Comus and the Stuart Masque Connection, 1632–34

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Notes

See John Demaray. Milton and the Masque Tradition: the Early Poems, “Arcades,‘’ & Comus (Cambridge. Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1968), Chap. 3, esp. pp. 76–82, and Chap. 4. for important connections between these masques.

This was the ‘lawyers’ masque.’ an outstanding success, commissioned by the four Inns of Court in answer to the King’s demand that the Inns display their loyalty. Two of the four principal organisers, John Seiden and Bulstrode Whitelocke, were to have significant parlia- mentary careers: Milton later was to have professional connections with both, and he probably knew some of the lawyers by 1634, since his own brother Christopher was a templar in 1632. It would have been hard for any Londoner not to have known about The Triumph of Peace’, it had processed in full costume through the London streets for hours, from the Inns of Court to Whitehall. See n. 8 below.

The texts of all the 1630–34 masques are available in Vol. II of Stephen Orgel and Roy Strong, eds., Inigo Jones: the Theatre of the Stuart Court, 2 vols. (London: Sotheby ParkeBemet, Univ. of California Press, 1973). 1 have used Vol. II of this modernised edition for quotations; emphases are my own. An echo (or paraphrase) of Eternity’s song (No.4) in Coelum Britannicum (lines 1084–86) in Milton’s curious lines on “the overdated [or overdaled] sphears” (scribbled on the back of a letter from Henry Lawes of 1638) has been noted by Willa McClung Evans in her study Henry Lawes: Musician and Friend of Poets (1941; repr. New York; Kraus, 1966), p. 88. Evans (pp. 88ff.) finds further masque-like parallels to Coelum Britannicum in Milton’s poem “On Time” (however, the doubtful date of this poem, whether before 1634 or after, as has been variously proposed, makes such a derivation uncertain). Evans (pp. 96ff.) also believes that the narrative framework of Carew’s masque is duplicated in Comus: this is disputed by Demaray, pp. 71–73. The verbal parallels which I shall indicate between Comus and the masques of 1632 and 1634 seem not to have been noted.

Cedric Brown, in The poems and masques of Aurelian Townshend: with music by Henry Lawes and William Webb (Reading: Whiteknights Press, 1983), p. 90, n., and “Presidential Travels and Instructive Augury in Milton’s Ludlow Masque,” in Comus: Contexts, MQ21 (1987), 6 and n. 39, notes two such presentation copies of masques as having been given to the Earl of Bridgewater: one of Davenant’s Albion’s Triumph, the other of the “Chirk Castle Entertainment” (in honour of the Earl). Lawes, in a dedicatory letter prefixed to the 1637 edition of A Maske presented at Ludlow Castle, 1634, records that “the often Copying of it hath tir’d my Pen to give my severall friends satisfaction”: see The Poetical Works of John Milton, ed. Helen Darbishire (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1958). p. 455. My quotations from Comus and Lawes’ letter follow the 1637 text as printed in this edition: emphases (except for proper names) are my own. It should be noted that Darbishire does not include the stage directions in her line numberings; Orgel and Strong do, in theirs.

Penelope Egerton took part in lonson’s Chloridia (1630); Katherine (as a star, one of the Queen’s masquers) and Alice (in a pattern dance) performed in Tempe Restored; Thomas Egerton and his elder brother John (Viscount Brackley, the heir, dedicatee of Comus) danced with nine other very young gentlemen in Coelum Britannicum; Alice, John and Thomas, with their music tutor Lawes, made up the whole of the main masque in Comus. For sources, see n. 6 below.

Information (when reliably documented) about Lawes’ participation in the masques, and also about the Egerton children’s, is drawn from: Orgel and Strong, Vol. II (the prefatory material to each masque); William Riley Parker, Milton: a Biography, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968); Evans, Henry Lawes: Demaray, Milton and the Masque Tradition; and (particularly) Murray Lefkowitz: “The Longleat Papers of Bulstrode Whitelocke; New Light on Shirley’s Triumph of Peace,” J. Amer. Musicological Soc., XVIII (1965). 42–60; Trois Masques A la Cour de Charles I^er D’Angleterre, Choeur des Muses (Paris: Éditions du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1970); and William Lawes (London: Routledge, 1960).

See Demaray, n. 1 above.

The mention of Lawes in the procession of The Triumph of Peace comes from the MSS of Reginald Cholmondeley. printed in H.M.C. Commission, 5th Report, Part I, 1876, p. 355. This is quoted (unattributed) in Orgel and Strong, Vol. II, p. 538; see also Lefkowitz, “Longleat Papers,” 42, n. 1. Whitelocke’s description of the procession, composed out of his private papers and published in 1682 in his Memorials of English Affairs, is also quoted in full in Orgel and Strong, Vol. II, pp. 539–45.

Described at lines 647–50; cf. Comus, ‘directiom’; p. 458; “Arcades,” ‘direction,’ p. 441. A rustic dance is indicated in The Triumph of Peace, at line 390; cf. Comus, lines 958–60.

Most striking, of course, is the speech (noted by Demaray, p. 81) of the ‘young gentleman’ on the freedom of the mind (lines 88–91), reworked in the Lady’s speech to Comus at lines 663–65.

To indicate a few such parallels. In Albion’s Triumph, lines 48–50, 77, Coelum Britannicum. line 39 and Triumph of Peace, lines 647–50, “Mercury” or “Genius” “descend” from Heaven; cf. Milton’s Spirit, who “descends or enters”, p 458. To the tableaux of Religion, Truth and Wisdom descending in a cloud in Coelum Britannicum, lines 1055–62, or of Peace, Law and Justice in three separate clouds in Triumph of Peace at lines 506–10, 537–42, 566–71, cf. Milton’s Faith, Hope and Chastity seen “visibly,” as if by the light of a “silver lining” to a cloud (lines 213–24). Lighting inside transparent cloud-effects was a usual masque device: see Coelum Britannicum, line 961. The scene in Albion’s Triumph showing “a prospect of the King’s palace of Whitehall and part of the city of London seen afar off,” lines 338–40, was novel; cf. the final scene in Comus showing “Ludlow Town and the Presidents Castle,” ‘direction,’ line 958. There is also recognisably similar iconography derived from shared visual emblem traditions: to the emblematically suggestive “starry threshold of Joves Court” where “bright aereal Spirits live insphear’d,” the “Palace of Eternity,” or the Spirit’s “skie robes” in Comus (lines 1–3, 14, 83), cf. (to take one single of many elaborate emblems or emblematic spectacles in the Stuart masques) “eternity on a globe; his garment … light blue, wrought all over with stars of gold” (Coelum Britannicum. lines 1072–73).

Coelum Britannicum;

I From your consecrated woods.

Holy Dniids. 2 Silver floods.

From your channels fringed with flowers—

3 Hither move; forsake your bowers—

I Strewed with hallowed oaken leaves,

Decked with flags and sedgy sheaves … (908–15)

Sabrina’s song:

By the ntshy-fringed bank.

Where grows the Willow and the Osier dank.

My sliding Chariot stayes…

That in the channell strayes. (890–95)

These differences have been noted by Demaray, pp. 79–82. Milton’s handling of the allegory from the moralised Ovid is, in the manner of Spenser, more severely Protestant than is Townshend’s wholly platonic-ethical allegory, or even George Sandys’s treatment.

“CARLOMARIA.” or “Hymen’s Twin, the Mary-Charles,” the “royal hermaphrodite” representing the marriage of Heroic Virtue with Divine Beauty, is several times thematised in the 1632–34 masques. See Albion’s Triumph, lines 440–41 (repeated at line 445), and Coelum Britannicum, line 279. Milton’s spiritual marriage of Cupid and Psyche, an apotheosis arising out of the mythological marriage of Venus and Adonis (“Epilogue,” lines 999–1011), not only lifts the symbolic marriage onto a higher plane, but as it were transcends the royal apotheoses themselves, as they were so often adumbrated in the Stuart masques. See, e. g., in Coelum Britannicum the extinction of the stars in their spheres (‘direction,’ lines 404–5), followed by the royal apotheosis into new stars in the final scene; similarly, the final scene in Tempe Restored.

Lines 631–32. Repeated at lines 817–19 ff.

For a recent downward evaluation of the importance of the Castlehaven scandal of 1631 to the attempted violation and Chastity theme in Comus, see John Creaser, “Milton’s Comus; the Irrelevance of the Castlehaven Scandal,” in Comus: Contexts, MQ 21 (1987), 24–34. Creaser thinks that the masque is not directly a defensive answer.

The stress on “your own” is odd (since self-evidently, the Earl’s children would be recognised as such by him—they are not even in masque disguise). It makes one wonder similarly about Lawes’ throwaway line in the dedicatory letter to John, Viscount Brackley: “Although not openly acknowledged by the Author, yet it is a legitimate offspring … ”: p. 455.

The phrase is Michael Wilding’s, p. 36, “Milton’s A Masque presented at Ludlow Castle, 1634’: Theatre and Politics on the Border,” in Comus: Contexts, 35–51.