Milton's life, as every English major knows, divides into three periods: a youthful apprenticeship, ending with Lycidas; pamphleteering on behalf of the Parliamentary and Puritan causes, ending with the Restoration; and, finally, blindness and the composition of the famous epic poems, ending with death. Maybe that is not how it seemed to him while he was living it, but he is now a character in literary history, and that is what he gets.
I thought of Milton's biography while watching with Amanda Howards End (1992), our latest Netflix rental. It's the Merchant-Ivory version of E. M. Forster's novel of the same title in which the characters are all meant to represent their class: lower-middle, up-and-coming, and crusty rich. Given these choices, who wouldn't want up-and-coming? Emma Thompson and Helena Bonham Carter, Merchant & Ivory call on you!
Possibly, from 30,000 feet, everything breaks into threes. The plot, similarly tidy, involves an altered will and poetic justice. The novel is Forster's, the screenplay is Ruth Prawer Jhablava's, the technique is O. Henry's, and the Oscars go to Thompson and Vanessa Redgrave (whose character writes the codicil that gets tossed into the fire). It takes 140 minutes for the up-and-comers to get what they deserve. England, hooray!
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