In John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, the audience’s opinion on the anti-hero Bosola and his moral integrity changes throughout the play due to his sudden catharsis and change in behavior after he realizes the consequences of his working for the...

Milton’s representation of free will and Christian faith is centered on an omniscient God of selective omnipotence. He predicts the fall of man, without doing anything to cause or prevent this. It's Satan who instigates the fall, with God knowing...

Paradise Lost, the epic poem written in blank verse by the 17th-century English poet John Milton narrates the biblical account of the Fall of mankind. Eve is the only character that is both female and human in the poem and Milton’s depiction of...

Words with the root “obedient” or “obedience” appear thirty-two times in John Milton’s Paradise Lost, while the root word “loyal” appears only four times. Nevertheless, ties of loyalty are central to the narrative of man’s first fall. Questions...

As proposed by Immanual Kant, the Enlightenment consisted of having “the courage to use your own understanding,” and John Milton’s Paradise Lost, Descartes’ Meditations, and Cervantes’ Don Quixote collectively provide instances that both affirm...

John Milton conforms much to the popular misogyny of his time - the belief that women are inferior to men, and wives subservient to their husbands. However, his epic Paradise Lost explores the positive and important role women in that society...

Even as Paradise Lost is the story of “man’s first disobedience,” John Milton notably opens his epic poem with a complex portrait of Satan as the ruler of Hell. Satan is a sympathetic character as a rebel, but easily denounced as a hypocritical...

When Satan says “Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heav’n,” he becomes a true advocate for freewill. He has gone against what he considered a tyrannical leader, lost, and reemerges as a classical tragic hero reminiscent of the likes of...

‘I may assert eternal providence,

And justify the ways of God to men.’

(Book I, II. 25-26, p. 4)

It would be strange for any reader not to see that John Milton’s most famous work, Paradise Lost, is a deeply religious text, simply by glancing at...

The writers of the early modern period often presented in their texts characters who struggled with a crisis of identity. Furthermore, these characters were unable to reconcile their identity with the role that they played within the fictional...

Webster’s presentation of the fallen world in Act V of The White Devil appears as a more developed and grander reflection of Milton’s fallen world in Book IX of Paradise Lost. Milton’s outstanding attributes of the fallen world are developed by...

In his “Areopagitica,” John Milton claims “He that can apprehend and consider vice with all her baits and seeming pleasures, and yet abstain, and yet distinguish, and yet prefer that which is truly better, he is the true warfaring Christian. I...

Since its first publication in 1667, Milton’s Paradise Lost has continued to exert its influence over literature, having particular resonance with the romantics, Wordsworth citing it as among ‘the grand store-houses of enthusiastic and meditative...

Humans have instincts. However, some are often suppressed and viewed by society as immoral and unnatural because not all of them have pure intentions. In John Milton’s Paradise Lost, Milton retells the story of Adam and Eve and their fall from...

Milton’s exploration of heroism in Paradise Lost has been the focus of much debate and controversy since the poem was first published. Critical attention has shifted through the years from Satanism to feminism, from the exultation of Adam to the...

In Paradise Lost, John Milton endows angels with magnificent qualities, both positive and negative. Through symbolism, he shows their greatness. In a meaningful shift from earlier ideas of his time, Milton’s angels are shown to possess full free...

When comparing their two works, it becomes clear that while John Milton’s Paradise Lost shares the general viewpoint on marriage found in Mary Astell’s Reflections upon Marriage — that being that the institution of marriage of the time period was...

John Milton’s first encounter with death sent him reeling and kept him off balance for a long time. He found an escape in poetry, pouring out his confusion and frustration and sorrow in the now-famous poem Lycidas. The young Milton was struck with...

The potential for political meaning in the metaphors, allegories and allusions of Paradise Lost is rich for interpretations due to the shifting associations of political ideologies with various sides, in order to prove a spectrum of arguments. The...

Densely populated with similes, allusions, and speeches, John Milton’s Paradise Lost takes Satan’s fall from Heaven and expands it into a meditation on hierarchy, knowledge, and power. Though Satan’s main vendetta against God is established in his...

In Book IV of Paradise Lost, Eve relates her birth and her first meeting with Adam. She claims to first have been distracted by her reflection on a pond, where she would have stayed had a voice not warned her away. The person on the pond “started...

An antagonist is essential to any story. Establishing a clear “bad guy” gives the story more emotion, uniting the reader with the protagonist(s) against a common enemy that is easy to hate. Every story has an antagonist, but only some are evil....

In his poem Christabel (1816), Samuel Taylor Coleridge revises John Milton’s Paradise Lost to create a version of the fall of humanity that is wholly feminine. Coleridge represents Eve though the character Christabel, an innocent young maiden...

Following the story of Genesis, John Milton’s Paradise Lost gives insight to Adam and Eve’s Fall from Paradise and Satan’s war against God in heaven. While all of the characters add crucial detail to the storyline, Eve is arguably one of the most...