ABSTRACT

Although the extent of Milton’s knowledge of the Portuguese poet, Luís de Camões, is unknown, critics ranging from E.M.W. Tillyard to Louis Martz have made persuasive cases for the influence of Camões’s epic, Os Lusíadas, on Paradise Lost.1 The majority of these cases are based on the discovery of echoes and parallels between the two poems. Given the nature of the similarities, it is likely that Milton knew Fanshawe’s 1655 translation of the epic, although considering Milton’s remarkable command of modern languages, it is not altogether impossible that he also knew the Portuguese original or that he used Faria e Sousa’s annotated 1639 prose translation into Spanish.2 The abundance of internal evidence certainly shows that one of the epics Milton had in mind while writing Paradise Lost was Os Lusíadas. But it is clear that, rather than adopting Camões’s perspective, Milton intended Paradise Lost as a repudiation of the Christian nationalism which seems to play such a large role in certain episodes of the Portuguese epic.3 Camões’s vision of the Portuguese king and nation had obvious resonances with the aims of the disenfranchised royalists during the Interregnum in England. In this respect, Fanshawe’s own royalist affiliations are not insignificant. As I have noted in Chapter

1 See E.M.W. Tillyard, The English Epic and its Background (New York, 1954), 238-50, and Louis L. Martz, Milton: Poet of Exile (New Haven, 1986), 155-68. Also see C.M. Bowra, From Virgil to Milton (London, 1948), 194-5 and Robert Ralston Cawley, Milton and the Literature of Travel (New York, 1970), 140. The most complete study of Camões’s influence on Milton is James H. Sims, “Christened Classicism in Paradise Lost and The Lusiads,” Comparative Literature 24.2 (1972): 338-56. See footnote 1 in Sims for a more exhaustive list. See also James Sims, “The Epic Narrator’s Mortal Voice in Camões and Milton,” Revue de Littérature Comparée 51 (1977): 374-84. In Epic and Empire, Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton, 253-6, David Quint has uncovered a further series of echoes of Os Lusíadas in Paradise Lost.