Fiddling with Milton

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Good and evil slug it out in Paradise Lost. Good triumphs, just about. So, too, in the Oxford Stage Company’s version of Milton’s epic, where flashes of brilliance overcome a few choppy patches. The staging is simple and sometimes powerful but the costumes are a poor blend of mediaeval pastiche and modern party-gear ripped up and spattered with blood. The ensemble playing is very strong and at least one of the visual settings — where Satan surveys the solar system — is extraordinarily beautiful. But the text has been fiddled with a lot. I was surprised by unMiltonic phrases like ‘Let us recognise’ and when I got home I checked my 1674 edition, with its wonderfully gnarled spellings. In Book II Death, the ‘grieslie terrour’, confronts Satan at the gates of Hell (‘Hell-doomd’ being a name Death gives Satan.)

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And reck’n’st thou thy self with Spirits of Heav’n,
Hell-doomd, and breath’st defiance here and scorn,
Where I reign King, and to enrage thee more,
Thy King and Lord?

In this adaptation we get,

Dost reckonest thou thyself a spirit of heaven
When I reign king and what is more, thy lord?