Milton's "Fit Audience"

abstract:In the narrator's evocation of "fit audience . . . though few," Paradise Lost responds to Milton's immediate circumstances in Restoration England. Yet the desire to find, encourage, or create a "fit audience," coupled with a conviction that such an audience will necessarily be "few" in number, remained a preoccupation of Milton's throughout his career. Looking closely at Milton's prose works, from Areopagitica to The Readie and Easie Way, and at the language of the "fit" and "few" in poetry up to and beyond Paradise Lost, this article traces Milton's complex and evolving concept of a fit audience. As Milton's confidence in the people themselves decreases, he increasingly depends on divine aid to find or create that fit audience.