Milton and the end of Renaissance friendship

This study traces the impact of the humanist revival of classical friendship on the life and works of John Milton. Placing his relationship with Charles Diodati within the tradition of Neoplatonic friendship articulated by Marsilio Ficino, the initial chapters reinterpret the pivotal decade of Milton's early biography, the 1630s: the long scholarly retirement following his matriculation from Cambridge (1632--37), Comus (1634), the alleged vow of virginity (1637), Lycidas (1637), the Italian journey (1638--39), Diodati's death (1638), and the dedication to epic poetry in Epitaphium Damonis (1639). Chapter One contests prevailing psychoanalytic assessments of Milton's personality and offers an innovative reading of Comus, the work most associated with his psychological development. Chapter Two argues that Diodati's death compels Milton to turn from a collaborative model of authorship to a poetics of mourning and isolation, a move that coincides with his progression from pastoral to epic poetry.;The middle of the dissertation investigates Milton's prose and examines how he draws on theories of friendship to redefine the nature of marital and political relations. Chapter Three contends that Milton writes the homoerotic discourse of Renaissance friendship into the ideal of marriage developed in his divorce tracts and depicted in Paradise Lost. Chapter Four explores the influence of Ciceronian and Stoic ideas of amicitia on Milton's political writings, particularly in the latter's delineation of popular sovereignty and anxieties about effeminacy and uxoriousness. Chapter Five concludes the dissertation by illuminating the conflicting pressures that these marital and political theories place on Adam, Eve, and Raphael in Paradise Lost. Although this study takes Milton as its focus, it also makes a larger argument about how the revival of classical friendship shapes Renaissance discourses of gender and sexuality.