An excellent demonstration of how performance that seems designed for the pursuit of truth can deceive its audience into misunderstanding reality, how performance can be used for evil in the context of good, is John Milton's "Paradise Lost." Milton is an excellent counterpoint to this study of performance for several reasons. First, Milton is a devout Puritan who retells one of the most prominent stories in the Christian mythos-his religious affiliations alone make him an apt choice for comparison to Thomas Shepard and his sermon. Second, Milton (1608-1674) and Shepard (1605-1649) were contemporaries for most of their lives, and studying them in contrast will provide different viewpoints on similar times. Third, "Paradise Lost" is a narrative epic poem, allowing us to see performance and drama operate in a different sphere from Shepard's church sermon. And fourth, Milton's telling of the Fall depends on misunderstanding God's truth and striving to achieve the misrepresentation because one has come to accept it as real, which is in stark contrast to Shepard's invocation of and calling to God's truth.

Satan in "Paradise Lost" plays the role of the great tempter who leads Adam and Eve to their doom by enticing Eve to eat the forbidden fruit and then to give it to Adam. In Milton's telling of the story, Satan is dangerous to God's creation-and fascinating to the reader-because he is an ever-shifting character who tricks, cajoles, and manipulates other characters in order to achieve his goals. Satan is the ultimate deceiver, a role-player and a liar few are capable of facing without falling prey to his misrepresentations of the truth. I assert that Satan is essentially an actor with a cosmological agenda, which I will discuss in detail in this section, and which complicates the nature of performance. Misrepresentation of the truth through performance by Satan provides evidence that performance can be misleading and potentially harmful, even in a divine context. This, in turn, calls into question the veracity and stability of the performance of the Puritan minister in the pulpit by making the means of explicating or relating "truth" suspect.

All this talk of Satan's bad intentions requires pause to clarify what is meant by "evil." The problem of evil (What is it? Where did it come from? What does its presence tell us about the world and ourselves?) has haunted societies of people since time immemorial, Christianity included. Different peoples have had various strategies for dealing with the problem of evil, ranging from the denial of the reality evil altogether (as in a monism that maintains that evil is but an illusion, such as Buddhism) to the positing of evil as one ultimate force, equally balanced with good, in a dual reality (as in Zoroastrianism) (Frye 21). Christianity, however, uses neither of these views, but occupies a space somewhere between the two:

"The reality of evil is not denied [by Christianity], yet it is regarded as only a perversion of real existence. Its attractive power is admitted, yet held to be a strictly inferior power. Thus the Christian maintains neither the monist nor the dualist solution of the problem of evil, but accepts the reality of evil while holding that it is both subordinate and perverse." (Frye 21)

The abstract notion of evil is impersonal and hard to understand, but Christianity makes evil immediate and comprehensible by metaphorically representing evil in the form of Satan. Satan is understood as the source and the expression of all evil in the world, making him a potential threat to God and humanity:

"Christianity summarizes the source of evil under the symbol of the demonic, and the essence of the demonic is the aspiration to godhead, the attempt to usurp the place of the Creator, followed by assault upon creation in a frenzy of hate which irrevocably dedicates itself to a continuous destruction of life. Satan is thus the continuous source of evil . . . He is not an independent being set opposite an equally independent good being, and his fall from heaven comes from precisely his false claim to be just that." (Fry 22)

Satan's falsehood runs deeper than just his false beliefs in his equality with God and his false claims to power. His cosmological positioning below God compromises not only himself, but also the very nature of evil as well. Satan's demise is greater than his being declared an anathema because the legitimacy of his very existence-and the existence of the evil he embodies-is threatened.

"In the Christian conception, then, evil is totally subordinate to God . . . It is . . . basically a lie, carrying at the core of its existence a falsification of its own nature. As evil itself, it cannot be denied, but must not be made absolute. In its relation to man, its power should not be underestimated, yet in relation to God it is as nothing." (Frye 22-23)

Evil and Satan may not exist independently of the allowance of their existence by God, and they may not have any legitimate claims to power in the Christian cosmology, but they are both nonetheless extremely dangerous. Both are attractive to the minds of humans, and both can present tempting possibilities to humans in an effort to lead them astray by their own free will, all without Satan's or evil's exertion of any power over the human, the world, or God. Satan, as the embodiment of evil in the world, has the ultimate goal of attaining some sort of power that is autonomous of God. "The thrust of Satan's aspiration is to enjoy himself rather than God, to become the bearer of his own image, to become power without love" (Frye 23).

Satan is particularly dangerous in a Puritan context, despite his compromised position and lack of power. Satan becomes the object of a powerful fascination of the human mind, both because of the inherently enticing nature of evil and because of humanity's tie to evil through original sin (the condition of sin that marks all humans, a result of Adam and Eve's first act of disobedience). Common Puritan teaching was that "Satan was a wizard of disguise" (Delbanco 32) who could deceive and appeal to humans despite his being "a metaphor for ultimate nonbeing" (Delbanco 48). Most terrifying of all was that, after his defeat at the hands of God and expulsion from Heaven, Satan had his sight set on the corruption of humanity as a form of indirect assault on God by misleading God's most prized creation.

"As the Genesis story confirmed, he [Satan] had charm at the ready; he had the ability to inspire confidence in even the riskiest ventures . . . he was restless within the world as it was delivered to him. And he had the glint of ambition in his eye. With all these ominous attributes, he gave up the futile quest for equality with God, and turned to the conscription of man." (Delbanco 44)

Puritans were fascinated by the threat Satan posed, were absolutely terrified of him, and spent considerable time and effort coping with this most dangerous menace. Puritan awareness of the presence of Satan and sin, both within and without, is legendary:

"There is no body of writing before or since the Puritans that has issued more precise maps of the intricate soul; ministers took exquisite, almost competitive, pains in laying out the traps and dodges of Satan as he wound his way into the hearts of unwary men. Yet Satan is almost never pictured vividly . . . The Puritan's Satan was much more an abstract idea than a representable creature or thing . . . and sin itself tended to be represented as a kidnapping of the soul by a captor less brutal than maddeningly elusive." (Delbanco 45)

Satan's prominence in Puritan minds is a result of Satan's being both fascinating and incredibly dangerous to the humans he threatens. As humans, Puritans are drawn to Satan and the possibilities of thought and action that he offers. As Christians, they resist his influence and fear for their eternal souls. Satan the tempter, Satan the deceiver, Satan the corrupter, Satan the evil, Satan the alluring-it is no wonder that the Puritan Milton made Satan such a prominent and attractive character in "Paradise Lost."

Satan is a difficult character to fully understand because every aspect of him-body, mind, actions, opinions-is filled with contradiction and falsity. In discussing Satan's deceptive effect on others, it is useful first to establish characteristics of Satan that force the reader to question him, then to examine the performative aspects of his behavior. In beginning this task, it is interesting to note that Satan also sometimes has a hard time understanding his complete self. His psyche is subject to seemingly haphazard shifting and manipulation. A passage in Book IV that describes the mind and memory of Satan makes it apparent that Satan himself is subject to his own ever-shifting nature: "Now conscience wakes despair / That slumbered" (IV.23-24). Character instabilities such as this one have lead many scholars to the conclusion that "Satan's states of awareness . . . are murky and changeable . . . The fallen Satan . . . is a creature of moods, apprehending reality through mists of self-deception and forgetfulness. This wavering, slumbering, deceptive state of consciousness is another factor that gives Satan fictional depth, concealing him from our full knowledge" (Carey 137). Not even Satan completely understands himself all the time, making it highly unlikely that those whom Satan encounters will have an accurate understanding of him either.

Some of the earliest physical descriptions of Satan call the reader's attention to the fact that Satan is not a character to be taken lightly, and that he is a character who may or may not be as he seems. The narrative in "Paradise Lost" begins as Satan and his followers awaken in Hell after their expulsion from Heaven, which resulted because of the failed revolt lead by the archangel Lucifer, now known as Satan (this shift in nomenclature is significant, but the reader does not learn of Satan's previous name in his previous position until later in the narrative). The description of Satan as he lies on Hell's floor, gathering his senses, indicates that Satan is of enormous physical size:

"Thus Satan talking to his nearest mate
With head uplift above the wave, and eyes
That sparkling blazed, his other parts besides
Prone on the flood, extended long and large
Lay floating many a rood, in bulk as huge
As whom the fables name of monstrous size,
Titanian, or Earth-born, that warred on Jove,
Briareos or Typhon, whom the den
By ancient Tarsus held, or that sea-beast
Leviathan, which God of all his works
Created hugest that swim th' ocean stream:" (I.192-202)

The reader's first impression of Satan calls upon physical and mythological imagery to express the power and sheer magnitude of Satan. The verbal description of Satan's grandeur is accentuated by the expansiveness of the verse structure. The above selection is but the first eleven lines of the description of Satan that stretches on for some fifty lines. This extended section is composed of but three sentences and is marked by extensive enjambment and digression into ideas and images that reveal the remarkable enormity of Satan.

Soon after this lengthy description, Milton once again presents Satan in an enormous and imposing form, this time making Satan so huge that he uses celestial objects for armament: "his ponderous shield / Ethereal temper, massy, large and round, / Behind him cast; the broad circumference / Hung on his shoulders like the moon" (I.283-287). But all is not what it seems. Milton notes that the moon that Satan carries as a shield is viewed "through optic glass" (I. 298), which involves a distortion of image. Satan may be subject to the same artificial enlargement of appearance due to viewpoint as the moon-like object he carries as a shield. Distortion of image with a lens is essentially distortion of light, making Milton's choice of celestial body for a shield problematic. The moon is visible on Earth as an shining object because it reflects the light of the sun-the moon does not generate its own light and its appearance depends on its ability to deflect and distort a pure, previously unreflected light. Satan's physical appearance now must be understood with reservations about the immediacy and accuracy of perception. The issue of Satan's size is further complicated by the forms and scales he occupies in other locales within the text and within the cosmos.

Only moments after describing Satan as huge and powerful, Milton's perspective on Hell and its supposedly enormously potentate shifts significantly. The fallen angels in Hell, of which Satan is one, are reduced to the scale of insects, specifically locusts,

"As when the potent rod
Of Amram's son in Egypt's evil day
Waved round the coast, up called a pitchy cloud
Of locusts, warping on the eastern wind,
That o'er the realm of impious Pharaoh hung
Like night, and darkened all the land of Nile:" (I.338-343)

Satan shifts in size and, presumably, power without seeming to make any effort to do so. Here Satan becomes small and insignificant in the grand scheme, whereas before his sheer magnitude dominated earth and sky. Milton has simply attempted to describe Satan accurately, and two radically different images are the result. Which, if either, is accurate? Closer? One has no means of knowing Satan's actual appearance and size with any certainty, but one is fully aware that there is something unusual, something elusive, about Satan, and that one would be well advised to read carefully and critically whenever Satan is involved.

Satan's strikingly different physical forms outside of Hell and when in the company of "good" beings has been noted by Milton critic Frank Kastor. While moving about in Paradise, Satan is described as behaving as or appearing similar to a prowling wolf (IV.183), a cormorant (IV.196), and a toad (IV.800). In all of his forms in Paradise, Satan is not large. In fact, he is rather small, and is commonly smaller than a human (Kastor 66). The character once shown to be incredibly huge and powerful is here crushed into the small and often unthreatening forms of animals. These sorts of radical shifts in Satan's physical form reveal the character trait that makes him so appealing and so dangerous: he has a remarkable ability to deceive those who attempt to perceive him. Even a task as straightforward as accurate physical description becomes a near impossibility when dealing with Satan. This discussion of Satan's appearance is valuable because the contradictory physical descriptions of Satan put the reader on notice that he is a character who is not who he seems, and who is not to be trusted without strict examination.