to declare some degree of affiliation to a faction of the Protestant faith, a phenomenon that was becoming more splintered by the month. To some, this might seem a strategy of avoidance yet there is evidence to suggest that he had chosen to observe events from a distance, consider what he witnessed in relation to his private regime of reading, and wait upon the day that the sum of his wisdom might be employed as a calling or vocation.
Milton would already have witnessed at Cambridge the growing tensions between the advocates of Puritanism and the better-established champions of high-Anglicanism. In the University, theology was still largely a matter for abstract speculation and private commitment but within England as a whole these same divisions were coming to influence conventions governing behaviour and lifestyle. The Puritan position was made clear in William Prynne’s Histrio-Mastix: or, The Players Scourge and Actors Tragedy (1632). As indicated by his title Prynne was particularly agitated by stage plays and masques, which he saw as licensing hedonism and immorality, but this was but his opening tirade in a thousand page invective against dancing, maypoles, sports of any kind, rural fairs, stained glass windows, ostentatiously decorated altars, the wearing of garishly coloured vestments by members of the clergy and much more. Prynne’s logic is clear enough: there is a causal relationship between secular activities in which display or enjoyment are prominent and religious practices that show allegiances to Catholicism. Prynne and many other extremist Puritans held that indulgent gratification was not only immoral but an indication of treacherous affiliations to enemies of England, specifically the Catholic nations of continental Europe.
Prynne’s book was prompted by a tendency in Charles’s court to sponsor plays and masques which celebrated him and Queen Henrietta as at once passionate yet ungoverned by the rules thought appropriate for fallen humanity. Moreover Charles attempted to promulgate the culture of his court to the nation as a whole. Throughout the early 1630s he issued proclamations commanding gentry and nobility to run their country estates as hospitable sinecures in which the lower orders would be encouraged, with financial sponsorships, to treat the Sabbath and other holidays as the opportunity for relaxation and recreation. Indeed as a direct rebuke to Prynne’s polemic Charles ordered to be reissued in 1633 a revised edition of James I’s controversial Book of Sports. According to this, on Sundays ‘our good people be not disturbed, letted or discouraged from any lawful recreation, such as dancing, either men or women; archery for men, leaping, vaulting, or any other such harmless recreation, nor from having of May-games, whitsunales, and Morris-dances; and the setting up of May-Poles and other sports therewith used.’
During that same year Laud became Archbishop of Canterbury and immediately began to bring the church into line with his own high Anglican beliefs and practices, ordering his bishops to supervise closely what was preached and what rituals performed. Puritan-leaning ministers would be ejected and forbidden from setting up private chaplaincies. Ordinances were issued requiring fixed altars to replace plain communion tables and clergy were told to conduct services in vestments that were virtually identical to those of Catholic priests. It is certain that Milton was aware of this. Even if his self-imposed country exile detached him from the cauldron of dispute that was London he would need only to attend his local parish church to witness the changes. While he showed reluctance to comment directly on contemporary events it is clear from his poetry in this period that such matters were exercising his imagination.
Close to the Milton house was the estate of Harefield, presided over by Alice, Countess of Derby. Milton was introduced to the household by Henry Lawes, a composer and musician, who had been a friend of his father’s since the Bread Street days. Lawes, at the time, was music teacher to the Countess’s grandchildren. Milton’s attachment to the household is celebrated in his 1633 piece ‘Arcades’. ‘Arcades’ began as a masque, a brief drama involving verse, music and scenic effects, in which the Duchess is presented as the matriarch of a rural paradise in which the arts flourish. (Countess Derby, then aged seventy-two, had been a well-known patron of poets and playwrights, Spenser included.) But the work is more than a gift to his patroness. In the middle of the piece Milton introduces the ‘celestial sirens’ (63), figures borrowed from Plato’s Republic whose voices harmonise the concentric whorls of the universe, and blends this image with his by now familiar notion of
… the heavenly tune, which none can hear Of human mould with gross unpurged ear
(72–3)
This, like the music which accompanies the birth of Christ in the ‘Nativity Ode’, is an expression of God’s presence from which the Fall has detached human beings.
The most interesting section of ‘Arcades’ is the conclusion of the Genius’s address (74–84), in which Milton finds himself having to reconcile the notion of music which is beyond human comprehension with the newly elevated, almost otherworldly, status of the Dowager. To have caused her to hear it would have been both sacrilegious and sycophantic, and Milton provides a deftly evasive compromise: ‘[S]uch music’ would be worthy of ‘her immortal praise’ if only ‘my [Milton’s] inferior hand or voice could hit/Inimitable sounds’ (75–8). The ‘heavenly tone’ would indeed be a fitting tribute to her status, but she is attended by lowly human beings who cannot produce it.
While this might seem to ally him with the Court-sponsored forms of entertainment so decried by the Puritans he subtly incorporates a meditation on the timeless notion of spiritually and the limitations of the ordinary human state. He was, demonstrably, answering questions raised by his refusal to commit himself to a career. Tentatively, he was finding in poetry a means of exploring the controversies that would soon drive England into warring factions. His next step in this process would be ‘Comus’. In June 1631 the Earl of Bridgewater, the Countess’s son-in-law, was appointed Lord Lieutenant of Wales, and Lawes and Milton decided to collaborate in the writing of his second masque to celebrate this. ‘A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle’, later to be known as Comus, was first performed in September 1634 in the grounds of Ludlow, one of Bridgewater’s official residences. Lawes wrote the music for the song parts, and the words, sung and spoken, were Milton’s. Three of the parts would be played by Bridgewater’s children, who, as Lawes’s pupils, had been well prepared for the demands of acting and singing.
The uncomplicated plot centres upon the kidnapping by the eponymous Comus, a semi-human demonic presence, of The Lady (played by the fifteen-year-old Lady Alice), whom he then attempts to seduce. It is a fairy story involving a conflict between Virtue and Vice; the former triumphs and a joyous, idyllic mood prevails. Comus was designed as the centrepiece of an evening of dancing and restrained conviviality; it was intended to reflect for its audience, and its participants, a collective feeling of familial order and optimism. (The Lady is eventually rescued by her two brothers, played by Lady Alice’s brothers, John and Thomas). Milton, who was responsible for the script and the direction of the plot, wraps a moral fable in light and decorative poetic dress, but at the same time, particularly during the verbal struggle between Comus and the Lady, he inscribes a more disturbing subtext – something that would have resonated for the adult, informed members of the audience. Three years earlier, in 1631, Countess Derby’s other son-in-law, Lord Castlehaven, had been at the centre of a trial which, if tabloid newspapers had existed at the time, would have become the newsprint scandal of the decade. Castlehaven was a bisexual, a paedophile and a sadist. He obliged a number of his male servants to have sex with him and on several occasions forced one of them, called Skipwith, to rape Castlehaven’s twelve-year-old stepdaughter Elizabeth, an act in which he was both spectator and participant. The biographical resonance of the Castlehaven scandal has been debated by Milton scholars for the best part of a century but while his most recent biographers refer to the events none suggests that they had a direct influence on the writing or performance of Comus. The consensus seems to be that while there are unsettling resemblances between what happened in life and in the masque there is no proof of a causal relationship between the two, a point made by John Creasey’s widely praised 1987 article whose title speaks for itself: ‘Milton and the Irrelevance of the Castlehaven Scandal’ (Milton Quarterly, 4, 1987, pp. 25–34). Creasey’s opinion, endorsed by everyone since 1987, is based on the premise that we
