Milton enjoyed little wide-scale early success, either in prose or poetry, until the production of his later, controversial political works starting with The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates and Eikonoklastes.
Although Milton was known early on for a poem that he wrote about Shakespeare and for his masque Comus, he was only a minor figure until he started writing in a pamphlet war.
[1] His writing brought him into a position of power in the Commonwealth, Secretary for Foreign Tongues to the Council of State, and he served in that duty from 1649 until 1659.
[15] Milton wrote A Treatise of Civil Power to warn against claims of heresy and of attempts to limit free speech in regards to religious matters.
[16] The Ready and Easy Way was written by Milton during the final moments of the Commonwealth and sought to promote his views on the establishment and constitution of an English Republic.
For instance, scholars have argued that Paradise Lost was informed in part by contemporaneous comic broadsides like The Life and Death of Mris.
[19][20] As Christopher N. Warren has argued, “For a republican independent like Milton observing these gestures, it was vital to demonstrate that the Presbyterians could not trust the promises of safety implied by the royalist allegories.”[21] Paradise Lost’s Sin and Death allegory speaks to this concern by forestalling “comic reconciliation,” urging the reader to recall England’s violent political past, rather than “forgetting or sanitizing” the past in the move towards reconciliation.
[23] When the Rump Parliament was removed and Oliver Cromwell became the Protector in December 1653, Milton, and other republicans, believed that the Commonwealth was not following the proper governmental path.
[27] Once Cromwell died and the Commonwealth fell apart, Milton returned to his republican principles, and he published several works in opposition to a monarchical form of government.
[6] Milton's involvement with the licensing controversy proved to be important, and his ideas influenced later discussions of truth and the freedom of printing.