However, when Milton came to compose Paradise Lost in the late 1650s, he had abandoned the idea of presenting the story as a play. The outline has much in common with Paradise Lost and is considered a stage in the development of Milton's thinking on the great epic. In the years after Paradise Lost was published, Milton also wrote a tragedy in the Greek style, Samson Agonistes, but in his introduction he made it clear that it was never intended for the stage.īy 1642, Milton had written a detailed outline for a play, a tragedy, called Adam Unparadised. Comus has a more developed story than many masques (which, like Milton's epic, centres around temptation), but is also highly philosophical and discursive in its presentation. They involved great spectacle - lavish costumes and scenery, music and dancing - but the exercise was a symbolic expression of social order, often presenting moral values, not a dramatic exploration of story or character. Entertainments were performed in aristocratic homes or at the royal court, usually by members of a noble family, for a private audience. While they were written for performance, they are not dramatic in the way we'd think of, for example, a Shakespeare play being. In his early twenties, he wrote two entertainments: 'Arcades' and the masque now known as Comus. Milton was intimately familiar with classical drama, and the poems 'On Shakespeare' and 'L'Allegro' show his admiration for contemporary drama. Milton's initial jottings about a play called Adam Unparadised, which would eventually turn into Paradise Lost. Whether you are considering putting on a version yourself or simply looking for a new way to think about the poem, there are some tricky questions to ask. Let's take a brief look at Milton's own relationship to the performing arts, and the history of Paradise Lost in performance, before returning to this idea and thinking about how one might go about staging or filming this epic. But then the realization struck: so too are the difficulties of Paradise Lost as a text for performance. the opportunities here for special effects and character acting are huge. When I first thought about a film version, I was thrown into the heady raptures of movie-lover bliss at the idea of epic battle sequences, the plunging descent into hell, Satan's proud rallying speeches counterpoised by his doubting and twisted private monologues. There has been very little information since, and one wonders if the project has been shelved, but the prospect of Milton's poem becoming a Hollywood blockbuster is an exciting, if problematic, one. In April 2006 it was announced that Legendary Pictures were to make a film version of Paradise Lost.
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