An Introduction to the Prose and Poetical Works of John Milton / Comprising All the Autobiographic Passages in His Works, the More Explicit Presentations of His Ideas of True Liberty.

by John Milton

COMUS

A Masque presented at Ludlow Castle, 1634, before the Earl of Bridgewater, then President of Wales

Masques, in the reigns of Elizabeth, James I., and Charles I., were generally written for the entertainment of royalty and nobility. They were, besides, in most cases, presented by royal and noble persons. In their setting, they were in strong contrast to the public drama of the day, got up, as they were, with great magnificence of architecture, scenery, and 'appareling' (Ben Jonson's word for the apparatus of the scene), and frequently at an enormous expense. They were generally offset by grotesque and comic antimasques, which were played by common actors, dancers, and buffoons, from the public theatres. Shakespeare's 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' was probably not written as a regular drama for the public stage, but as a masque, on the occasion of some noble marriage. 'The most lamentable comedy and most cruel death of Pyramus and Thisbe' presented by the 'rude mechanicals,' 'hard-handed men,' in the fifth act, is the antimasque. It offsets the Masque in a special way. The Masque makes great demands on the imagination in its presentation of the fairy world; the antimasque is absurdly realistic—nothing is left by the 'rude mechanicals' to the imagination.

The Masque of 'Comus' is the last notable, if not entirely the last, composition of the kind in English literature, and the loftiest and loveliest. It is a glorification of the power of purity and chastity over the impure and the unchaste; and the poet no doubt meant it as a reflection upon the license and excesses and revelries (of which Comus is a personification) of the profligate and extravagant court of the time, imported from

'Celtic and Iberian fields.' The now obvious attitude of the composition was perhaps not at all suspected when it was performed at Ludlow Castle.

There is nothing in the Masque of 'Comus' that is even suggestive of the antimasque of the earlier masques, unless it be where the Country Dancers come in before the entrance of the Attendant Spirit with the two Brothers and the Lady, who catch the dancers at their sport. The Attendant Spirit addresses them in the song (vv. 958-965):

'Back, shepherds, back! Enough your play

Till next sunshine holiday.

Here be, without duck or nod,

Other trippings to be trod

Of lighter toes,' etc.

The subject of 'Comus' was too serious to be offset or parodied in any way by an antimasque; and, furthermore, Milton was not the man for anything of the kind. His theme excluded all humor, even if he had had any to expend upon it. Its seriousness must have been deepened for him by what he no doubt already felt in regard to the Court and the Church, that both were corrupt, and that both were leagued in their despotic tendencies, or rather in their actual despotic characters.

The traditional story that the two sons of the Earl of Bridgewater, the Lord Brackley and Mr. Thomas Egerton, and their sister, the Lady Alice Egerton, were lost in Haywood Forest on their way to Ludlow Castle from Herefordshire, where they had been visiting their relatives, the Egertons, and that the Lady Alice was for a time separated from her brothers, they having gone to discover the right path, may have had its origin in the Masque. This seems more likely than that the Masque had its origin in the story.

In the talk of the two Brothers in regard to their lost sister, the idea of the Masque is explicitly presented by the elder Brother. He had said:

'My sister is not so defenceless left

As you imagine; she has a hidden strength

Which you remember not.'

The second Brother replies:

'What hidden strength,

Unless the strength of Heaven, if you mean that?'

And then the elder Brother gives expression, in a long speech, the gem of the Masque (vv. 418-475), to the power of chastity and purity over the unchaste and the impure.

In the service of this idea, the poet started, no doubt, with Comus, the personification of unchaste and impure revelry (κῶμος), and therefrom constructed his plot, in which a pure maiden is brought within range of the wiles and temptations of the enchanter. And as the daughter of the noble family for which the Masque was written was to play the part of the tempted maiden, in the presentation of the Masque, the incident of her being temporarily and necessarily left alone by her brothers in the forest, would be readily suggested to the poet. It afforded him, too, an opportunity of paying a high compliment to the children of the Earl of Bridgewater.

The traditional story may therefore be safely regarded as a figment.

Henry Lawes, the most prominent music teacher of the time, in noble and wealthy families, and with a high reputation as a musical composer, furnished the music for the Masque, and took the part of the Attendant Spirit, first appearing as such, and afterward in the guise of the old and faithful shepherd

Thyrsis. It is not known by whom the parts of Comus and Sabrina were taken.

Lawes had been one of Milton's musical friends from early boyhood.

Milton addressed the following sonnet to him, which was prefixed to 'Choice Psalmes . . . by Henry and William Lawes, brothers, 1648.' In Milton's volume of poems published in 1645, Lawes is represented as 'Gentleman of the king's chapel and one of His Majesty's private music.'

To Mr. H. Lawes, on his Airs (1646)

'Harry, whose tuneful and well-measured song

First taught our English music how to span

Words with just note and accent, not to scan

With Midas' ears, committing short and long,

Thy worth and skill exempts thee from the throng, 5

With praise enough for envy to look wan;

To after-age thou shalt be writ the man,

That with smooth air could humour best our tongue.

Thou honourest verse, and verse must lend her wing

To honour thee, the priest of Phœbus' quire, 10

That tunest their happiest lines in hymn or story.

Dante shall give fame leave to set thee higher

Than his Casella, whom he wooed to sing,

Met in the milder shades of Purgatory.'