration of Milton and Berowne’s idiosyncratic vision. The source, or justification, of the reversals is the men’s privileged perspective. If Milton and Berowne see beauty where others see ugliness, it is because they have an uncommon kind of vision. Both use an erotic object as the demonstration or emblem of this (universally) privileged sight: to praise the women is thus indirectly to praise themselves. Therefore Berowne can say: “When ourselves we see in lady’s eyes, / Do we not likewise see our learning there?” (IV.3.291.21-23). Erotic choice being a question of valuation, confidence in an uncommon choice reflects confidence in one’s own evaluative standpoint.

            The notion that Berowne’s praise of Rosaline is indirect exaltation of his own perspective, equips us to understand his early speech comparing women and books. He says:

Why, all delights are vain; but that most vain,

Which with pain purchased doth inherit pain:

As, painfully to pore upon a book

To seek the light of truth; while truth the while

Doth falsely blind the eyesight of his look:

Light seeking light doth light of light beguile:

So, ere you find where light in darkness lies,

Your light grows dark by losing of your eyes.

Study me how to please the eye indeed

By fixing it upon a fairer eye,

Who dazzling so, that eye shall be his heed

And give him light that it was blinded by. (I.1.74-85)

Berowne does not argue, per se, for the claim that “truth… doth falsely blind the eyesight,” but elaborates it in a strange conceit in which “eye” and “light” are used interchangeably; in which books count as ‘eye-lights’; yet in which women and books are distinct kinds of light—one “gives,” the other “blinds.” Thus Berowne argues against books: they are a light that can illuminate darkness, but not reciprocally augment light. Yet this is convoluted; why does he use “eye” and “light” as synonyms? why do women and books (both of them ‘eye-lights’) have different effects?

            To use “eye” and “light” as synonyms is to conflate the perceiver and that which is perceived—or, to elide perspective. The compounding of eye and light suggests a communion between subject and object. In the case of male eyes and and female eyes, the latter “gives him light”: the object is subsumed or metabolized by the subject. Books seem to resist this objectification or metabolization. This is, I propose, because the book represents a second male subjectivity (or, set of eyes). That would explain, in Shakespeare’s masculinist milieu, why the book threatens to subsume the male subject that looks upon it—threatens to “beguile” the looker’s light and “blind” his eye.

            Light is thus an acutely gendered trope for influence, antagonistic or benign. Milton’s early poems pick up on it in two places: the central clause of his epitaph for Shakespeare is “our fancy of itself bereaving,” a phrase that recalls “light of light beguiles” (in the reflexivity of the syntax and the “be-” prefix). Milton finds a model for expressing his anxiety about studying Shakespeare in Berowne’s statement of unease with regard to book-learning. Each fears the book as a rival or eclipsing perspective—a perspective that cannot be perspectivized, or a light that blinds rather than illuminates.

            Milton more obviously repeats Berowne’s trope of light-as-influence—and more pointedly revises it—in a second, stronger parallel. Perhaps too summarily, Berowne dismisses influence-anxiety with the claim that “men that give a name to every fixed star” gain no advantage thereby. Milton, seeking to refute or evade this claim, is under a double bind. In order to evade influence, he must vindicate it; in order to take an antithetical approach to tradition, he must defend it. He is able to shoot the gulf (or, accomplish both) only because of the distinction made in Il Penseroso and Comus between diurnal and nocturnal light. The relevant passage is from Comus:

Unmuffle, ye faint stars; and thou, fair moon…

Stoop thy pale visage through an amber cloud,

And disinherit Chaos, that reigns here

In double night of darkness and of shades;

Or, if your influence be quite dammed up

With black usurping mists, some gentle taper…

With thy long levelled rule of streaming light… (331-340)

The star’s light is “faint”; the moon’s is “fair”; the candle’s “gentle… long, levelled rule” resembles the embers in Penseroso, which “counterfeit a glow.” Milton’s ideal is neither light nor dark, but some in-between gray: less “glaring,” it is therefore superior to brighter light. The implied artistic tradition that this class of dim lights represent—perhaps classicism, as opposed to Shakespeare’s ‘modernism’—allows Milton to venerate tradition while evading Shakespeare. The delineation of a secondary light is what allows the speaker of Penseroso to wish to “sit and rightly spell, / Of every star that heav’n doth show.” Milton reappropriates Berowne’s distinction between light that “blinds” and light that “gives,” and applies it to two kinds of received tradition, rather than oppose received tradition to astral or feminine influence.

            For Berowne, to study is to forfeit what ‘optical’ advantage one has, because to see through a book is to see through another man’s eyes. Naturally, to see through Shakespeare’s eyes would, for Milton, be imaginative death. Milton, like Berowne, reverses the light-dark polarity, but takes a further step: while Berowne merely privileges dark over light, Milton prizes nocturnal light over diurnal. This allows him to juxtapose not ignorance and learning, but wanton learning and chaste learning, or disordered and ordered learning. He is able to oppose the study of Shakespeare to alternative kinds of study, and thus to vindicate study (in reaction to Shakespeare’s Berowne) without vindicating the study of Shakespeare himself. Milton, in short, adopts Berowne’s elaborate metaphor for influence and turns it against him. This plays to Milton’s strengths: with no hope of matching Shakespeare’s skill for characterization, he engages his eminent precursor on the planes of rhetoric and metaphysical conceit.

[1] John Milton et al., The Complete Poetry and Essential Prose of John Milton (New York: Modern Library, 2007), 34.

[2] Milton, The Complete Poetry, 41-52.                    

[3] Milton, The Complete Poetry, 65-98.

[4]Shakespeare, William. "Love's Labor's Lost." Edited by Peter Holland. In William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, edited by Stephen Orgel and A. R. Braunmuller, 208-48. London: Penguin Books, 2002.