Milton’s greatest villains are also his best rhetoricians. In his later works, he imagines evil as a speechmaker who can convince you of anything. His most disturbing characters are figures like Comus and Satan, magnetic speechmakers who sow chaos by seducing their victims with visions of a life free from difficulty or pain. In these later speeches, Milton draws from the argument his speaker makes in “L’Allegro,” using his speech on a life full of pleasure as a model for the speeches of his most famous villains.
Milton wrote the play Comus three years after he wrote “L’Allegro,” and in many ways, the works echo each other. In Milton’s play, Comus encounters a young woman lost in the woods at night, and promises to lead her back into safety. He presents himself as a guide, which is exactly how the speaker in “L’Allegro” imagines himself when he calls Mirth to follow him, and compares himself to the shepherd Orpheus leading his wife out of the underworld. Comus even uses some of the same words as Milton’s earlier speaker. He calls for his followers to “trip” around him, just as the speaker in “L’Allegro” tells Mirth and her companions to “trip it as you go.” The two characters are making the same argument, for a life full of pleasure, and some scholars have suggested that the young woman’s response to Comus takes the place of “Il Penseroso” in Milton’s earlier debate.
The language of “L’Allegro” also appears in the mouth of Satan as he tempts Eve to eat the apple that will doom her and Adam in “Paradise Lost.” Early on in the poem, Satan plots with his “crew,” much like the speaker in “L’Allegro” gathers Mirth’s “crew” around him. He then appears in Eve’s dreams, seducing her first in scenes that echo the dreams within dreams at the end of “L’Allegro.” Finally, Satan appears before the tree to sway Eve with his speech. Before he begins, Milton describes him holding himself like an “orator renowned / In Athens or free Rome,” like one of the classical speechmakers Milton models in “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso.” The speech that follows is full of rhetorical flourishes, winding through a smooth logic that ultimately traps Eve. In the end, the thing that makes Satan truly dangerous is the tricks Milton honed in “L’Allegro”: his power to make a speech.
