Critical Quotes - Paradise Lost and Volpone

Question 1

Carey 1

Answer 1

‘Milton’s effort to encapsulate evil in Satan was not successful …. Some of the most distinguished have claimed that he is superior in character to Milton’s God.’

Question 2

Carey 2

Answer 2

‘Satanist critics generally emphasize Satan’s courage, anti-satanists his selfishness or folly’

Question 3

Tillyard

Answer 3

‘From first to last Eve takes and keeps the initiative … Adam, whom Eve expects to be firm, suddenly weakens’

Question 4

Burden

Answer 4

‘By granting his permission Adam becomes involved in what happens to her’

Question 5

Dr Johnson 1779

Answer 5

‘There appears in his books something like a Turkish contempt of females, as subordinate and inferior beings’

Question 6

Gilbert

Answer 6

‘Her otherness … leads inexorably to her demonic anger’

Question 7

Weston 1

Answer 7

‘It seems unfair to suggest that Eve is here motivated entirely by a calculation to deceive’

Question 8

Campbell

Answer 8

‘The capacity induce a sympathetic understanding of villainy without sentimentalizing the villain is a mark of Johnson extreme skill … The same feat later accomplished with Milton’s Satan.

Question 9

Knapp

Answer 9

‘Volpone is a satanic challenger to God’s order and Society’s’

Question 10

Mcevoy

Answer 10

‘The audience in Tyrone Guthrie’s 1964 production famously applauded the rape scene’

Question 11

McAvoy

Answer 11

‘In her desire to be a martyr to chastity, it comes across as a masochistic response to voyeuristic sadism’

Question 12

Dedune

Answer 12

Volpone a demonstration of ‘man’s compulsion to make others suffer’

Question 13

Alicock

Answer 13

Johnson brings out ‘moral impulses in his audience by dramatizing a world which has lost all ability to do so’

Question 14

Weston 2

Answer 14

‘Passion as a result of flattery rules her reason’

Question 15

Davies

Answer 15

‘Eve did not have to utter a word to persuade him’

Question 16

Stanley Fish

Answer 16

‘Small language effects can trick the reader into heretically thinking’ - e.g. ‘For what God, after better, would worse build?’

Question 17

CS Lewis

Answer 17

‘Eve decides that if she is to die, Adam must die with her’ in this sense she is a ‘murderess’