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

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.