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In his encyclopedic History and Warfare in Renaissance Epic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994; xvi + 371 pp., 21 illus., $37.50), Michael Murrin records the response of Renaissance poets of epic and romance to the changes wrought by technology on the battlefields of the old and new worlds, chiefly those changes brought about by the introduction of gunpowder. 1 These poets were faced with the artistic problem of representing heroic action in narratives that incorporated that technology. Homeric and Virgilian heroes clashed in individual combat, where victory depended upon strength of arm, undaunted resolve, and boundless courage, not to mention purity of heart and the help of the gods. The melee of the medieval battlefield on which armored knights clashed man-to-man, brandishing the mace and broadsword, offered ample opportunity for poets to display such heroic qualities; but the innovations of the 15th and 16th centuries presented a challenge. The lines of sputtering muskets and rows of roaring cannon defeated their enemy at a distance; and if poets endeavored to embellish their works with firearms they were faced with the difficulty of showing their heroes in episodes of personal combat where they could perform feats worthy of the name.
As Murrin explains, some of these poets chose to ignore the changes altogether, those like Matteo Maria Boiardo, whose Orlando inamorato is a poem in the classic tradition, undisturbed by firearms of any kind. In like manner Torquato Tasso, who based his Gerusalemme Liberata on documented history, could not let modern weapons intrude upon a tale of the Crusades modeled on The Iliad.
Lodovico Ariosto, on the other hand, inaugurated what Murrin calls a "shift to realism" in Orlando Furioso by including images of cannon and exploding mines anachronistically in an account of a medieval siege of Paris during the time of Charlemagne. Still others, like the Iberian poets, Alonso de Ercilla in his La Araucana and Perez de Villagrá in The History of New Mexico, composed long epic poems about mili tary campaigns in which they had personally served; and they incorporated individual firearms into realistic scenes of battle, though admittedly taking some liberties with history (79 ff.).
On the other hand, according to Murrin, English poets of epic and romance responded to the challenge of the contemporary battlefield by ignoring it almost entirely, creating what he calls "the epic without war." Murrin carefully distinguishes between individual jousts and duels and scenes of general warfare. There were no lack of gentle knights "pricking on the plaine" but few accounts of great armies clashing there. Ben Jonson complained that Samuel Daniel wrote The Civile Wars "and yet hath not one battle in all his book." Murrin finds three of them but observes that they occupy but seven percent of the work. Sidney, he notes, reduced wars to jousts and duels and "Spenser has almost nothing else." Murrin finds the origin of this "peaceful epic" in the English experience. As he explains, "the English poets lacked direct experience of war and also lacked an audience for the literature of war" (239-41).
Murrin's argument seems altogether convincing when applied to the years prior to the outbreak of the English Civil Wars. England was indeed spared the carnage of marauding armies like those that marched across the scorched plains of Europe in the 16th and early 17th centuries. Indeed, not since Bosworth Field had rival forces of significant size fought [End Page 119] on English soil. Despite their service in the Dutch wars of liberation in the 16th, and the armies of Gustavus Adolphus in the 17th centuries, English soldiers were slow to adapt to the new methods. In the Trained Bands of London the bow and pike gave way only grudgingly to the musket, and it was not until 1635 that they had a training manual for troops equipped with firearms in William Barriff's Militarie Discipline: or the yong artillery man. English poets were thus content, according to Murrin, to ignore this new technology and depict only personal duels or, as he puts it, "actions that had occurred long ago in an imaginary Arcadian world" (235).
Murrin's evidence for all this is exhaustive and his interpretation of the poets' adaptation of the contemporary battlefield ingenious. Time does not permit me to review his many fascinating insights, but the book deserves the attention of anyone studying the epic tradition or the history of the period. My only argument with the author is the inclusion of John Milton among the English poets of the "peaceful epic," those who "limited war to a small portion of their narrative" or "dropped it altogether." In reply I must point out that Paradise Lost devotes some 1200 of its 10,000-odd lines to the cause, conduct, and outcome of the war in Heaven, and 900 of them narrate the battle from the first marshaling of troops to the final defeat. Further, Milton has been justly praised for passages that evoke the sound and sense of vast armies clashing in general combat:
now storming fury rose,
And clamor such as heard in Heav'n till now
Was never, Arms on Armor clashing bray'd
Horrible discord, and the madding Wheels
Of brazen Chariots rag'd; dire was the noise
Of conflict; over head the dismal hiss
If fiery darts in flaming volleys flew,
And flying vaulted either Host with fire.
So under fiery Cope together rush'd
Both Battles main, with ruinous assault
And inextinguishable rage.
(6.207-17) 2
Again:
wide was spread
That War and various; sometimes on firm ground
A standing fight, then soaring on main Wing
Tormented all the Air; all Air seem'd then
Conflicting Fire.
(6.241-45)
Aside from this account the epic fairly bristles with soldiers. In Book I Satan is the resolute commander restoring his armies to discipline and confidence; and though he does not risk them in another encounter with omnipotence, he orders a pass in review in full battle array, after which they stand on parade, "a horrid Front / Of dreadful length and dazzling Arms" (1.563-34). Satan then raises their spirits with a martial speech, concluding dramatically, "peace is despair'd, / For who can think Submission? War then, War / Open or understood, must be resolved." The response is all he could have wished for; his followers drew their "flaming swords," "rag'd / Against the Highest, and fierce with grasped Arms / Clash'd on thir sounding shields the din of war" (1.664-68). Satan then convenes "the great consult" of Book 2, which is essentially a council of war assembled to decide how to oppose the King of Heaven, whether openly or with "covert guile." As it happens, the "great Seraphic Lords and Seraphim" spend most of their time debating, not how to oppose him, but whether or not they should even try.
On Heaven's side, Raphael leads a force "Squar'd in full Legion" to the gates of Hell during the days of Creation (8.233); Gabriel commands angelic sentinels equipped with "Celestial Armory, Shields, Helms, and Spears" on guard outside the Garden (4.549-54); and Michael arrives in Eden armed to the teeth, with his "Sword, / Satan's dire dread, and in his hand the Spear." He comes, moreover, in command of a "Cohort bright" of "flaming Warriors" with orders to "seize / Possession of the Garden" (11.221-22). Michael's chronicle of the sorry history of the race includes accounts of tragic conflict, of "Concourse in Arms, fierce faces threat'ning War" (11.641), and of Nimrod who hunted with "War and hostile snare" (12.31). The archangel relates to Adam God's decision to harden the wandering Israelites in the desert lest, "untrain'd in Arms," battle would "terrify them inexpert," and leave them reluctant to undertake the struggle for the Promised Land (12.214-20). Thus uniforms abound in a poem not itself built upon a martial theme, but which takes as its subject the [End Page 120] creation and fall of our first parents, whose life is bound, until the last lines, by the peaceful confines of the Garden of Eden. Milton, though he protests himself "not sedulous by Nature to indite / Wars" (9.27-28), certainly did a great deal of it.
Further, one must question Murrin's contention that Milton, like Spenser and Sidney, "lacked an audience for the literature of war." The first readers of Paradise Lost, unlike the generations before them, had seen much of armies on the march: a devastating civil conflict from 1642 to 1646, another in 1648, regiments again in the field to subdue a Leveller rebellion in 1649 and repel a royalist invasion in 1651, another uprising in 1659, and George Monk's slow trek south from Scotland to occupy London the following year. Indeed, Milton's English audience had witnessed at first hand the grim reality of war among their own downs and pastures and few were left untouched by the conflict. For readers so seasoned, one would think, a "peaceful epic" about an "imaginary Arcadian world" would have seemed somewhat tame, out of touch with their harsh memory of those years. And Milton himself, though he never experienced battle, lived through the siege of London and spent his years as Latin Secretary composing tracts to justify England's wars and preparing documents that record either their outbreak or diplomatic efforts to end them in treaty. With this background, it is not surprising that he would have depicted the sacred war between good and evil with imagery derived from the clash of profane armies.
In actuality, Murrin only glances at Milton and his cursory remarks reflect the generally accepted interpretation of Paradise Lost as a "peaceful epic" with antiwar overtones; the book is otherwise admirably free of ideological constraints that shackle critical inquiry. A closer look at Book 6, however would have provided him with striking illustrations of the entire spectrum of methods he describes so skillfully of poets adapting the epic tradition to the evolving technology of the 15th and 16th century battlefield. The war in Heaven opens with "the dismal hiss" of arrows overhead, as did so many of those early battles, followed closely by the clash of rival armies along "the ridges of grim War" (6.237). Milton's account of that first day of battle is in the classic tradition of Homer and Virgil, one preferred by Boiardo, Tasso, and others who chose to ignore the new technology. Like them, Milton mirrors his classic models in describing Satan's individual encounters with Abdiel and Michael, duels preceded by bellicose speeches in the manner of those between Achilles and Hector, Turnus and Aeneas, and decided by strength of arm and edge of blade. In the account of the second day, however, the poet undertakes Murrin's "shift to realism," introducing contemporary technology, as did Ariosto anachronistically in Orlando Furioso. Satan deploys his cannon, which disrupt and demoralize his enemy, preventing personal combat, the very condition Murrin contends created the artistic challenge that Renaissance writers of epic wrestled with. In Milton's narrative the first day's battle revealed that the rebel angels were at a distinct disadvantage--when wounded, they feel pain--and Satan's employment of his technological marvel is a resourceful device to even the unequal odds. The cannon effectively neutralize the loyal angels' advantage, since they are prevented from closing with their enemy in personal combat where their valor and superior strength could be brought to bear in the classic tradition of heroic warfare. It may be said that Satan fails to capitalize on his tactical advantage and is content merely to exchange witty puns with Belial deriding their enemy's discomfort; but in truth there is little more he can do. Technology has enabled him to fight the King of Heaven to a stand-off, no mean accomplishment in itself. Murrin argues that Milton should be associated with poets like Ariosto who equated the cannon with fraud (130-32); but in the context of the war the employment of these weapons may be seen as an ingenious expedient--Satan had to develop tactics to keep an enemy, unencumbered by pain, at bay. Milton has him conceal his weapons to achieve a tactical advantage in surprise, but this is hardly fraud. The poet simply acknowledges the reality of any battlefield, where deception, feint, and surprise are keys to victory.
The loyal angels, in an effort to silence the cannon, respond by tossing mountains at them, whereupon the rebels reply in kind and the war degenerates into a "horrid confusion." This duel of hills, "hurl'd to and fro with jaculation dire" (6.665) is akin to the [End Page 121] changes Murrin describes in the evolving tactics of naval warfare brought about by the development of effective shipboard cannon, changes reflected in the works of Alonso de Ercilla and Juan Rufo, who penned imaginative accounts of the battle of Lepanto (142-43). In ancient and medieval encounters at sea, Murrin explains, the preferred tactic was the ram, in which one ship simply crunched into the side of another and followed by boarding the damaged vessel with an armed force. It was a tactic that provided poets with ample occasion to describe individual encounters in which they could celebrate their heroes' superiority in hand-to-hand combat. By the late 16th century, however, notably in the English repulse of the Armada, naval cannon had reached a level of efficiency that all but eliminated boarding as a necessary action. Opposing vessels stood off from one another and exchanged volleys until one or the other of them was either disabled or sunk. Similar tactics, I would suggest, are imaginatively represented in Paradise Lost, not by the introduction of the cannon, since only one side is so armed, but by the exchange of mountains. The opposing armies are like two massive men-o'-war unleashing broadsides at one another; but now that the rebel angels' vulnerability to pain is no longer a factor, the two sides are evenly matched and could have continued the fusillade of hills indefinitely until "all Heav'n / Had gone to wrack, with ruin overspread" (6.669-70). God finally intervenes in the conflict, calling a halt to the destructive exchange, and, through the Son, commits the full weight of his omnipotence to the battle, with predictable results. Thus Milton both reflects the tradition of his ancient models and employs many of the devices of his contemporaries to adapt his account to the realities of 17th century warfare. The third day of the war in Heaven is no less reflective of Murrin's insights. When they are confronted earlier with the cannon, the loyal angels, of course, did not show fear, which would have been entirely inappropriate for adherents to the divine will. They are not terrified by the bombardment. Their chief concern is that they cannot keep their feet under them; and they are distressed that in the consequent "foul dissipation" and "forc't rout" they will be vulnerable, not to attack by the enemy, but to his derisive laughter (6.602-3).
The Chariot of Paternal Deity, unlike the cannon, is a weapon of terror; and Satan's forces respond to it much as did simple natives to their first encounter with firearms. Initially the rebels are resolute, "disdaining flight, / Or faint retreat" (6.798-99); but the mere sound of the chariot, like that "Of torrent Floods, or of a numerous host," followed by the Son's "ten thousand Thunders" fills them with fear; and "astonisht all resistance lost, / All courage," they flee (6.829-38). Their reaction is much like that Camões records in his Lusiad, when the natives of Mozambique run terrified by the flash and roar of Vasco de Gama's gunfire (148-49). The rebel angels, further disheartened by the hail of arrows from the many eyes of the four "Cherubic shapes" that propel the Chariot, seek relative safety by hurling themselves over the edge of Heaven into the "wasteful Deep" of Chaos. It is a desperate measure resembling that of the Indians in Villagrá's account of the Spanish attack on the mesa at Ácoma in The History of New Mexico, where the natives cast themselves off a 400 foot cliff rather than face the wrath of the victors, an incident repeated in Ercilla's account of the battle of Reinaco in his Araucana (218-19).
It is not the purpose here to propose sources for Milton's poetry. Fine scholars like John Steadman and Stella Revard have explored the influence of poets like Tasso, Ariosto, and Camöes on his art; 3 and others may in time find suggestive links between his poetry and Villagra's History of New Mexico or Ercilla's Araucana. Our purpose has been simply to demonstrate that Paradise Lost, far from being an "epic without war," as Murrin finds it, contains lively examples of several key elements of his remarkable study. Milton seems well aware of the response of Renaissance poets of epic and romance to the challenge of incorporating into their art the evolving technology of the contemporary battlefield; and in many respects he manages to include in his martial imagery the whole range of responses of other poets to that challenge, from Tasso's adherence to The Iliad to the Iberian poets' realistic account of the terrifying effectiveness of firearms against those unused to their flash and roar. The poet ranged widely, using everything that came within the compass of his imagination from both ancient and contemporary accounts of temporal warfare to [End Page 122] animate his spectacle of the spiritual battle between good and evil.
1. The seed of this essay appears in a few sentences of my review of his splendid book for JEGP, wherein I take some exceptions to his treatment of John Milton (Vol. 95, no. 4 [Oct 1996]: 546-548). Given that journal's stern warnings about limitations, my remarks were restricted to a brief half-paragraph in an otherwise admiring review. Though Milton occupies but a few pages of the book, the subject seemed worth further thought.
2. Quotations are from Merritt Y. Hughes, ed., Complete Poems and Major Prose (New York: Odyssey, 1957).
3. John. M. Steadman, Milton and the Renaissance Hero (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967); Stella P. Revard, The War in Heaven: "Paradise Lost" and the Tradition of Satan's Rebellion (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1980). There are, of course, many others.
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/milton_quarterly/v031/31.4fallon.html