a poem, play or novel. As we will see in Chapters 13 and 14, attempts to assemble a profile of an author and their intentions from biographical and contextual evidence went out of fashion in the 1980s. By the same token we might argue that because there is no direct reference in Orwell’s Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four to a particular place or regime then we can rule them out as representations of Soviet totalitarianism. Few would regard this as anything other than imbecilic, so why are we not allowed to apply the same contextual model to Milton’s Comus?
Castlehaven was found guilty and executed in May 1631. He was beheaded and the two servants who allegedly colluded with him in various acts of rape and sodomy were hanged, as befitted their lower social ranking. The family would have recognised the parallels – an adult, demonic figure of aristocratic bearing attempts to satiate himself with a virgin child. Comus, unlike Castlehaven, fails, but there was an implied postscript. Castlehaven was a Roman Catholic and an enthusiastic supporter of Charles I. Prynne, in Histrio-Mastix cites Castlehaven as the worst exemplar of his religious creed, and from this he argued that the grand ceremonialism of the Roman Church encouraged the most sinful, lewd, pernicious aspects of our fallen condition. For virtually everyone who witnessed the performance of the masque the curious intersections between the Castlehaven case and the broader polemical sweep of Prynne’s book would have been evident. We have no evidence from those present at the performance of how what they witnessed triggered uneasy recognitions of what had recently happened to the Bridgewaters, but consider: a year before the masque was performed a non-aristocratic fourteen-year-old girl had been raped by a gang of men in the grounds of the castle. Amazingly, she named those who had assaulted her and insisted that charges be pressed, though we know nothing of the result. We cannot prove that Milton knew of the incident but at the same time we can’t be certain that he did not: the parallels between a brave early teenager who goes after the rapists and Milton’s The Lady who heroically resists them are stunning. Moreover Alice’s mother the senior Lady Egerton had written a letter to her friend stating that she feared that Alice had been bewitched, entranced by the husband of a servant who had acquired his powers from Satan. It is unlikely that Milton knew of the letter but he was certainly alert to the neuroses and preoccupations of his sponsors, the house of aristocrats for whom he was writing a play that would not dispel their anxieties but which might help them in their attempts to confront them. Milton was harnessing his talents as a poet to a more solemn and pragmatic commitment, involving fundamental elements of belief and behaviour. His seemingly self-indulgent period of withdrawal was in truth quite the opposite.
The most important section of Comus is lines 558–812, in which The Lady is ‘set in’ and apparently unable to remove herself form ‘an enchanted chair’. It is made up of a dialogue between The Lady and Comus, who appears to have entrapped her in a fantastic, enchanted realm. Comus is attempting to seduce her and the following are examples of his rhetorical technique:
If all the worldShould in a pet of temperance feed on pulse,Drink the clear stream, and nothing wear by frieze,The All-giver would be unthanked, would be unpraised,Not half his riches known, and yet despised.
(719–23)
Beauty is nature’s coin, must not be hoarded,But must be current, and the good thereofConsists in mutual and partaken bliss,Unsavoury in the enjoyment of itself.It you let slip time, like a neglected rose It withers on the stalk with languished head
(738–43)
The passages are significant because they transcend their immediate context and involve Milton in an engagement with contemporary poetic and social conventions. They invite comparison with the amatory mode of Metaphysical poetry in which the male addresser makes use of his considerable stylistic and referential abilities to persuade the female addressee of something; frequently that sex with him is entirely consistent with God’s design for the universe and the status of human beings within it. Comus argues that nakedness is God’s gift and that He would be ‘unthanked’ if it were not fully appreciated and indeed made use of ‘in mutual and partaken bliss’. Beauty is transient and will ‘like a neglected rose’ wither if not enjoyed. These strategies are almost clichés and are abundant in Donne’s ‘The Flea’ and ‘The Ecstacy’ and in Marvell’s ‘To His Coy Mistress’. But while Donne’s and Marvell’s addressees remain silent and, one assumes, enchanted, Milton allows The Lady to reply:
I had not thought to have unlocked my lipsIn this unhallowed air, but that this jugglerWould think to charm my judgement, as mine eyes,Obtruding false rules pranked in reason’s garb.
(755–8)
The closing line of this extract is remarkable: ‘false rules pranked in reason’s garb’ is a succinct and unambiguous rejection of the tendency in the verse of the Metaphysicals for the use of figurative language as a means of undermining the customary perceptions of the listener. During John Donne’s lifetime his poems circulated only in manuscript form among the London-based literary intelligentsia. We have no proof that Milton had read any of them but given his sense of his own role as part of the burgeoning new age of English writing it is difficult to imagine that he did not avidly seek out the verses of the man he’d heard preach in the cathedral attached to his school. Most significantly, Donne’s poems went into print in 1633, roughly seven months before Milton began work on Comus and we can take it as a given that Milton was confident that most, if not all of his audience, members of the aristocratic and cultural elite, would have obtained copies of the work of the secular alter-ego of the Dean of St Paul’s. It is of course impossible to claim any knowledge of what was going through Milton’s mind when he composed Comus but, knowing the circumstances, we might be forgiven for suspecting that he was inviting his audience to compare his masque with the ingrained habits of his immediate creative forebears. Consider, for example, Donne’s ‘The Flea’, reckoned to be popular among his peers and a work that typifies the defining features of Metaphysical verse. In three stanzas the male speaker attempts to seduce his female listener, using the eponymous flea as the foundation for a bravura performance in twisting and turning a metaphor back and forth. First he compares her reluctance to submit to his desires with the insect, an insignificance. Next, when she attempts to swat it, he treats it as symbolic of their unity; it has bitten them both and united their blood. Finally, when she succeeds in killing it, he proposes that its disappearance means nothing compared with their enduring love. The woman never speaks. We know, by implication from the man’s words, of her acts and opinions but we listen only to him. Aside from anything else it is a lesson in the proprietorial conventions of verbal dexterity. Men speak, invent, persuade, and women listen. Milton’s Lady answers back and stops Comus in his rhetorical tracks. The passage is an unrecognised crossroads in literary history; for the first time the woman takes control of the direction of the mood and plot of the work. Milton, I would argue, was inviting his audience to compare the battle of the sexes on this stage with a pre-decided contest in literature everywhere else. Would his audience have detected the allusion, the invitation to compare the performance with their acceptance of a norm? The fact that it was so radical a gesture indicates only one response: yes. Consider Samuel Johnson’s famous dismissal of Metaphysical and Renaissance drama technique: ‘their learning instructs and their subtlety surprises; but the reader commonly thinks his improvement dearly bought …’ (Johnson 1779–81). ‘His’ improvement might be dearly bought by figurative excess, but what about hers? The Lady continues,
Thou hast not the ear nor soul to apprehendThe subtle notion, and high mysteryThat must be uttered to unfold the sageAnd serious doctrine of Virginity …Enjoy your dear wit and gay rhetoric That hath so well been taught her dazzling fence Thou art not fit to hear thyself convinced.
(783–91)
There are very few women in Renaissance literature who use language with such confidence and authority as Milton’s Lady. Most importantly she removes any doubt that Milton had absorbed and reflected on key passages in his edition of Shakespeare’s 1623 Folio and was
