Paradise Lost Context

Question 1

Milton’s Life

Answer 1

• Married 3 times (left, died, survived)
• Very radical ideas
• 1652: Went totally blind
• Sister, dad, brother + son died when young
• Free thinker
• Outsider
• Arrested due to republican views
• Puritan views
• Briefly imprisoned + forced into hiding after Charles II’s return from exile

Question 2

Milton’s Politics

Answer 2

• 1648: Wrote ‘The Tenure of Kings + Magistrates’ to show support of republican govn
• Believed govn shouldn’t censor works
• Wrote anti royalist pamphlets
• Appointed ‘Secretary of Foreign Tongues’ in Cromwell’s govn after Charles I’d execution
• Supported regicide
• Wanted a free commonwealth
• Constantly criticises Church of England

Question 3

Milton’s Religion

Answer 3

• Protestant (disinherited by father)
• Soul sleeping mortalism
• Puritan (believed in authority of Bible, not CofE)
• Despised corruption in Catholic Church
• Questioned many orthodoxies of Church
• Evangelical
• Wanted separation of Church + state
• Wanted reform of Church

Question 4

Doctrine + Discipline of Divorce

Answer 4

• ‘No one can always know the disposition of their spouse before they enter into marriage’
• Argues ability to have second chance at marriage
• Radical opinions about divorce because 1st wife (Mary) left him
• Controversial
• Marriage depends on compatibility of partners

Question 5

‘De Doctrina Christina’

Answer 5

• Marriage should contain a ‘reservation of superior rights to the husband’
• Divorce should be private

Question 6

Areopagitica

Answer 6

• Milton encouraged ‘extirpation’ (destruction) of Roman Catholic Church + their writings
• No need for censorship (no corrupted speeches from Church)
• People can decide what they want to read independently

Question 7

‘The Tenure of Kings + Magistrates’

Answer 7

• ‘indeed none can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license; which never hath more scope or more indulgence than under Tyrants’
• Showed Milton’s support of a republican form of govn (English Republicanism grew during English Civil War)
• Defends right of people to execute a guilty sovereign, whether tyrannical or not
• Milton conjectures about formation of commonwealths

Question 8

Paradise Regained

Answer 8

• Philosophical dialogue between Satan + son of God

Question 9

1600s History

Answer 9

• 1642 to 1651: English Civil War / English Revolution between Royalists + Parliamentarians
• 1603: Elizabeth I succeeded by James I (Elizabethan to Jacobean period)
• Population increase in England + Wales
• City life emerging in London
• Increase in small market towns
• 1608: Milton born when London still developing