to the playhouses on the Bankside in London; and certain remarks in the prose about mute persons on the stage,1 creaking doors in the scenery,2 and hissing in the audience,' reflect an acquaintance with the practices and conditions of contemporary theatrical representation. Moreover, Milton, while still a Cambridge undergraduate, upheld an exacting standard for actors, and sat among 'the judicious.' 'While they acted, and overacted,' he writes, 'among other young scholars I was a spectator; they thought themselves gallant men, and I thought them fools; they made sport, and I laughed; they mispronounced, and I misliked; and to make up the Atticism, they were out, and I hissed.' Also he betrays an interest in the still cruder exhibitions of mimetic art in popular shows, pantomimes, and May-Day revels—whether a puppet Adam hitched through the simple action of a motion, an antic Hobnail capered in a morris,' or the 'hey pass' of some jugglers at a town fair attracted an astonished audience, the gaping crowd and gaudy costume, 'the inexplicable dumb-shows and noise,' alone imparting to the latter performance any kinship with the art of mimicry.

Trans. by Cowper:

Here too I visit, or to smile or weep,
The winding theatre's majestic sweep;
The grave or gay colloquial scene recruits
My spirits, spent in learning's long pursuits;

I gaze, and grieve, still cherishing my grief. At times, e'en bitter tears yield sweet relief. 1Hist. Brit. (Bk. 4), Works 5.177. 11 Defence (Preface), Works 8.6. Eikonoclastes (1), Works 3.339. 'See below, p. 142, n. 1 An Apology, Works 3.268. Areopagitica, Works 4.418. "Colasterion, Works 4.365. • Animadversions, Works 3.210.

On the allusions to genuine drama in L'Allegro, Il Penseroso, and the first Elegy, we simply give the gist of various commentaries. The comic characters enumerated in the Elegy1 are identified as largely Terentian. The patronus (line 31), translated by Cowper as,

Some coifed brooder o'er a ten years' cause,

is referred to a Latin play by Ruggles, called Ignoramus.2 The youth (line 45), dying ‘hapless on his bridal day,' suggests both Sophocles' Haemon and Shakespeare's Romeo; the ghost in the next lines may call to mind the Senecan drama, or Hamlet, or Macbeth, or Richard III; and the Greek tragedies are the sources of the final references. The following passage from Il Penseroso limits tragedy to royal themes, and primarily refers to the Greek classics:

Sometime let gorgeous Tragedy

In sceptred pall come sweeping by,
Presenting Thebes, or Pelops' line,
Or the tale of Troy divine,

Or what (though rare) of later age
Ennobled hath the buskined stage.3

L'Allegro, we have seen, refers to the 'learned sock' of Jonson. The epithet needs no comment and has aroused no protest. But as people often take for precise verdicts the chance-allusions of one great man to another, the two lines devoted to Shakespeare have not been so quietly received. When Milton, in words suited to the capricious tone of his lyric, calls Shakespeare 'Fancy's child,' and

'Cf. Cowper's translation, lines 31-38.

The play probably was not produced in London, and the date of composition is unknown, but there was a translation by one R. C., printed at London in 1662.

Il Pens. 97-102.

Shakespeare's romantic comedy 'wild' and native 'woodnotes,' not all readers are pleased. Many, their enthusiasm half-met, think the praise so faint as to be damning. Others understand the word 'fancy," and consider Shakespeare's display of that quality his greatest charm; these are satisfied by Milton's tribute, and find it wholly discriminating. Warton, in editing Milton's juvenile poems, finds a way, through the words of the poet's nephew, to amplify the two lines: 'There is good reason,' he writes, 'to suppose that Milton threw many additions and corrections into the Theatrum Poetarum, a book published by his nephew, Edward Phillips, in 1675. It contains criticisms far above the taste of that period. Among these is the following judgment of Shakespeare, which was not then, I believe, the general opinion, and which perfectly coincided both with the sentiments and with the words of the text [in L'Allegro].' This 'judgment' Warton condenses; I give it in full:

William Shakespeare, the glory of the English stage, whose nativity at Stratford upon Avon is the highest honor that town can boast of. From an actor of tragedies and comedies, he became a maker; and such a maker that, though some others may perhaps pretend to a more

1In the notes to R. C. Brown's English Poems by John Milton, Archbishop Trench is quoted as follows: "Fancy's Child" may pass, seeing that "fancy" and imagination were not effectually desynonymized when Milton wrote; nay "fancy" was to him the greater name.' A discussion of the meaning of 'fancy' in the seventeenth century does not properly belong to the theme of this essay, but we may note that the word, besides its literary signification, had a technical value in the vocabulary of Elizabethan psychology. See P. L. 4.802-803; 5.113; 8.188, 460-461, etc.; and compare Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy 1.1.2.7. See also Dowden, Elizabethan Psychology, in Essays Modern and Elizabethan, pp. 320 ff.

'Poems upon Several Occasions, English, Italian, and Latin, ed. by Warton, p. 60.

exact decorum and economy, especially in tragedy, never any expressed a more lofty and tragic height; never any represented nature more purely to the life, and, where the polishments of art are most wanting (as probably his learning was not extraordinary), he pleaseth with a certain wild and native elegance; and in all his writings hath an unvulgar style, as well in his Venus and Adonis, his Rape of Lucrece, and other various poems, as in his dramatic.1

The passage is somewhat illuminating, but it must be confessed that its light falls more brightly upon the woodnotes than upon the quality of 'fancy' by which Milton characterized the comedy of Shakespeare.

If we may thus supplement Milton from the Theatrum Poetarum, we may gain something by also adding at this point what Phillips says of Ben Jonson:

The most learned, judicious, and correct-generally so accounted-of our English comedians, and the more to be admired for being so, for that neither the height of natural parts, for he was no Shakespeare, nor the cost of extraordinary education, for he is reported but a bricklayer's son, but his own proper industry and addiction to books advanced him to this perfection."

Following Warton's lead, we may assume that in turning to Shakespeare for a stock example of the poet who is largely nature's child in contrast with the poet who is more obviously the product of his own effort, Phillips again reflects his uncle. To Milton, conscious perhaps of a balance of forces in his own nature, Shakespeare seemed principally upborne by an 'inward prompting,' Jonson by ‘labor and intent study.' To compare them upon these grounds was scarcely to praise either; it was merely to illustrate a distinction. But at least it may be said that in the poem in

'Phillips, Theatrum Poetarum, p. 240.
Ibid., p. 241-242.

honor of the great dramatist, with its ardent opening and solemn close, there is praise enough to convince his most jealous admirer that Shakespeare stood high in Milton's love.

We have paused over the traces of Milton's dramatic predilections and his fragmentary estimates of Jonson and Shakespeare, because such spontaneously revealed tastes and chance-criticisms correctly indicate the formal artistic principles of a mind so unified as his. Now we shall investigate more technical data; and henceforward also we can show the main theoretical influences upon Milton's thought and practice. These influences he acknowledges by implication in the tractate Of Education, where he speaks of 'that sublime art which in Aristotle's Poetics, in Horace, and the Italian commentaries of Castelvetro, Tasso, Mazzoni, and others, teaches what the laws are of a true epic poem; what of a dramatic; what of a lyric; what decorum is (which is the grand master-piece to observe)." We shall try to follow him in his selection, assimilation, and recombination of material from these sources of classical and neo-classical theory.

To Milton, the function of the drama, broadly considered, was that of the fine arts in general. Within the limits of delightful teaching, however, right tragedy (we shall, for the moment, disregard comedy) attains a peculiar end, which Milton, a professed student of Aristotle, calls the purgation of pity and fear. But in saying thus much, the poet offers us a problem rather than an axiom; for, as Dr. Spingarn observes, 'No passage in Aristotle's Poetics has been subjected to more discussion, and certainly no 1 Education, Works 4.389.