The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
John Milton · a masque for performance, about a thousand lines of blank verse, couplets and song · first performed at Ludlow Castle on 29 September 1634 · scored on the text printed in 1645 among Milton’s English poems, read from knowledge; no text in hand, quoted only where its words are certain
Mode
Masque for a great household, turned from spectacle to debate and ordeal; a play of temptation with songs, dances and three scenes
Mythos
The maiden lost in the wood, the enchanter, the ordeal and the rescue; Circe’s son and his beasts; moly made Christian; Sabrina, the drowned virgin made goddess of the Severn
Phase
One night: the Spirit’s descent, the Lady lost and taken, the Brothers’ search, the chair, the rescue, the return to Ludlow, the Spirit’s flight
Presentation
Text for performance, printed anonymously in 1637 through Henry Lawes, and in 1645 and 1673 under Milton’s name; the 1645 text, with Sir Henry Wotton’s letter of 1638 printed before it
Register
Blank verse for argument and narrative, octosyllabic couplets for the rout and the epilogue, songs in short lyric measures for Echo and for Sabrina
Scale
Three children of an earl, an enchanter, a spirit and a river goddess, over one night between a wood and a castle
Governing Proposition
A girl lost at night in a wood on the way to her father’s house is taken by an enchanter, set fast in a chair and argued with by the most seductive voice in the poem; she refuses him, and cannot rise. The wager of the masque is that the mind no tempter can touch is still not able to free itself, that the virtue proof against seduction needs help it cannot give, and that the help comes down, and up, from the place where the masque is played.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
On Michaelmas night, 29 September 1634, a masque was played at Ludlow Castle for John Egerton, first Earl of Bridgewater, newly Lord President of the Council of Wales. His daughter, Lady Alice Egerton, played the Lady; his sons, John, Viscount Brackley, and Thomas Egerton, played the two Brothers. Henry Lawes wrote the music and played the Attendant Spirit. The words were by a young poet who had no public name, and when Lawes printed them in 1637, with a dedication to Lord Brackley, they appeared without his. Milton put his name to the masque in 1645 and again in 1673. The name it has been known by since the eighteenth century, Comus, is not his.
The desk scores the 1645 text, printed among the English poems of Poems of Mr. John Milton, Both English and Latin, with Sir Henry Wotton’s letter of 1638 set before it. Earlier states survive in the Trinity College Manuscript, in the Bridgewater Manuscript and in the 1637 print, and they show a work revised and lengthened; the last text Milton made is the one weighed. It is scored as a text for performance, as a play is: the songs, the dances and the changes of scene it calls for are part of it. Lawes’s music, which is not Milton’s, is not.
The masque begins with a descent. The Attendant Spirit comes down from “Before the starry threshold of Jove’s court” and tells the hall what it is about to see: a wood, three travellers on their way to their father, and Comus, son of Bacchus and Circe, who offers travellers a drink that turns their faces into the faces of beasts. The Spirit sets the cosmos the epilogue will complete, a ladder from the spheres to the earth, and the whole action is played on one rung of it.
Movement II
Comus enters with his rout, beast-headed revellers, in octosyllabic couplets that dance where the Spirit’s blank verse walked: “Midnight shout and revelry, / Tipsy dance and jollity”. This is the antimasque, and in a court masque it would be brief and grotesque and then swept away. Here it is the first sight of the man the masque will let speak at length, and the couplets are light and quick and not ugly. He hears someone coming, and the rout scatters.
The Lady is alone. She has lost her brothers in the dark, and the verse goes plain and firm as she gathers herself. She answers her fear with a short creed, “pure-eyed Faith, white-handed Hope”, and with chastity beside them, and then she sees a “sable cloud” turn “her silver lining on the night”. The phrase has passed into the language and left its scene behind; in its scene it is a girl in the dark choosing to see what will help her. Then she sings, to call her brothers, “Sweet Echo, sweetest nymph that liv’st unseen”.
Comus hears her, and his answer is the first sign of what the masque will do with him: “Can any mortal mixture of earth’s mould / Breathe such divine enchanting ravishment?” The tempter is moved, and moved by the right thing. He comes to her disguised as a shepherd, offers to lead her to his cottage until her brothers can be found, and she goes with him. The deception is simple, and the masque does not linger on it. The test is to come.
Movement III
The Brothers, lost in the same wood, talk about their sister. The younger fears for her; the elder answers with a doctrine. Chastity, he holds, is armour, and the wood cannot harm it: “Virtue may be assailed but never hurt, / Surprised by unjust force but not enthralled.” The younger is won over: “How charming is divine philosophy!” It is the longest movement of the masque, and it states the confidence the action will test. That is its use; but the doctrine is argued, illustrated and argued again, and the length was permitted by the occasion, two boys who needed parts, more than compelled by the argument.
The Spirit comes to them disguised as Thyrsis, their father’s shepherd, and tells them what has happened to their sister, which the hall has already seen. He gives them haemony, a root that guards against enchantment: the moly with which Hermes armed Odysseus against Circe, made here into a figure of grace that looks like nothing in this soil. The Brothers mean to rush in with drawn swords; the Spirit tells them that swords will not be enough, and that they must seize the enchanter’s wand.
The scene is the masque’s most static. The Brothers stand and talk while their sister is in danger, and the Spirit narrates instead of acting. But the Elder Brother’s Platonism is not mocked. It is the faith of a good boy who has read the right books, and what the masque goes on to do is not to refute it in words but to show what it cannot do.
Movement IV
The scene changes to Comus’s palace. The Lady is set in an enchanted chair, and she cannot move. Comus offers his cup, and she refuses it, and the masque gives her its firmest line: “Thou canst not touch the freedom of my mind.” It is true, and the chair shows what it costs, since her mind is free and her body is fixed. The image does what the debate cannot: it makes the doctrine visible and shows its limit in the same moment.
Then Comus argues, and Milton gives him the richest verse in the work. Nature has poured out her gifts “With such a full and unwithdrawing hand” that to refuse them is ingratitude; the long periods pile up as the plenty does, and the argument ends in the economy of seduction: “Beauty is nature’s coin, must not be hoarded.” The Lady answers him, plainer and harder, on temperance and the right use of nature’s goods, and the passages Milton added for the 1637 print raise the stakes from chastity to virginity. She refuses the argument more than she wins it.
The Brothers break in with their swords, and the glass is broken and the rout driven off; but Comus escapes with his wand, and the Lady is still fixed in the chair. The good boys, armed with doctrine and with haemony, have done what they could, and it was not enough. Virtue proof against temptation is not thereby sufficient to itself. That is the masque’s best disclosure, and it is given by an action, not a speech.
Movement V
The Spirit knows of one power that can undo the spell, and he calls her in song: “Sabrina fair, / Listen where thou art sitting / Under the glassy, cool, translucent wave.” Sabrina is a virgin of the line of Brutus and Locrine, drowned in the Severn and made its goddess, and the river runs through the country the Lord President had come to govern. She rises, sprinkles the Lady, touches the chair, and the Lady is free. Grace comes in song, not argument, and it comes up from the region in which the masque is being played.
The scene changes again, to Ludlow town and the President’s castle. Country dancers come on, and the Spirit presents the three children to their father and mother, tried and returned. Every masque ends with its masquers presented to the great persons in the hall. Here the convention is the meaning: the wood of the world has been passed through, and the children who walked into it come home to the house they set out for.
Then the Spirit goes back up, in octosyllabics lighter than the rout’s, past “the sphery chime” to gardens where Cupid holds Psyche, the right use of the love Comus misused. The last lines are an instruction to the hall: “Love virtue, she alone is free”, and a promise beneath it: “Or if Virtue feeble were, / Heaven itself would stoop to her.” The masque has shown both halves. Virtue was free in the chair and could not rise, and help came down the ladder the Spirit came down at the start.
Act III · The Twelve
The spine is required: the descent, the loss in the wood, the deception, the ordeal in the chair, a rescue the virtue itself cannot effect, the return to the father’s house. Remove Sabrina and the masque loses its theology, since the Brothers’ failure is what proves that chastity does not free itself. Remove the Brothers and the Lady’s confidence has no measure. But the subtractive test finds much. The Elder’s doctrine, “Virtue may be assailed but never hurt, / Surprised by unjust force but not enthralled”, is argued, illustrated and argued again; the Spirit as Thyrsis tells what the audience has seen; the passages added for the 1637 print carry the second debate past what the drama needs. What holds the axis near its cap is a work of set speeches as often as of necessity.
Score: 7.6 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds in part. The freedom of the mind is not the freedom of the body: “Thou canst not touch the freedom of my mind”, the Lady says, and the chair shows the cost, since her mind is free and she cannot move. Better, virtue proof against temptation is not thereby sufficient to itself: the Elder Brother’s confident Platonism is answered by the action, not in words. And Comus discloses the economy of seduction, plenty turned into a duty to spend: “Beauty is nature’s coin, must not be hoarded.” Held well below the top because the meaning is doctrine as much as discovery, the Lady refuses the argument rather than winning it, and the tempter’s richer sense of the world is left standing as a tension the work does not govern.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Height is frequent and of more than one kind. The lyric heights first: the Lady’s song, “Sweet Echo, sweetest nymph that liv’st unseen”, which makes Comus himself speak of “divine enchanting ravishment”; the invocation, “Sabrina fair, / Listen where thou art sitting / Under the glassy, cool, translucent wave”; the epilogue’s flight past “the sphery chime” to its close, “Or if Virtue feeble were, / Heaven itself would stoop to her”, the masque’s best lines and its theology in two. The dreadful height is lower but real: the Lady alone in the dark, answering her fear with “pure-eyed Faith, white-handed Hope”. Comus on Nature’s “full and unwithdrawing hand” is grand in a sensuous mode. Held off the top because the long debates are flat between the heights, and the height is lyric rather than dramatic.
Score: 8.4 / 10
More built than evoked, but built from borrowed materials. The load-bearing structure is the oldest: a maiden lost in a wood, an enchanter, an ordeal, a rescue, a return home. Comus is made the son of Circe, so the Odyssean change of men to beasts is inherited, and haemony is moly made Christian. Sabrina is the masque’s real construction: the British river goddess, a drowned virgin turned genius of the Severn, of the line of Brutus and Locrine, made the one power that can free the Lady, so that the region where the masque is played supplies the grace the doctrine lacks. The Welsh border, the Earl’s office and the oldest pattern of romance become one figure. Held below the gate because much else is allegory set on the frame, Faith, Hope and Chastity, rather than myth living in particulars.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The inheritance is the Stuart court masque of Jonson and Inigo Jones, where spectacle carries the meaning, the antimasque is grotesque and brief, and the noble masquers dance and do not speak. Milton turned it nearly inside out: the noble children speak, at length; the antimasque figure is given the most seductive verse in the work and argues; the core is a debate and an ordeal, not a revelation of the court’s order; the spectacle is minimal. A Puritan critique of the masque’s ethos is made inside a masque, for a great household, through its children. The stake was bounded: an occasional piece for a private audience, by a young poet without a name, printed anonymously. And Jonson had moralised the form already in Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue (1618), which has a Comus of its own.
Score: 8.0 / 10
The masque form knows things a play or a dialogue poem would not. The work ends where every masque ends, in the presentation of the masquers to the great persons in the hall, and here the convention is the meaning: the children pass through the wood of the world and are returned to their father’s house as tried, so the occasion becomes the moral. The chair, a stage image, carries what the debate cannot: a mind free in a body bound. The turn from blank verse to song marks the descent of grace, since Sabrina comes in song, not argument. But large parts are speeches whose form is indifferent to their stage, and the Brothers’ debate would lose little as a dialogue poem. The form is instrument at the frame and at the rescue, and container in the middle.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Evidence rather than promise: close to four centuries of reading and argument, with readings of nature and grace, of the revisions, of the masque and the politics of the Welsh Marches, and a long feminist argument over the Lady and her chair. The open questions are real and have not closed. Why the Lady cannot rise. Whether chastity and virginity are one doctrine or two, a question the passages added in 1637 sharpen. Whether Comus’s poetry undoes the argument it is set to lose. What the Cupid and Psyche of the epilogue promise. Held a step lower because the yield has come mainly from the doctrine and the occasion, and less from a poetic surface that keeps giving to the reader who comes back to it.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The field is English poetic drama and the masque in the 1630s, and English verse of the century. The intrinsic force is real: this is the work by which the masque became a poem that can be read without its performance, and the first full sounding of the blank verse and the argument of temptation that Paradise Lost would carry; Comus’s rhetoric is a first draft of the tempter’s in Eden. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: narrower than the force. The court masque ended with the Civil War, so the swerve redirected no form; what lived was the text. John Dalton’s adaptation with Arne’s music (1738) gave it a long stage life, and the poem was a school of lyric and blank verse for later poets. That is presence more than redirection, and it holds the axis below the gate.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Survival is demonstrated: the text is whole and has been since 1637, printed again in 1645 and 1673 and in every collected Milton since, and the earlier states in the Trinity College and Bridgewater manuscripts enrich it rather than cloud it. Presence was wide in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, on the stage in Dalton’s version and in anthologies and schools. The charges are on presence now and on the surface. It is read mainly in the academy and staged rarely; its surface is fixed to an occasion more than most works of its age, a Lord President’s office, the Earl’s children, the Severn; and the masque as a form is extinct. It has outlived its conditions as a poem, not as a spectacle, and the charged presence holds it beneath what a whole text of nearly four centuries would otherwise stand at.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Judged on Milton’s English. The blank verse is the young Milton’s most varied before Paradise Lost: Comus’s speech on Nature runs in long periods of accumulation, “With such a full and unwithdrawing hand”, that mime the plenty they argue, while the Lady’s verse is plainer and firmer, and the difference between them is craft. The octosyllabics of the rout and of the epilogue are light and quick. The songs, “Sweet Echo” and “Sabrina fair”, are among the finest lyrics for music in English. The charges are on construction: the drama is static, the Brothers stand and talk while their sister is in danger, the Spirit narrates what has been seen, the stagecraft is a scene painter’s minimum, and the rescue turns on the uncaptured wand, a failure the text explains briefly.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: Comus’s rout with its “Tipsy dance and jollity”, and the epilogue’s celestial Cupid with Psyche. One law governs them: a Platonic cosmos in which the body’s goods are real and ordered upward, so that the sensuous is not refused but placed, and the epilogue’s chaste love is the right use of what Comus misuses. The Spirit comes down from the spheres and goes back to them; the Lady’s virtue is tried on earth and helped from below, by a river. The range is wide for a masque: grotesque, pastoral, debate, theology, local legend, compliment. The strain is that Comus is given a poetry the law cannot quite contain, so the two speakers seem at times to belong to different poems; and the compliments and country dances sit on the frame, not under the law.
Score: 8.2 / 10
For a masque of about a thousand lines, much is held. The family: an earl’s children, a sister and two brothers, tried and returned to their parents. The state: the Lord President, the Welsh Marches, the country people’s dances admitted to the castle. The sacred: grace and its descent, the virtue that cannot free itself, the soul’s ascent. The natural order: the wood, the night, Nature’s bounty argued as the ground of appetite. Myth and British legend in Sabrina. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve: consciousness comes in thinly, the Lady’s fear in the wood the one place the work enters a mind under pressure; history is absent beyond the occasion; labour appears only as a shepherd’s disguise. The orders are held at the frame, in the return to the castle, and elsewhere listed more than held.
Score: 7.2 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.1 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 9.0, then The Made at 8.7, The Sublime at 8.4 and The Bottomless Well at 8.3. A text whole since 1637 and printed and read ever since, with a long stage life; the young Milton’s most varied blank verse and two of the finest lyrics for music in English; heights that come often, in Echo, Sabrina and the epilogue’s last lines; and open questions, the chair above all, that have kept readers arguing for nearly four centuries.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.2: household, region, office and the sacred are held at the frame, and elsewhere listed; consciousness comes in thinly and history barely at all. Above it, The Inevitable at 7.6, where the Brothers’ debate and the Spirit’s narrative state twice what they state once well; Pressure on Tradition at 7.8, a turn made inside a form the Civil War ended, so that it redirected nothing; and The Unconcealment at 7.9, a doctrine made visible more than a condition uncovered.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.6 against a threshold of 7.5, by a tenth. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.0, The Made at 8.7, The Inner Law at 8.2, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 9.0 clears the bar of 8.5, but The Archetypal Deep at 8.2, The Swerve at 8.0, The Unconcealment at 7.9 and Pressure on Tradition at 7.8 fall short. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis but The Encompassed falls below 7.6, against 7.5), and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.2. The aggregate, at 8.1, also stands below the summit’s 9.0.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of John Milton’s A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle, 1634, known as Comus, scored as the text printed in 1645 among the English poems of Poems of Mr. John Milton, Both English and Latin, with Sir Henry Wotton’s letter of 1638 before it, and weighed as a text for performance, with the songs, dances and changes of scene it calls for. Lawes’s music is not Milton’s and is not scored. No translation is involved. No text was in hand, nothing was measured, and no quotation was checked against a file. Quotations are short passages whose words are certain, given in modernised spelling and placed by speaker and scene; they are not cited by line, since the line numbering could not be checked. Matters that could not be verified, among them the exact line count, the length of each part and the share of the debates, the character of the Bridgewater Manuscript and what it lacks, a debt to Spenser in the chair, how long the stage adaptation held the London stage, a contemporary phrase of praise for the songs, a famous eighteenth-century verdict on the masque, the names and arguments of particular modern critics, including a case connecting the masque to a scandal in the Countess’s family, and several further phrases of the text, are not given.