Maria, as well as from the practices of the papist Castlehaven. There is indeed a certain class-consciousness in Comus. The Lady’s aristocratic assumptions about the morals and manners of the ‘loose unlettered hinds’ (173) are rebuked by the subsequent action. Courtesy ‘oft is sooner found in lowly sheds … than … courts of princes’ (321–4). She ultimately goes out of her way to plead for greater economic equality:
If every just man that now pines with want
Had but a moderate and beseeming share
Of that which lewdly-pampered Luxury
Now heaps upon some few with vast excess …
The giver would be better thanked.
(767–74)
A masque is a light-hearted entertainment. Critics who warn us against over-reading the text, against worrying about pseudo-problems, may well be right.2 We should accept the magic as magic, and not try to press too deep allegorical meanings. We may be encouraged in this by the divergences among those scholars who think they have a key to the details of the allegory.3 But some things may be said about the spirit which informs the poem. It is, in James Maxwell’s words, about virtue rather than specifically about virginity.
Virtue may be assailed but never lost,
Surprised by unjust force but not enthralled.
That was the Elder Brother. The Lady herself tells Comus:
Fool, do not boast,
Thou canst not touch the freedom of my mind.
‘Love virtue, she alone is free’ is the conclusion. When the poem was published in 1637, Milton drew special attention (line 996) to the addition glorifying marriage. This new passage (999–1011) celebrates both the earthly love of Venus and Adonis and the heavenly love of Christ for his eternal bride, who is both the church and the individual soul, Psyche. Together she and Cupid beget Youth and Joy. Pleasure is illusory without this freedom, is self-enthralled. The Lady’s apparently negative attitude was essential to the preservation of her freedom. In the eternal conflict of good and evil good must win.
If this fail
The pillared firmament is rottenness,
And earth’s base built on stubble.
(592–7)1
The true church cannot fail, and God will come to the help of men and women when they have done all they can to resist evil. This is a recurrent Miltonic theme. Christ on the pinnacle of the temple, Samson clutching the pillars, both receive a miraculous accession of power. They illustrate the conclusion of Comus:
Or if virtue feeble were
Heaven itself would stoop to her.2
In the masque there is no problem of moral choice, only confidence and exultation in being on the right side. Haller rightly links the theme of the Masque with the preachers’ exhortation to spiritual wayfaring and warfaring.3 The Lady in Comus never seems in the least likely to succumb to the wiles of the tempter; very different from Eve in Paradise Lost.4 Milton was not ready to write Paradise Lost in 1634. He too had been called ‘the Lady’ at Christ’s; and his mind was still filled with ideas of romantic chivalry, of knightly gallantry: his epic aspirations long circled round King Arthur. And yet there is continuity, for all the greater sadness of Milton’s later poetry: Paradise Regained lacks the gorgeous plenitude of Comus, the sense of the pulsing richness of nature; but its theme is analogous, the serene rejection of temptation, not a negative attitude but a sense of the irrelevance, the emptiness, of pleasure that is separated from virtue.5
In Comus Milton creates what I have called the Robinson Crusoe situation. The hero – or heroine – is isolated from society, to face an ordeal alone.1 This is characteristic of the Puritan-individualist tradition, from Milton to Clarissa Harlowe. Adam and Eve in Paradise, Jesus in the wilderness, Samson isolated by blindness and finally alone in the temple, Bunyan’s Christian deserting wife and children: all face their destiny alone with God. They are as solitary as Hobbist man before Leviathan set up a law-abiding community.
Milton used the occasion of Comus to try to bring order into what he saw as the moral chaos that court and papists were bringing upon England. As against the Inns of Court wits, who combined acceptance of sexual promiscuity with social sneers against the bourgeoisie, Milton aligned himself with the Puritan middle class, on aesthetic as well as moral grounds. It is this, rather than mere controversial opportunism, that made Milton in 1642 criticize Joseph Hall’s Mundus Alter et Idem because it offered no vision of a better world in which evil would be eradicated: Milton specifically contrasted Utopia and New Atlantis with Hall’s book. Milton’s anti-episcopal tracts contain elements of his own Utopian ideals, which Haller has described as ‘a society ruled by public opinion, enlightened not only by preachers but by intellectual and moral leaders of all sorts, lay and cleric, above all by poet-prophets like himself’.2
Social concern is even more apparent in Lycidas. Its occasion was the death by drowning of Edward King on his way to Ireland in 1637. There is no reason to suppose that Milton was particularly fond of King, who had been made a Fellow of Christ’s in 1630 – the Fellowship which Milton might have hoped for. But Milton was by this time well known in Cambridge, and especially in his own college, as a poet: whilst still in residence he had turned his hand to elegies on ecclesiastical and university dignitaries. What more natural than that he should be invited to contribute to the memorial volume for his contemporary?
He did not perhaps produce quite what was expected. Lycidas is ostensibly a poem about the tragedy of youthful death. Why should Edward King be cut off in his prime whilst others live? The poem calls God’s justice in question, not for the last time in Milton’s career. But this leads the poet on to ask how important worldly success is, and to assess his own life in the light of King’s death. Lycidas turns into a tremendous denunciation of the dominant clique in the Church of England, the Laudians.
Here the pastoral tradition stood Milton in good stead. Fulke Greville made it clear that the allegorical form of works like Arcadia, ‘this representing of virtues, vices, humours, counsels and actions of men in feigned and unscandalous images, is an enabling of freeborn spirits to the greatest affairs of state.’1 Sidney himself in The Defence of Poesie had said ‘sometimes under the pretty tales of wolves and sheep [pastoral poetry] can include the whole considerations of wrongdoings and patience.’2 Spenser did just that in The Shepheardes Calendar and Colin Clouts come home again. Of The Faerie Queene Spenser admitted almost in so many words that ‘I chose the history of King Arthur as … furthest from the danger of envy and suspicion of present times.’ The Spenserians Browne and Wither made a similar use of pastoral. Browne directly anticipates Lycidas by his reference to ‘The prelate in pluralities asleep / Whilst that the wolf lies preying on his sheep.’3
The advantage of the pastoral mode, then, was that sharp criticisms could be made, and the key supplied to those in the know. The innocent would miss the point. The essence of pastoral was ambiguity, something perhaps forgotten by those who continue to labour at the mysteries of Lycidas. Thus everybody would know in general what Milton meant by ‘the grim wolf with privy paw’: it meant Rome, popery. But just because this is pastoral, is allegory, it need
