The dramatic Milton
Item
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Title
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The dramatic Milton
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:ca84cf766b80:10463
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identifier
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10616
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Creator
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Goldstein, William W.,
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Contributor
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Joseph Wittreich
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Date
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2010
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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English literature | Theater history | English Religious Drama | John Milton | Kenneth Tynan | Michael Redgrave | Samson Agonistes | William Poel
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Abstract
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De Quincey wrote of Milton's Samson, "I am satisfied that Milton meant him to dance." De Quincey is a touchstone within a broadly theatrical history of Samson Agonistes and Milton's poetic career that this dissertation, combining archival research, textual analysis and performative theory, makes a first effort to establish. Beginning early in the eighteenth century, a theatrical tradition began to accumulate around Samson Agonistes. Continuing through the nineteenth century, commentators praised the work's theatricality, it was published in anthologies as a play collected with other contemporary plays, and editors divided it into acts and scenes and added stage directions. Tracing this process of theatricalization for the first time, I also chronicle the extensive, largely unexamined performance history of Samson Agonistes since the inaugural production of 1900, demonstrating that productions have been intricately entwined with an expansion of the Elizabethan and international dramatic canon spearheaded by leading theater artists who transformed the political and cultural possibilities of theater. Key productions, I argue, stand in the history of Milton criticism as a harbinger of hermeneutics, offering an unexplored body of interpretation prefiguring essential critical debates about Milton's work. I expose the shadows of dramatic traditions in Milton's biblical poetry, including the almost completely neglected influence of English religious drama, and examine the question of Samson's heroism in the context of Greek epic, particularly as it informs Milton's choice of tragedy as the genre for Samson Agonistes. Foregrounding how Milton's interest in drama shaped his poetic career, I analyze Milton's earliest works and reveal there is a theatrical structure to Milton.s 1671 volume, which is the culmination of the career prophesied by poems Milton wrote nearly a half-century earlier, such as On Shakespeare, On the Morning of Christ's Nativity and Lycidas. Stressing the continuity of Milton's poetic language across time, I argue that links between his 1671 volume and his 1645 Poems reveals a career encircled and defined, at first and near its end, by the dramatic Milton's engagement with theatrical metaphors and concerns.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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English
