Give Me Freedom by John Chandler

This Play is the copyright of the Author, and may not be performed, copied or sold without the Author's prior consent

A Prison Cell. Dimly lit. John Milton is sitting by a table illuminated by a candle. He is blind,
and looks older than his 50 years. He is reciting from memory part of the 78th psal

JOHN MILTON "God changed their rivers to blood; their streams
they could not drink. He sent insects that devoured them, frogs that
destroyed them. He gave their harvest to the caterpillar, the fruits
of their labor to the locust. He killed their vines with hail, their
trees with frost He unleashed against them his fiery breath, roaring
furiously, storming messenger of death."

As he is reciting this Psalm, Andrew Marvell enters.

JOHN MILTON Welcome Andrew!

ANDREW MARVELL What need has a man for eyes when he can see through
the back of his head!

JOHN MILTON Before I heard your voice, I knew it was you by your
scent! Takes me back to Provence when the lavender was in bloom.
Fields of vibrant blue. I can see them now.

ANDREW MARVELL Pray tell me sir, that which you were speaking is not
what you have been composing. If it is, I will surely fail to get you
released from this prison.

JOHN MILTON No, no, Andrew my friend, the words I was reciting are
not mine. They are from the Bible.

ANDREW MARVELL The Bible? Surely you jest.

JOHN I was trying to recall the 78th Psalm. Believe me, I didn't
write it. No one knows who did. Some claim David wrote all the Psalms,
but it does not sound to me like those attributed to David. His are
much more melodious and lyrical, the work of a great poet.

ANDREW Since the Bible is the word of God, this fellow, King David,
or whoever, must have heard the words from God and wrote them down,
as I have been writing down your words to Paradise Lost.

JOHN MILTON Hmmm. If these are God's words, why do you think he
would refer to himself in the third person?

ANDREW MARVEL The air in here is most fowl. May I open a window?

He opens a shutter and light from outside brightens the cell.

JOHN MILTON Most likely it is due to prison food. Simple fare.
Tasty, but too many beans and turnips.

ANDREW laughs
We have to get you out of here. This is no place for a gentleman and
a man of lettersIndeed, England's greatest poet, you deserve much
finer quarters.

JOHN You flatter me. However, when we finish Paradise Lost, we
might be worthy of a little praise.

ANDREW We? I'm but your scribe putting down on paper what you
recite, my lord.

JOHN Every day we hear of new discoveries. Someday someone will
invent a way for a blind man to read and write.

ANDREW
That will be the day.

JOHN I imagine ancient writing, like cuneiform could have been
read without eyes as I can read gravestones with my fingers. Perhaps I
could engrave my words in stone? Hmm. Another project for another
day.

ANDREW Would take a lifetime don't you think?
For now, I am honored to be your eyes.

JOHN Prison is not so bad. There are few of the distractions that
normally interrupt my thoughts. I am well taken care of here, and
although apparently alone, I take pleasure in thinking that I am in
good company, having been sent to prison for speaking the truth.
Prisons have often been made to prevent people from speaking where
others might overhear them.
Did I tell you I visited Galileo when I was in Italy?

ANDREW No

JOHN John Donne wrote of Galileo's discoveries:
"The New philosophy calls all in doubt;
The element of fire is quite put out."
I feel that sums up my first response as well. To think we are on a
great ball of earth and sea, whirling around the sun, and all the
while spinning like a bowing ball. Makes me quite dizzy. What keeps
the oceans from spewing out their waters? What keeps us from following
after? It is reassuring and comforting to think that my world and we
in it are the center of the universe, while everything else revolves
around us.
..Established ways of thinking are comforting, but what the world
needs are new and challenging ideas, freely expressed.

ANDREW His new cosmology, if true, would it not make the Bible
false? I cannot accept that.

JOHN Perhaps here and there might be found contradictions, but not
the entire book, Andrew. There are many things in the Bible I find
hard to believe (chuckles) old men many times my age begetting
children, for example. Even at my age I can't imagine any more
"begetting".

ANDREW But the Bible is the word of God, John. I do hope this is
not the sort of thing you are writing! Imagine your judges reading
such blasphemy while deciding whether to let you get out of here and
go home!

JOHN MILTON The Old Testament is largely a history book, Andrew.
Oh there is much to admire in it, but like any history, written
several centuries after the events recorded, it is not entirely
accurate and certainly not complete. For a large part, the Old
Testament is a history of the Jewish people. Take for example this
line from the Psalm I was reciting:

"God drove out the nations before them, apportioned them a heritage
by lot, settled the tribes of Israel in their tents."

According to the Bible, God gave his "chosen people" land
belonging to others. Are we not also His people? What if we are
descendents of those driven out? And if the latter, who is worshiping
our own gods now? How would it make you feel, Andrew, for a powerful
person to came along and give England to the French or to the Spanish?
Or some African or Asian nation with its own deities who forbade us to
worship our own gods?

There are other histories of other peoples as ancient and even older
as theirs. And these other histories speak of many other gods. How
can we be sure we are worshiping the right one, Andrew?

ANDREW Speaking of ideas that make our heads spin! But surely
John you must believe there is but one god and all the others are
false gods?

JOHN Sometimes I do, but then, monotheism is a theory perpetrated
by one of the myriad gods, and accepted as a fact, but a fact not
proven, and accepted only by Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Many
religions are pantheistic.

If He is the only god, why did his first commandment say not to put
other gods before Him?" Some of the earlier people's stories tell
of people who worshiped female gods, goddesses of fertility and
harvest and hearth, peaceful earth deities. Others , mostly
barbarians from the North, worshiped sky gods, gods of lightning and
war. The god of the Old Testament is a sky god, who supposedly took
the land away from, say, for example, a peaceful fertility god, by
force, and gave it to other people. For this gift, he wanted and
expected their undivided attention, obedience, and praise.

I find it amusing to think that the great battle in heaven between
the forces of darkness and the forces of the light might have been a
battle between the many gods for supremacy. Suppose Satan was the god
Apollo, and the one we worship was Zeus, and Apollo and Demeter and
all the other Greco/Roman and Near Eastern gods were cast out of
heaven? Not to mention the Scandinavian, Hindu, and the other Asian
and African gods.

ANDREW John! Certainly you believe the god we worship is the
right God, and the one who created the earth, and man, as the Bible
describes in Genesis?

JOHN The creation is beautifully described there, isn't it?
(Pause)
But if God is all-powerful, I can't help wondering why it took him
so long. And why he needed to rest upon its completion.

ANDREW Stop it! Someone will hear you! God himself will hear you
and strike you dumb.

JOHN Do you think God made me blind?

ANDREW He blinded St Paul, temporarily, knocked him off his horse
on his way to Damascus, did he not? But in so doing, he made him see
the truth for the first time.

JOHN We call lightning, floods, hurricanes, volcanoes, plagues,
droughts, and other horrendous natural phenomena "acts of God".
All of them terrible and terrifying things, and then we are asked to
worship Him, he who torments us with such devastating behavior.

ANDREW I despair at achieving your release, John. Even if I
should succeed, you would be back here within a week if anyone heard
you speaking such blasphemous things, asking such questions, and
raising such doubts. No! You would not be sent back here, You would
be hung or worse!

JOHN Maybe I ought to write my poem in a language the Royalists do
not understand. Sanscrit, perhaps. Otherwise some may find it
shocking, as they have with the words of Galileo, or Copernicus. Or
Bruno. Do you know Andrew, when they were about to light the fire
under Giordano Bruno's feet, he is supposed to have said, "You are
probably more afraid what you are about to do than I am. Some day
everyone will believe as I do" pause
As I said, I am in good company.

ANDRE MARVELL I cannot bear to think of them burning you… or
your manuscript, for that matter. You may not appreciate it, John,
but you have not been treated nearly as badly as others who advocated
the trial and execution of the King's father. Most people who
attacked the political or religious status quo were not only
imprisoned for treason, but had their ears cut off and letters branded
on their cheeks. And all of those who, like yourself, supported the
trial and execution of the king were then hung, drawn and quartered.

JOHN Tell me, Andrew, do you think I might become more famous,
more likely to be remembered in posterity, if I were burned at the
stake, or hung, or drawn and quartered? If I am allowed to live to
complete this poem will anyone read it? And if anyone did, would they
burn it along with its author? Maybe I stand a better chance of being
one of the immortals if they execute me.

ANDREW The King has permitted you to live thus far because he
admires your sonnets. He is a patron of the arts, and he finds it
amusing that you be spared to continue writing. However, if you insist
on making Satan the hero of your story, I doubt the king will continue
to be amused.

JOHN Do you think Satan, or Lucifer, as I might prefer to call him,
is the hero of my tale?

ANDREW Picks up a page of text
If he is not then why do you give him such lines as "The mind is
its own place, and in itself can make a Heav'n of Hell and a Hell of
Heav'n"Or this line, spoke by Satan in Hell: "At least here
we shall be freethe Almightywill not drive us hence, Better to
reign in Hell than serve in Heav'n"

JOHN My Satan, the one I created in this make believe tale, is a
hero in the Aristotelian sense: a good person of noble stature, an
angel in fact, with outstanding quality and greatness about him. His
destruction and ruin is for a greater cause or principle. Do I not
have Satan and his following, an army of angels, cast out of heaven by
God's volcanoes and thrown into the sulfurous abyss? Talk about a
downfall!
If I am sympathetic with Satan, it is because he attempted to
overthrow an unjust and tyrannical, king. A king not fit to rule.

ANDREW Hush! You mustn't talk that way! Justifying the trial and
execution of King Charles the First was bad enough to get you sent
here, but justifying and attempting the overthrow of God, the King of
Kings?

JOHN Are you asking me, the man who wrote Areopagitica, and who
is totally opposed to censorship, to censor himself? Government
should not be permitted to prevent a moral man from making moral
arguments, for asking questions and stimulating discussion, no matter
how much of what he writes or says may offend traditional ideas and
opinions. And no matter how wrong his opinions may be, for that
matter.

ANDREW You would censor government but not yourself?

JOHN Government may continue to express its opinions, and permit me
to express my own if I disagree. Speech, both oral and written,
should be free from censorship.

ANDREW I only want to save your neck from the noose, John. How
can you slander our creator with such words?

JOHN I appreciate your efforts, Andrew. I really do. However,
I will not save my neck by not sticking it out. Slander? According
to the authors of the Old Testament the God they worshiped attempted
to govern his kingdom out of fear. He commanded men to do his bidding
—not always because such behavior might be the right thing to do, but
because he said so, because to behave otherwise would be disloyal,
unfaithful. Did GOD create men just so they would worship Him? HIS
People were told to worship and obey him, and they would be expected
to do so out of fear for their lives, and when they strayed, he
tormented them, and yes, often killed them. What's more, if the
Bible be always true, at times he killed them simply because, like a
jealous husband, he suspected they might be ungrateful or unfaithful.

ANDREW Surely you do not believe this?

JOHN It's in the book. Over and over again. Not only in the psalm I
was reciting when you entered.. Take Genesis, and the story of the
flood. It says this heavenly King caused a flood to kill every human
being in the world except Noah and his family. Think of it, Andrew.
He murdered every other living woman and child. How wicked could a
little girl, a few weeks old, be? What could one fresh out of the
womb have possibly done to warrant such a death sentence? Not to
mention the lambs, the cattle, the wheat and crops. If a worldly
monarch did the same, would he not be a tyrant? Should there not be
a rebellion?

Yes. It's true. I am sympathetic with the Satan character in my
story. I sometimes call him Lucifer, rather than Satan, because Satan
has had a bad press. We have come to thinking him the personification
of Evil. Lucifer means "the bringer of light." The enlightened
one He tried, in my story, to set things right in heaven, and he
failed. Here in England Cromwell had a better army than the king, and
he won the war but lost the opportunity to make a better, happier
world. Instead our "Lord Protector" became an even more
oppressive tyrant. He and his Roundheads chased everyone out of the
pleasure garden, forbade free speech, closed the theaters, outlawed
all earthly pleasures, considered laughter a vice. Good riddance.

ANDREW You make a good case, John. in a legal sense at least, but
is England is the world, ready for it? I know I am not ready
for it.

JOHN The world will never be ready for the freedom to express new
and contrary ideas unless we make a case for it, one voice at a time.
But my story certainly does not end with the victory of enlightenment
over the forces of darkness. Far from it. I do want people to read
it after all, and it is fiction Make believe rather than belief is
what matters here. When we are finished, I think you might not find
fault with what we write. Paradise is, after all, lost.temporarily.
However, in my larger plan, my story does not end there. There will
follow-up a sequel where Paradise is regained.

ANDREW How so?

JOHN Paradise Regained will be about the coming of Jesus and his
message of love and forgiveness. If the Old Testament God tried and
failed to rule out of fear, Jesus replaced rules requiring obedience
or else with examples of how one might behave. He replaced fear with
hope. His followers ought not behave as a flock of frightened sheep,
but as individual people who want to do kind and loving acts,
following the examples he set for us. Whether or not Jesus was the Son
of God, he certainly was not a chip off the old block!

ANDREW Hope replaces fear. I like it! Can we skip to the sequel
now, John?

JOHN laughs
In due time, Andrew. But lets complete "Lost" first.

ANDREW The Lost shall be First.

[end of extract]

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