"Paradise Lost": Epic and Opera (Sacra Rappresentazione) (Opera Review‪)‬

1. John Milton's great epic poem cannot be easily summarized nor conveniently reduced to a simple description. The twelve books of the familiar 1674, or second edition of the poem, comprises 10, 565 lines, by no means the longest poem in English--Spenser's Faerie Queene (1590, 1596), or Joseph Beaumont's Psyche (1648), or a number of Victorian epics, all are longer. Of course, Milton's poem is not brief, yet it is paradoxically both vastly capacious and fiercely concise. It is about good and evil; life and death; innocence and experience; joy and sorrow; love and hate; and many more similarly expressive and contrasting pairs. 2. Paradise Lost is often simply described in such terms. Although inadequate, they all possess enormous implications with the possibility of different emphases. Milton, as we know, had sketched various biblical dramas, including "Adam Unparadized," in the Trinity manuscript as early as 1640. Such considerations were eventually to become realized in the great drama of the Fall of Man within the grand divine plan of creation and salvation.