12 hours of Paradise as Milton enters the internet age

To celebrate the 400th anniversary of Milton’s birth, Cambridge University is holding a rare, live reading of what is regarded by many as the most powerful and influential epic poem ever written in English. The mammoth undertaking will start at 9am and will cover each of Paradise Lost’s 12 books; some 10,000 lines of poetry in total. It is expected to take the entire day.

Fans of the great poet will be able to watch the live performance in the University’s English Faculty, drop in and out of a lecture theatre showing a live video feed, or tune in from anywhere in the world via the Milton 400 website, http://www.christs.cam.ac.uk/milton400/. Anyone who misses that can download a podcast from the same address after the event. The whole thing is completely free.

Paradise Lost, first published in 1667, marks for many the moment at which Milton affirmed his position as second only to Shakespeare in the pantheon of great English poets. It offers an expansive retelling of the Creation, the defeat of the rebel angels under Satan, and the Fall of Adam and Eve.

Writers ever since, from Shelley and Blake to CS Lewis and Neil Gaiman, have been fascinated by Milton’s exploration of the psychology of rebellion and the way in which he extended the possibilities of the English language as he sought to “justify the ways of God to men”. The epic formed the basis for Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. “Paradise Lost” has even been borrowed as the name for a death metal band.

Due to its huge size, however, live performances of the poem tend to be few and far between. The Cambridge rendition is organised by Christ’s College (where Milton himself studied) in collaboration with the Faculty of English and forms part of the University’s new Festival of Ideas. It will be the first time it has ever been broadcast live online.

“Poetry has always been something to read out or sing, but increasingly since Milton’s day people have tended to read it silently or in private,” Dr Gavin Alexander, a fellow of Christ’s who will open Thursday’s performance by reading Book I, said.

“You lose the music of the words if you never hear poetry out loud. Even for those who have read the whole poem, Paradise Lost is something many have, until now, been unable to hear. It’s not often that a performance on this scale is attempted, but the whole point of Milton’s anniversary celebrations is to try new things and show that he still has the ability to grab new readers.”

For Milton himself, who was blind and had to dictate the whole of Paradise Lost to a scribe, the sound of the words inevitably mattered a great deal. The poem has an extraordinary imaginative range, with Milton striving to summon up heaven, hell and everything in between. This reading will be a test of the ability of Milton’s words to communicate that vision.

He believed that he had made himself blind with reading (and that it had been worth it), but many readers of Milton’s poetry sense that with his blindness came a kind of mental claustrophobia. The poem contrasts the light of heaven with the profound darkness of hell. The setting for the live performance, the drama studio in the University’s English Faculty, is a black, box-like room. “Listening to the poem in that space will feel a little like inhabiting the blind Milton’s head, with darkness only resisted by the force of his imagination,” Alexander said.

Each of the poem’s 12 books has been assigned to a senior Faculty member. Each will use the space in a different way. Some books will have a single reader, while in others students and colleagues will perform the various different parts, from God to Adam and Eve. In some cases the reading will be accompanied by images, lighting effects and installations. These different approaches aim to show something of the poem’s power and range.

The date of October 23rd is also significant. In 1650, Milton’s contemporary Bishop James Ussher published The Annals Of The World Deduced From The Origin Of Time, in which he claimed that the start of Creation occurred on the evening before October 23rd, 4004 BC.

At noon the following day, he argued, “the light was created; which God severing from the darknesse, called the one day, and the other night.” While Ussher’s work has not survived the test of time in the manner of Paradise Lost, and though Milton himself almost certainly thought he was a fool, the reading will by 17th century standards mark the 6,011th anniversary of the creation of the world.

The event forms just part of an ongoing series of celebrations led by Christ’s College to mark Milton’s 400th year. The programme, which started in January, has already featured exhibitions, lectures by a number of eminent speakers and school visits to the College itself. A series of concerts are planned for the anniversary on December 9th.

Students at Christ’s have also created a website, Darkness Visible (http://www.christs.cam.ac.uk/darknessvisible/), which is packed with information and interactive features for schoolchildren, students and first-time readers of Milton.

The performance of Paradise Lost will be held in the Judith E. Wilson Drama Studio at the University of Cambridge Faculty of English, 9 West Road, Cambridge, on October 23rd, from 9am to 9pm. The studio itself will be accessible between books, but visitors are welcome to watch the live video feed, which will be shown in a lecture theatre in the same building, at any time. All aspects of the event are free to view and/or attend. For more details, including a full timetable, please visit the website, linked to the right of this page.