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The Political Afterlife of Paradise Lost
From white supremacists to black activists, readers have sought moral legitimacy in Milton’s epic poem.
In his clever, wide-ranging book, Orlando Reade shows how Milton’s great epic has been dug up and dismembered, its pieces repurposed in often mutually contradictory ways by a succession of ideologues, activists and devout admirers projecting their own preoccupations on to his narrative. Commenting on Milton’s comparison of Satan to an eclipsed sun that “disastrous twilight sheds/On half the nations” he gives us the historical information that the censor was so alarmed by this passage, with its promise of “change to perplex monarchs”, that he considered banning the poem’s publication. Arriving at the Gaiety theatre the Mistick Krewe, wearing huge papier-mâché masks that turned them into monstrous giants, acted out four scenes from Paradise Lost, including that of the creation of the world as described to Adam by the Angel Raphael.
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