Historicizing Irony: The Case of Milton and the Restoration

Abstract

In September 1660 Thomas Rugg, professional barber and amateur court and social observer, reader of newsbooks, pamphlets and broadsides, listener at street corners and coffee houses, noted in his 'Diurnal' of the years 1659-1661 the sudden craze for novelty tobacco boxes:"At this time great store of tobacco boxes was made, the outside of the box lide the late Kinge, the inside of the box lide the present King Charles the Second, and one the inside of the bottome the picture of Oliver Cromwell, leaninge to a post and gallow tree over his heade, and about his neck a haulter tied to the tree, and by him the pictuer of the devill, wide-mouthed."Rugg then explains these ironical juxtapositions-familiar as they arein the Restoration context- in a rather surprising way: his responseto the rise and fall of the princes of the earth is medieval or, onecould also say, 'Miltonic'. Instead of the customary sarcastic crowingover Cromwell's reversal he offers, in this cockpit of partisanship, a curiously detached formula that embraces the two Charles as well asCromwell in its moral orbit: "so that men in great power (right orwrong goten), are admired, but once fallen from that are the mostdispiseable men that are."