ABSTRACT
The literary and dramatic voice of the revolution is John Milton, and his protagonists are made on a correspondingly gigantic scale. A lady of firm chastity is entrapped by Comus. The name ‘ Comus’ comes from the Greek for ‘revel’, from which people derive their word ‘comedy’. Milton's solution was dramatic. He had for long planned dramas on biblical themes, and for long his imagination had been fired by the figure of Samson. Milton labours for the harmonization of virility and goodness, and in Samson Agonistes makes a final effort to fuse human and physical strength with divine meaning. Milton's return to the Old Testament allows him to incorporate both the Jesus and the Satan of Paradise Regained within his new, and for him more inclusive, hero. Milton, who was presumably writing for a Puritan public, succeeded as has no other British dramatist in aligning the Dionysian and destructive energies with a God who commanded unquestioned belief.
