These were all learned styles, Latinate and sophisticated, but the appearance in the 1620s of the first corantos, or courants (news books), generated by interest in the Thirty Years’ War, heralded the great 17th-century shift from an elite to a mass readership, a change consolidated by the explosion of popular journalism that accompanied the political confusion of the 1640s. The search for new kinds of political order and authority generated an answering chaos of styles, as voices were heard that had hitherto been denied access to print. The radical ideas of educated political theorists like Hobbes and the republican James Harrington were advanced within the traditional decencies of polite (if ruthless) debate, but they spoke in competition with writers who deliberately breached the literary canons of good taste—Levelers, such as John Lilburne and Richard Overton, with their vigorously dramatic manner; Diggers, such as Gerrard Winstanley in his Law of Freedom (1652); and Ranters, whose language and syntax were as disruptive as the libertinism they professed. The outstanding examples are Milton’s tracts against the bishops (1641–42), which revealed an unexpected talent for scurrilous abuse and withering sarcasm. Milton’s later pamphlets—on divorce, education, and free speech (Areopagitica, 1644) and in defense of tyrannicide (The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, 1649)—adopt a loosely Ciceronian sonorousness, but their language is plain and always intensely imaginative and absorbing. Milton
John Milton, the last great poet of the English Renaissance, laid down in his work the foundations for the emerging aesthetic of the post-Renaissance period. Milton had a concept of the public role of the poet even more elevated, if possible, than Jonson’s; he early declared his hope to do for his native tongue what “the greatest and choicest wits of Athens, Rome, or modern Italy” had done for theirs. But where Jonson’s humanism had led him into court service, Milton’s was complicated by a respect for the conscience acting in pursuance of those things that it, individually, knew were right; he wished to “contribute to the progress of real and substantial liberty; which is to be sought for not from without, but within.” His early verse aligned him, poetically and politically, with the Spenserians: religious and pastoral odes; “Lycidas” (1637), a pastoral elegy that incidentally bewails the state of the church; and Comus (1634), a masque against “masquing,” performed privately in the country and opposing a private heroism in chastity and virtue to the courtly round of revelry and pleasure. But he was also well read in Latin and modern Italian literature and ambitious to write in English a poem to compare with Virgil’s Aeneid.
During the Civil Wars and the Cromwellian republic (1642–60), Milton saw his role as the intellectual serving the state in a glorious cause. He devoted his energies to pamphleteering, first in the cause of church reform and then in defense of the fledgling republic, and he became Latin secretary to Cromwell’s Council of State. But the republic of virtue failed to materialize, and the Cromwellian settlement was swept aside in 1660 by the returning monarchy. Milton showed himself virtually the last defender of the republic with his tract The Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth (1660), a courageous but desperate program for a permanent oligarchy of the Puritan elect, the only device he could suggest to prevent the return to royal slavery.
Milton’s greatest achievements were yet to come, for Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes were not published until after the Restoration. But their roots were deep in the radical experience of the 1640s and ’50s and in the ensuing transformations in politics and society. With its antihero, Satan, in flawed rebellion against an all-powerful divine monarchy, Paradise Lost revisits the politics of the last generation; its all-too-human protagonists, turned out of Eden into a more difficult world where they have to acquire new and less-certain kinds of heroism, are adjusting to a culture in which all the familiar bearings have been changed, the old public certainties now rendered more private, particular, and provisional. For Milton and his contemporaries, 1660 was a watershed that necessitated a complete rethinking of assumptions and a corresponding reassessment of the literary language, traditions, and forms appropriate to the new age. M.H. Butler The Restoration Literary reactions to the political climate
For some, the restoration of King Charles II in 1660 led many to a painful revaluation of the political hopes and millenarian expectations bred during two decades of civil war and republican government. For others, it excited the desire to celebrate kingship and even to turn the events of the new reign into signs of a divinely ordained scheme of things. Violent political conflict may have ceased, but the division between royalists and republicans still ran through literature of the period. Indeed, it is hard to conceive of a single literary culture that could include, on the one hand, John Milton and John Bunyan and, on the other, John Wilmot, earl of Rochester, and John Dryden. Yet these and other such opposites were writing at the same time.
The term Restoration literature is often taken to mean the literature of those who belonged, or aspired to belong, to the restored court culture of Charles II’s reign—the “mob of gentlemen who wrote with ease,” as Alexander Pope later put it. This identification was to allow Pope’s contemporaries to look back on the Restoration as an age of excess and licentiousness. Yet Puritans and republicans had not disappeared. With the Act of Uniformity (1662) and the Test Act (1673), those Protestants not conforming with the Church of England (“Dissenters”) were excluded from most public offices. However, they still formed an important body of opinion within the nation. They were also to make a distinctive contribution to the nation’s intellectual life throughout the following century.
In the first years after Charles II’s return, dissent was stilled or secretive. With the return of an efficient censorship, ambitiously heterodox ideas in theology and politics that had found their way freely into print during the 1640s and ’50s were once again denied publication. For erstwhile supporters of the Commonwealth, the experience of defeat needed time to be absorbed, and fresh strategies had to be devised to encounter the challenge of hostile times. Much caustic and libelous political satire was written during the reigns of Charles II and James II and (because printing was subject to repressive legal constrictions) circulated anonymously and widely in manuscript. Andrew Marvell, sitting as member of Parliament for Hull in three successive Parliaments from 1659 to 1678, experimented energetically with this mode, and his Last Instructions to a Painter (written in 1667) achieves a control of a broad canvas and an alertness to apt detail and to the movement of masses of people that make it a significant forerunner of Pope’s Dunciad, however divergent the two poets’ political visions may be. Marvell also proved himself to be a dexterous, abrasive prose controversialist, comprehensively deriding the anti-Dissenter arguments of Samuel Parker (later bishop of Oxford) in The Rehearsal Transprosed (1672, with a sequel in 1673) and providing so vivid an exposition of Whig suspicions of the restored monarchy’s attraction to absolutism in An Account of the Growth of Popery, and Arbitrary Government in England (1677) that a reward of £100 was offered for revealing its author’s identity. The defeated republicans