Notes to Chapter 1included in this manuscript, or else supplied by some other musician attached to the
household.
39 Parker (II, 792, n. 42) supplies evidence of Bridgewater’s moderation in the controver-
sies relating to royal absolutism and especially Laudianism. Leah Marcus, The Politics of
Mirth (Chicago and London, 1986), 172–9, reviews the conflicting interpretation of his
politics in the 1630s and after. Cf. Maryann Cale McGuire, Milton’s Puritan Masque
(Athens, Ga., 1983), 171–2. Marcus in “The Milieu of Milton’s Comus,” Criticism 25
(1983), 293–327, discusses Bridgewater’s judicial probity, especially in relation to a rape
case involving an aristocrat and a country girl. J[ohn] C[ollinges], a dissenting clergy-
man, published a biographical account of two of Lady Alice’s older sisters, Par Nobile.
Two Treatises (London, 1669), in one of which Frances Egerton credits her father with
“seasoning her against Arminian principles” and providing her a Huguenot governess
who taught her “to be a Calvinist in point of Doctrine, and a Presbyterian as to Disci-
pline.” The Excellent Woman, 4.
40 The best account of these revisions is Sprott’s introduction to A Maske: The Earlier
Versions (Toronto, 1973), 3–33. That edition presents the Trinity manuscript, the act-
ing version represented in the Bridgewater manuscript, and the 1637 published version
side by side, to highlight changes.
41 Brown, Aristocratic Entertainments (26–40) discusses Bridgewater’s activities, the circum-
stances of his two visits to Ludlow in July and September, and the route of his travels in
the region between those visits. Several entertainments were presented to him en route,
including one at Chirk Castle. See Cedric C. Brown, “The Chirk Castle Entertainment
of 1634,” MQ 11 (1977), 76–86. The family, including Lawes, also made a three-week
visit to Lyme Park in Cheshire, where the children and Lawes may have rehearsed their
rather demanding parts in A Maske.
42 This fair copy is not in Milton’s hand nor Lawes’s.
43 Omissions include ll. 195–225, 350–65, 735–55 (all line numbers in text and notes are
from Hughes).
44 For Gil’s witty verses of this period see Leo Miller, “On some Verses by Alexander Gil
which John Milton Read,” MQ 24 (1990), 22–5.
45 Stella P. Revard’s translation in Milton and the Tangles of Neaera’s Hair: The Making of
the 1645 Poems (Columbia, 1997), 85. The Greek is “En de theos laoisi mega kreion
basileuen.” She notes that the word “king” is not found in the English translation of
the Geneva Bible, or in the 1611 AV, or in the Latin Vulgate, or in the Greek of the
polyglot Bible, or in the original Hebrew, which uses the word for “dominion.”
46 See p. 56 and note 11.
47 This is the suggestion of Arthur and Alberta Turner, CPW I, 322.
48 Donald C. Dorian, The English Diodatis (New York, 1939), 155, 274.
49 Anthony à Wood, Athenae Oxonienses... to which are added the Fasti, or Annals, of the
said University (1500–1690), 4 vols (London, 1813–20), I, col. 513.
50 In the 1630s the county divisions placed Horton in Buckinghamshire.
51 Christopher Hill, Milton and the English Revolution (London, 1977), 38–9, points to
several trials of heretics in the region and to the unpopularity of the papermill, due to
the low wages paid and fears that the rags carried the plague.
52 Victoria History of the Counties of England: Buckinghamshire (London, 1925). British Li-
brary Add Ms 37017 contains obviously romanticized watercolor sketches of the house
Notes to Chapter 3