SOURCE: “Comus: Milton's Re-Formation of the Masque,” in Spokesperson Milton: Voices in Contemporary Criticism, edited by Charles W. Durham and Kristin Pruitt McColgan, Susquehanna University Press, 1994, pp. 193-205.

[In the essay below, Hubbell considers Milton's efforts to shift the nature and focus of the masque in his Comus.]

As Stephen Orgel demonstrates, the specific function of the masque is to represent the social order, making particular reference to the monarch as the regal head of both the masque and society. Since the masque proposes to create a political fiction that would glorify the establishment, the praise of the court is an inherent element of the genre.¹ Political issues are thus inseparable from formal ones, and a study of Milton's deviations from the masque traditions will reveal the political agendas within Comus.

During the two decades before Comus, Ben Jonson united the loosely connected art forms that he had inherited from earlier court entertainment writers. Drawing on a fourteenth-century tradition, Jonson engaged his aristocratic audience in his artistic productions, achieving a special intimacy between the ideal world of the masque and its audience.² The masque's dialogue between audience and representation created a self-reflexive system that glorified what it dramatized, which was always the king and the aristocratic values of absolute monarchy.

Although Jonson constantly experimented with the structure, a certain standardized form was developed, beginning with the descent of a divine or symbolic figure whose opening address set the stage for the antimasque. In the later masques (after 1610) Jonson used the antimasque as a counterpoint to the established social fictions of the aristocratic audience. Thus he would present a primitive, uncultured society in the antimasque as a challenge to the contemporary aristocratic society. But to the Christian, aristocratic audience, the antimasquers' argument presented no challenge, revealing only “the deformity of their minds,” symbolized in the grotesque masks they traditionally wore.³ Since the audience's very existence denied the antimasque claims, no drama was involved in the transition to the main masque's perfection; it was only a matter of coordinating the development from discord to harmony. Most often the transition was accomplished by a rapid shift in scenery made possible by Inigo Jones's intricate machinery. But rather than violating dramatic conventions, the literal deus ex machina functioned as the core metaphor for the whole masque. From the perspective of the antimasquers, their society seemed a utopia, but from the audience's perspective, this utopia was false. The deus ex machina represented the step out of the framework of the antimasque and into the framework of the audience, or from limited to omniscient perspective. Rather than presenting wrong and right, the masque moved from ignorance to knowledge, from deformity to perfection, from chaos to order, which the audience both participated in and directed. In the virtuosity of the evening's performance, the audience achieved a greater awareness of its own ethos through variations on themes with which it identified.

Since aristocratic values centered around the king, and his presence both obviated and evoked the main masque, the transformation that resolved the antimasque and generated the main masque was officially ascribed to his symbolic power. By invoking the symbolic power of the king, the poet grounds his ideal world in the central figure of the real world. Whatever properties the ideal carries are drawn from what already exists in reality. The fundamental myth that the main masque revels and dances attempt to establish is that aristocratic values bring permanence and stability to the world. Theoretically, a hierarchical system founded on the divine right of the ruler tied society to the everlasting, immutable truths of God. The masque draws the king into its fiction in order to generate a myth that is ultimately directed toward validating his own existence.

However, despite its claim to have transcended history, the masque was inherently a part of history, being commissioned for a particular occasion, and existing, like all performing arts, within a set time period. Both Steven Orgel and Angus Fletcher concur that Jonson's fear of the ephemerality of court entertainments led him to emphasize the masque's literary qualities. As a ceremonial performance, the masque was tied to the particular moment, but as a literary monument, it had the same claim to permanence as Shakespeare's sonnet, “Not marble nor the gilded monuments.” But Jonson's assertion that his poetry achieves what the masque spectacle cannot conflicts with the genre's inherent presumption that transcendent power is drawn from the king. There is thus a submerged tension between Jonson's claim for the immortalizing power of his verse and the regal myth he invokes in it. Angus Fletcher suggests that the king and the poet are empowered through mutually exclusive myths, and when they are joined within the same discourse, primacy becomes a serious contention.⁴ The rhetorical structures of the genre may acknowledge the primacy of the king's myth, but the very existence of those structures asserts the primacy of their creator, the poet.

In the masque, confrontation with absolutist ideology enlightened the primitive antimasquers, dramatizing the accord between divine truth and the Stuart social order. But on another level, the masque's mimetic representation of an idealized vision of the court transcends the actual world of the court. The poet, not the king, illuminates the ideal, utopian vision, revealing his superior ability to lead society toward an ideal world despite his subordinate status. This contradiction between the poet's myth and the king's myth, which every masque writer was forced to confront and only imperfectly resolved, betrays the precariousness of the political myth at the time.

In Comus Milton changed the masque's primary function from honoring the king to honoring the poet, thus making explicit what Jonson had only implied—that the poet's myth is superior to the king's. Angus Fletcher's argument that “the central action of Comus is the overthrow of one magician by another” implies a political interpretation that Fletcher fails to develop.⁵ If the “magic-users” are identified as the king and the poet and the masque is seen as a battle between their two conflicting myths, then the reading has radical implications.

While Cedric Brown acknowledges that the masque advocates reforms, he claims that Milton's sense of decorum would not have allowed him to make any more radical statement about his own powers as a poet or the failure of the aristocracy.⁶ Drawing support from Lycidas written three years later, Brown claims that Milton was plagued by serious doubts about his intended vocation in the prelacy at the time he wrote Comus, and the doubts account for the spirit of reform in the masque. In his view, the masque hints at Milton's future Puritan radicalism and displays his desire to unite poetry with preaching, but does not make the kind of radical statement that he does in Lycidas three years later.⁷

While Fletcher and Brown are hesitant in this matter, Michael Wilding and David Norbrook read Milton's masque as strongly revolutionary. Norbrook's short essay narrates the development of the masque genre in the context of the growing influence of Puritan moral reform, placing Comus at the turning point in the conflict between Royalists and Puritans. In Milton's masque, Comus, the villain, speaks for the establishment, while the Lady speaks for the Puritans. The dramatic conflict in the masque represents a Puritan questioning of aristocratic ideology, and Milton attempts to re-formulate masque conventions in light of a Puritan apocalyptic ideology.⁸ But this analysis leaves unexamined how Milton's growing disenchantment with his chosen vocation in the Royalist Anglican church and his desire to use his poetic talents productively would necessarily influence his generic re-formulations.

Wilding argues that Comus represents the contemporary state of politics, religion, and society, but he does not recognize the significance of representing contemporary England in the antimasque—a change that I argue is the masque's strongest ideological statement.⁹ In the Jonsonian tradition, the representation of England belonged in the main masque where it was acknowledged to be the ideal society. Milton's reversal of this tradition overturns the fundamental precept of the masque—praise of the absolute monarchy. By moving the absolutist ideology to the antimasque and replacing it with a celebration of the self-aware poet, Milton resolves the basic tension between the king and the poet and turns the masque into a vehicle for prophecy. Although he retained the superficial structure of the Jonsonian masque, its purpose was radically changed from the glorification of society to its restructuring.

Imitating Jonsonian tradition, Milton constructs a primitive, uncultured society in his antimasque. Comus, cast as the traditional protean figure of misrule, presides over a primitive, decadent society. He enters the masque carrying a “Charming Rod in one hand, his Glass in the other,” which is suggestive, as Wilding notes, of the ball and scepter held by the king.¹⁰ Comus also aspires to make the Lady his queen, taking her back to his “stately Palace” where he expresses the aristocratic ideology of conspicuous consumption, public display, and hierarchy:

Beauty is nature's brag, and must be shown
In courts, at feasts, and high solemnities
Where most may wonder at the workmanship;
It is for homely features to keep home.

(745-48)¹¹

Additionally, the drunken feasting at the castle parodies the royal banquets given on great occasions, as the “Midnight shout and revelry” parodied the aristocratic entertainments that usually followed the meal. Comus itself would probably have followed such a celebration feast, and the audience was thus presented with an imitation of itself as a class in the antimasque, though few may have recognized that fact.

Consistent with the English practice of uniting secular and spiritual leadership in the king, Comus is also cast as a high priest. Besides leading the invocation and religious services, Comus administers the sacrament with his enchanted glass, an obvious parody of the communion cup. He also claims that the Lady's argument is “mere moral babble, and direct / Against the canon laws of our foundation” (807-8). This statement reflects the way the establishment appropriated certain biblical texts or religious traditions in order to perpetuate its own existence and prevent the impetus of reform, a practice Milton would argue against in his prose tracts. By constructing Comus as the king and high priest, Milton is able to use the antimasque as a forum for critiquing the establishment, rather than, as was traditional in Jonson, as a way to bring the aristocratic audience to a greater awareness of the vital purpose that hierarchy served.

In contrast to Comus's chaotic world, the Lady presents a code of self-discipline and order. The Lady is presented as a figure of chastity, and Milton conceives of chastity as the ability to control and order the desires and functions of the human body, protecting the divine light of reason from the temptation of the senses. The Lady's ability to resist evil is attributed by her elder brother to her chaste character: “'Tis chastity, my brother, chastity: / She that has that is clad in complete steel” (420-21).¹² Even with all his art, Comus is incapable of influencing the freedom of her mind, and her arguments are consistently shown to be superior to his: “She fables not, I feel that I do fear / Her words set off by some superior power” (801-2). Both her singing, which “might create a soul / Under the ribs of Death” (562-63), and her rhetoric are witnesses to “something holy lodge[d] in that breast” (246-47). Chastity or self-discipline, in addition to making her art beautiful, also gives her philosophy a moral grounding. Thus it seems that art and morality are mutually dependent, and that style of discourse constructs and is constructed by a moral sense.

In her debate with Comus, the Lady counters Comus's hedonism with her own philosophy of temperance:

Impostor, do not charge most innocent nature,
As if she would her children should be riotous
With her abundance; she, good cateress,
Means her provision only to the good
That live according to her sober laws
And holy dictate of spare Temperance:
If every just man that now pines with want
Had but a moderate and beseeming share
Of that which lewdly-pamper'd Luxury
Now heaps upon some few with vast excess,
Nature's full blessings would be well dispens't
In unsuperfluous even proportion,
And she no whit encumber'd with her store,
And then the giver would be better thank't,
His praise due paid, for swinish gluttony
Ne'er looks to Heav'n amidst his gorgeous feast,
But with besotted base ingratitude
Crams, and blasphemes his feeder.

(762-79)

This passage condemns the absolutist establishment, praising the superiority of the Puritan ethic. But ironically, the Lady is herself one of the aristocracy, both in the masque fiction as well as in reality. Thus, while Comus manifests the conventional movement from an inferior to a superior set of values, those values and the people who establish them have been radically changed. Milton's triumphal aristocrats are an entirely new type of leader: reformist, bourgeois, meritocratic.¹³

Alongside this reconceptualization of the aristocratic class, Milton reconstructs the poet. His supreme representation of the poet is the Attendant Spirit, and this figure is portrayed as the controlling power in the masque. In the prologue, he claims authorship of the story:

And listen why, for I will tell ye now
What never yet was heard in Tale or Song
From old or modern Bard, in Hall or Bow'r.

(43-45)

His life amongst “those immortal shapes” (2), suggestive of Platonic forms, constructs an irrefutable authority for his mimetic creation; his words “figure forth” a transcendent truth. By his direction, the dynamics of the masque are kept in motion: the brothers are led out of the wood, the Lady is rescued, the transformation is accomplished, and the children are led home. By ascribing the construction of the didactic, transcendental myth to his own powers, the Spirit, in the vocation of the poet, takes what was traditionally the king's place in the masque. In the Jonsonian tradition, the masque reaffirmed for its audience that aristocratic society, symbolically united in the figure of the king, manifested divine truth. By replacing the royal figure with the poet, Milton shatters this whole tradition.¹⁴

Discarding the absolutist myth, Milton develops the traditionally muted rival myth of the poet. When Henry Lawes, playing the Attendant Spirit, disguises himself as Thyrsis, he accrues to himself the historical and symbolic meanings of Orpheus, the shepherd-poet.¹⁵ This tripartite role conflates the musician, the divine seer, and the shepherd-poet into one persona. Joining these different parts under one empowering myth, Milton constructs his poet as a divine prophet, a spiritual leader of fundamental importance to society. Beginning his story of Comus, Thyrsis says:

I'll tell ye; 'tis not vain or fabulous,
(Though so esteem'd by shallow ignorance)
What the sage Poets taught by th' heav'nly Muse
Storied of old in high immortal verse.

(513-16)

The “sage Poets” had an intimate awareness of transcendent truth, and Thyrsis, through his historical relationship with Orpheus, is constructed as the inheritor of both the wisdom of the ancients and the intimate connection with the “heav'nly Muse.” Knowledge of Platonic truth is thus the special power reserved solely for the poet.

Now that the Attendant Spirit has established himself in the tradition of the classical poets, he is in a position to prove his superiority. When Thyrsis plans the rescue of the Lady, he gives the brothers an herb “more med'cinal is it than that Moly / That Hermes once to wise Ulysses gave” (636-37). Whether one interprets the herb as an allegorical representation of the word of God as Cedric Brown does, or the sacrament, the result is the same: Thyrsis is the true preacher, the Christian Shepherd, and the Christian ethos transcends the classical.

Using the knowledge he inherited from Meliboeus, Thyrsis's poetic invocation initiates the transformation scene, that crucial point where the earthly transcendental power was formally recognized. The Jonsonian masque mandated the recognition and inclusion of the royal presence in the transformation of the antimasquers. In Milton's masque, the Lady must be released from Comus's spell.¹⁶ With a song, Thyrsis summons a demigoddess to break the spell:

                    as the old Swain said, she can unlock
The clasping charm and thaw the numbing spell,
If she be right invok'd in warbled Song,
                                                                                 … This will I try
And add the power of some adjuring verse.

(853-55, 58-59)

Thus the Christian shepherd-poet initiates the transformation with his own poetic power, as that power is the Christian successor and heir to the classical poetic tradition. The power of the absolute monarch is displaced by the power of the poet.

Since Milton has established the poet as the transcendent power, it is only fitting that the main masque celebrate and reaffirm his values in an appropriate form. In both the Trinity Manuscript and the 1637 publication, Milton ends his masque with a didactic eulogy by the Attendant Spirit.¹⁷ Because the poet's special province is the word, it is appropriate for the medium of celebration to be poetry rather than dance or spectacle; and the main masque and eulogy thus represent a poetic revelry, reaffirming the poet's power to translate society into a paradise through words:

To the Ocean now I fly,
And those happy climes that lie
Where day never shuts his eye,
Up in the broad fields of the sky:
There I suck the liquid air
All amidst the Gardens fair
Of Hesperus.

(976-82)

The poet constructs his own ascension into the paradise of Hesperus and the divine presence of Cupid and Psyche. The chaste union of these two, the god of love and the goddess of the soul, contrasts with the union between Bacchus and Circe; and the offspring of Cupid and Psyche, Youth and Joy, represent the perfection possible by their union.¹⁸ Furthermore, the marriage of Cupid and Psyche also symbolizes the passionate intensity that infuses art within the disciplined control of form. Appropriately, the poet's virtuoso performance ends with a vision of the Platonic form of his art, and elevating that image to the highest point in heaven places his myth in the truth and permanence of the divine.

The last lines of the masque affirm the poet's importance in society; through his awareness of transcendent truth, earthly society can be brought closer to divine perfection. Absolutism, caught in a web of excess, actually retards the progression of society. In his radical transformation of the masque, Milton has boldly taken the irony out of epideictic poetry, making the form a celebration of the self-aware poet.

In the character of the poet, the casting is central to the meaning. In the fiction of the masque, the poet is constructed as the true moral teacher of the young aristocracy. His guidance and knowledge are responsible for the youths' return to the true path, for the Lady's rescue, and for the return of the whole group to their home. Symbolically, he effects the moral and spiritual growth of the political leaders, enabling them to reform English society. In a parallel relationship, Lawes is the teacher of the Bridgewater siblings, and the significance the Spirit accrues to himself reflects onto Lawes. The poet appropriates the myth created about poets, empowering himself as he manifests the myth's grounded reality.

Milton, as the creator of the whole masque, succeeds Lawes as the supreme director and archetypal poet. Whereas Lawes's character claimed the narrator's part, Milton narrates the narrator. In its literary form, his mimetic virtuosity has the potential to affect audiences for all time. The power of his verse immortalizes its creator, and the claims he makes for the poet, he ultimately makes for himself. When the Attendant Spirit says that he was sent “by quick command from Sovran Jove” (41), he means in one significant, obvious sense that he was sent by Milton, the “Sovran” of the masque. Thus Milton has brought the tension between poet and king that was covert in Jonsonian masques out of the closet, decisively subordinating the “magic” of the absolutist to the “magic” of the Christian poet.

This inquiry, rather than closing things off, has only made it clearer that the political issues were much more immediate for Milton in 1633 than critics like John Demaray¹⁹ and Hunter allow, and thus the necessity of pursuing this train of thought further. The length of this essay permits only the suggestion that a fuller study of the agendas in Milton's masque might lead to an examination of Milton's vocational crisis at the time, his questioning about how his poetic talents fit into his political interests and ambitions. The presentation of contemporary England in the antimasque revolutionizes the genre, setting up the even more radical agenda that replaces the king with the poet as the true leader of the nation. In order to validate his own sense of importance in society, Milton proposes the complete restructuring of the social order. The message Milton sends is clear: if the aristocracy wants to lead England to a glorious, golden future, it must follow the only person who can find that future, the poet. To set these ideas in perspective, I would like to close by examining two critics who have argued that in his later poetry, Milton takes the position of the prophet directing his nation toward an apocalyptic future. The changes Milton makes to the masque genre suggest that he was constructing a myth that would allow him to take that position much earlier than either of them suggest.

Both William Kerrigan and Joseph A. Wittreich look at the tradition of prophecy that Milton inherited and molded to his own designs. Although neither one addresses Comus at any length, their arguments are so easily adapted to the poem that the neglect is surprising. After examining the transition of the meaning of the word prophet from the classical to the Christian, Kerrigan centers the debate over the proper office of this spiritual leader at the crux of the larger religious, economic, and political arguments between Puritans and Royalists.²⁰ Royalists, fearful of the revolutionary rhetoric inherent in most prophecy, tried to limit its scope to the interpretation of God's word and teaching. Their model was Christ the King leading the world on God's revealed path. By representing the king as the mediating link between God and the world, Royalists could argue that the divine right of kings was sanctioned by the New Testament. Kerrigan argues that Puritans countered by returning to the Old Testament, to Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Micah, for their model of the prophet—although Wittreich claims that the Christ of Revelation was the accepted paradigmatic prophet: a rebel who leads society to a new order by abolishing all orthodoxy.²¹ In both cases, however, the resulting image is the same: the prophet was on the margin of society, an observer as well as an actor, who, in a divinely inspired vision, saw the immediate apocalyptic demise of the present institutions and pointed the way to a more righteous future. The prophet's job was to criticize the establishment, to pull down kings and begin the purging revolution. While Milton is not calling for mass destruction in Comus, he does suggest the complete restructuring of society. The political criticism in the masque is presented in the prophetic mode: the evolution of antimasque into main masque symbolizes the demise of the present establishment in the apocalyptic future. The future is revealed by the Attendant Spirit, and the audience is instructed to follow him. All through the masque, the Spirit has been the children's spiritual teacher, guiding them through the “perplex't paths of this drear wood” (37). By inheriting the wisdom of the ancients and augmenting it with his divine Christian vision, he is able to transform the world of the masque and return the children to their parents. Through the intricate fusion of fiction and reality, Milton draws this prophet-image to himself, creating a position that would authenticate his sense of divine calling. As the Attendant Spirit of real life, Milton is justified in attempting the composition of his later epics and tragedy.

Although they are not aware of it, both Kerrigan and Wittreich provide good reasons why Milton's seminal statement about his prophetic stature should be made in the masque. Both critics analyze the structure of Milton's later poetry, concluding that the general pattern mirrors the paradigmatic prophetic mode. Kerrigan notes that prophetic epistemology was traditionally represented as a play unfolding in front of the prophet. He cites the seventeenth-century theorist, John Smith, who proposed that because of the symbolic nature of the prophetic vision and because the prophet was both a participant and an observer, the masque was the appropriate genre for the epistemological metaphor.²² Furthermore, because the masque was designed to subsume all of history into its allegory and because it manipulated different levels of perspective, it again conformed to the theater of the mind metaphor. To this analysis, Wittreich adds that the mode of prophecy moves toward greater clarity as it relates successive visions.²³ These visions mirror each other, creating the sense of synchronic analogic structures, which duplicate the structure of the active prophetic mind and of the universe itself. The paradigmatic example of the prophetic genre was the Book of Revelation, a visionary poem that created a literary microcosm of the universe by interconnecting all poetic forms. This paradigm is virtually identical to the masque, which moves toward greater clarity through the succession of diachronically represented synchronic perspectives, connected by mirroring and analogy. In addition to operating at a primarily visual level, the masque subsumes many different poetic and artistic genres.

Both critics argue that Milton borrowed from the paradigms of the prophetic mode for all his poetry starting with Lycidas. Kerrigan claims that without his claim to prophecy, which was made through his appropriation of prophetic paradigms, Paradise Lost would be reduced to the empty verses of a swindler.²⁴ In another sense, without the prophetic element, the Lady or the Spirit's poetry would be reduced to the “barbarous dissonance” of Comus. The similarity between Comus and Kerrigan's theater of the mind metaphor on one hand and Wittreich's prophetic poetics from Revelation on the other is so striking that it is difficult to understand why they overlooked Milton's masque. From the argument I have developed in this essay, there is good reason to think that Milton was carefully drawing out the inherent prophetic paradigms of the masque in order to claim a position as a Puritan prophet. Both the rhetorical schemes and the argument trumpet the arrival of a man chosen by God to prepare a nation for its glorious ascent to divine favor.

Notes

1. Stephen Orgel, The Jonsonian Masque (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965), 102-3.

2. Orgel, Jonsonian Masque, 186.

3. Ibid., 97.

4. Angus Fletcher, The Transcendental Masque (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1971), 19.

5. Fletcher, Transcendental Masque, 24.

6. Cedric Brown, John Milton's “Aristocratic Entertainments” (London: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 9.

7. Brown, “Aristocratic Entertainments,” 169-70.

8. David Norbrook, “The Reformation of the Masque,” The Court Masque, ed. David Lindley (Oxford: Manchester University Press, 1984), 94-110.

9. Michael Wilding, Dragon's Teeth (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1987), chapter 3.

10. Wilding, Dragon's Teeth, 67.

11. John Milton, Comus, John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (New York: Odyssey Press, 1957). All references to Milton's poetry are to this edition and are cited parenthetically in the text.

12. Milton's concept of chastity has caused more controversy than any other idea in the masque. Some, like E. M. W. Tillyard in Milton (London: Chatto and Windus, 1946), William Hunter in Milton's “Comus”: Family Piece (New York: Whitston, 1983), and Edward Tayler in Milton's Poetry: Its Development in Time (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1979) trace chastity back to biography. Others, like Malcolme Ross in Poetry and Dogma (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1954), are shocked by what they read as a degradation of 1 Corinthians 13's triad—faith, hope, and charity—and think chastity is the masque's major flaw. Still others complain that the portrayal of chastity as protective is ridiculously idealistic (Hunter, Milton's “Comus,” 1-2). In the past twenty years, the infamous Castlehaven scandal has become the standard context for interpreting the use and meaning of chastity (see Barbara Breasted, “Comus and the Castlehaven Scandal,” Milton Studies 3 [1971]: 201-24; Leah Marcus, “Justice for Margery Evans,” Milton and the Idea of Woman, ed. Julia Walker [Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988], 66-85; also Hunter, Milton's “Comus,” 29ff, and Brown, “Aristocratic Entertainment,” who thinks that Milton focuses on chastity not only because he wanted to remind the audience of the earlier scandal, but also because it would dramatize the biblical readings for Michaelmas day [on which day Comus was shown] and maintain the pastoral conventions). John Creaser challenges this context in “Milton's Comus: The Irrelevance of the Castlehaven Scandal,” Milton Quarterly 21 (1987): 24-34, claiming that it would have been tactless of Milton to make any overt references to the scandal. Creaser, like both Fletcher and Norbrook, interprets chastity as representative of individual willpower, an important aspect of Puritan ideology. Fletcher also sees an echo of Spenser's Britomart. While I side with Fletcher, Norbrook, and Creaser in this debate, my own reading broadens the meaning of chastity to include poetic as well as moral temperance.

13. I disagree with Wilding's reading of “even proportion” (773) as meaning an “equal distribution of wealth” (58-59). I think that the Lady's speech echoes Aristotle's concept of justice, and thus her ideology is meritocratic rather than, as Wilding suggests, leveling.

14. It might be argued that since the king would not have been present it would have been pointless to follow the traditional practice of making reference to him as the driving force in the masque. But reference to the king was the substance, the raison d'être, of the masque, so it would have been considered highly disturbing to completely discard this important gesture. Since Bridgewater was the king's political stand-in, in the Welsh highlands, it would not have been inappropriate for him to act as the king's symbolic stand-in in the masque—at least not as inappropriate as replacing the royal figure with the poet.

15. In lines 82-91, the Attendant Spirit adopts the disguise of a shepherd-poet. In the lines mentioned, there is a reference comparing the character the Attendant Spirit adopts to Orpheus. See Hughes, Complete Poems, 86n; see also Brown, “Aristocratic Entertainments,” 114. The reference creates a typological relationship between Orpheus and the Attendant Spirit, and since Lawes, a superior musician himself, plays the part of the Attendant Spirit, the mythogenic genealogy is grounded in the real world of Lord Bridgewater's court.

16. It would be interesting to explore the ramifications of Milton's metaphor “root-bound” (662) in the context of such Renaissance poetry as Jonson's “To Penshurst,” Lanyer's “Cooke-ham,” and Marvell's “Upon Appleton House” where trees symbolize the aristocracy. If Milton's metaphor plays on this conventional analogy, then being “root-bound” might signify the hold absolutism has over even those aristocrats who can perceive the hypocrisy and immorality of their culture. Comus's very existence binds these aristocrats to an ideology and to a method of action that they cannot break out of even though they may be able to resist full participation.

17. Brown, “Aristocratic Entertainment,” and Hunter, “Milton's Comus,” both claim that the Bridgewater Manuscript used as the performance script was considerably changed from what Milton submitted in the Trinity Manuscript. They muse that evidently someone felt that the performance should emphasize the aristocratic performers more than the submitted version did. Both critics interpret the changes as signs of Milton's conservative politics in 1634. I argue that it is more logically consistent to see the changes imposed on Milton's submission as a sign that his aristocratic patrons were disturbed by the radical diminishment of their stature in the masque. For Milton, who changed things back to the way they were in the Trinity and even augmented some of the radical statements in the 1637 edition, the reduction of aristocratic involvement in the main masque allowed the poet to dominate, and this is more consistent with what I take to be his general theme.

18. The union of Bacchus and Circe produced Comus.

19. John Demaray, Milton and the Masque Tradition: The Early Poems, “Arcades,” and “Comus” (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968).

20. William Kerrigan, The Prophetic Milton (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1974), 88-112.

21. Joseph A. Wittreich, Visionary Poetics: Milton's Tradition and His Legacy (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1979), 48.

22. Kerrigan, Prophetic Milton, 117-18.

23. Wittreich, Visionary Poetics, 32-39.

24. Kerrigan, Prophetic Milton, 187.

This work could not have been completed without the help of Marshall Grossman. I am indebted to him for his insightful comments and encouragement through every step of the way.