Paradise Regained and Spenser's Legend of Holiness

Abstract

One of the works said to have been in Milton's mind when he wrote Paradise Regained is Book n of The Faerie Queene. According to Edwin Greenlaw, ‘the three days of temptation of Guyon concludes a series of incidents that pretty certainly influenced Paradise Regained— Mammon's proffer of riches, worldly power, fame; the three days without sleep or food, followed by exhaustion; the angel sent to care for Guyon after the trial is over; even the debates between Mammon and Guyon, which parallel Christ's rebukes of Satan.’ These likenesses seem real enough, and the evidence has support from the wellknown passage on Guyon in Areopagitica. Still I should like to suggest here—and I have not seen the idea mentioned elsewhere—that Milton's poem was also influenced, and more strongly perhaps, by the first book of The Faerie Queene, Spenser's Legend of Holiness.A good place to begin the argument is with the fact that Books i and n of The Faerie Queene themselves have many similarities of structure and episode—a fact which so admiring a reader of Spenser as John Milton would surely have noticed.