Milton and Shakespeare

Someone named Nigel Terry recently wrote a book entitled Is Milton Better than Shakespeare?

One is tempted to respond by saying that "comparisons are odorous," but the fact is that Shakespeare is clearly better--or better at the things that matter most.

Milton, for all of his considerable poetic brilliance, did not have the faintest idea of how to develop character. As testament to this, we have the Romantic poets' deliberate misreadings of Milton's Satan. (That they could be so successful in promoting this misreading is ample evidence of Milton's shortcoming in this regard.) Shelley saw Satan as a hero possessing "magnificence" and a moral superiority over Milton's God, who is, as I have stated before, a real flat bore, and--as Shelley claims--vindictive to boot.

The real attraction of Milton is the quality of his verse--once you manage to untangle it. His sentences are convoluted to the extreme, and they make no pretense of accessibility. But they are grand, powerful, graceful--sometimes stunningly so. I'll take with me to my grave Milton's evocation of Satan's shield--massive and round like the moon viewed through the "Tuscan astronomer's" (Galileo's) lens, and his spear taller than the tallest pines of Norway. There's something about reading the epic simile rendered in one's own native language that is powerfully stirring, more so to me than when I read a like example translated from Greek. Part of the effect here is that the figure of Satan is so completely familiar to us that it is only through this new rendering of him that we find ourselves enabled to reconceive the figure itself. This was very much part of Milton's project--to enable us to see these figures recast, to behold new dimensions of meaning in the familiar narrative.

In Paradise Lost, Milton tosses out some heavy questions--most of which he can't answer successfully, but that doesn't make them any less compelling. His attempt to "justify the ways of God to man" is in effect nothing less than a theologically-based attempt at tackling what we now call the problem of evil. The attempt fails to suffice for a modern audience, but it's such a noble and fascinating attempt that it still bears consideration. It may indeed be true that no one has ever wished that Paradise Lost were longer, but that doesn't mean that we aren't glad (some of us, at least) that it exists.

Shakespeare, by contrast, reflects the Elizabethan universalist's skepticism of absolutes, and that is why he is ultimately the stronger and more appealing writer--because those of us out here in the real world are swimming in ambiguity. Milton's era was a time for taking sides--supporting the Puritans or supporting the king--while Shakespeare's era, just a few decades earlier, was a time for laying low, keeping your opinions to yourself--or perhaps even eschewing opinion altogether, seeing as how having one was likely to get you eviscerated and then beheaded. As Zadie Smith recently said of Shakespeare, "even more than for his wordplay we cherish him for his lack of allegiance. Our Shakespeare sees always both sides of a thing." In that regard, Shakespeare traffics in the mysteries of human character, and all ideas and ideologies are sifted so finely that in the end they blow away to insubstantiality. Take the running critique of stoicism that spans the first four acts of Hamlet. Polonius--subjected as he is to our scorn--embraces stoical precepts and by association renders them susceptible to our ridicule. Hamlet tries to embrace similar stoical attitudes, but they fail him--until the fifth act, when Hamlet's stoical acceptance of fate enables him to finally triumph in his project of avenging his father's murder. The end result for the audience, however, is that we are left not knowing what exactly it is that Shakespeare is saying about stoicism. Is he telling us that stoical precepts, used properly, are the means of transcending those infamous "slings and arrows"? Or does stoicism merely serve as a convenient means of finding the resolution to a plot that is going nowhere and taking its own sweet time to get there?* We will never be able to say with any degree of certainty: throughout his canon, Shakespeare gives us uncertainty instead of ideology. We are left not with ideas about the world, but with real-seeming characters who live in that world.

In the process, Shakespeare gives us some amazing lines. Sometimes his metaphors merge on the mixed variety, and sometimes his lines lack the intricacy of Milton's, but Shakespeare's greater appeal is deserved. Sometimes, though, I genuinely don't know which to prefer, the words of Hamlet:

"There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so."

Or the words of his successor, Satan:

"The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n."

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* Four acts of going nowhere is just fine in this context, but I suspect that W.S. may have sensed the need to resolve things before the audience caught wise to the fact that essentially very little has happened in the preceding 4000 or so lines.