Satan in Hell, Paradise Lost Book I.

Milton wrote his epic in English rather than Latin, using the basic metre of English drama, as Jonathan Bate notes: "Shakespeare was Milton's key precedent for the writing of Paradise Lost (1667) in blank verse rather than rhyme." The Guardian (London), 14 April, 2007. Though this etching by the French artist Gustave Doré dates from 1866, it reflects the theatrical lighting favored in baroque art, which began to appear in the late plays of Shakespeare designed for the indoor Blackfriars Theatre. Picture and data courtesy of the Yorck Project, under Creative Commons Attribution-Share- Alike License (Wikipedia)