“Studious Retirement” 1632–1638forbade any dispute in sermons or tracts about the meaning of any of the Thirty-
nine Articles. Laud enforced these ordinances by a regime of censorship and repres-
sion that he termed, all too aptly, “Thorough.” Offences were tried in ecclesiastical
or Star Chamber courts – outside the protections of Common Law – and punish-
ments were often brutal, as in the case of the Puritan pamphleteers John Bastwick,
Henry Burton, and William Prynne, who had their ears hacked off in June, 1637.
Charles and Laud also undertook to impose ecclesiastical canons and the Book of
Common Prayer on Presbyterian Scotland. The rural retreat of Hammersmith could
afford Milton no escape from these issues, nor from continuing dismaying reports
of Protestant losses in the continental wars.
Milton’s self-prescribed program of reading at Hammersmith seems to have been
largely in classical literature and philosophy. He states in the Second Defense that he
devoted himself “entirely” to the Greek and Latin writers, and in the Apology he
points especially to “Plato and his equall Xenophon” as one focus of his “ceaseless
round of study and reading” in his “riper yeares” after childhood and youth (CPW
I, 891). This classical program is reflected in books purchased by Milton at this
time, some bearing his annotations: Euripides’ Tragedies and Lycophron’s Alexandra
in 1634 and Terence’s Comedies in 1635.^10 Very likely he also obtained his friend
Alexander Gil’s Latin poems, Epinikion (1631), celebrating the victories of the Prot-
estant military hero and Swedish king, Gustavus Adolphus, and Parerga (1632), his
collected poems.^11 Perhaps he also purchased the Shakespeare Second Folio (1632)
containing his own epitaph to Shakespeare.
As an aspiring poet, whatever else he might do, Milton had to determine how to
situate himself in the culture wars that intensified during the 1630s. That issue was
forced soon after he left Cambridge for Hammersmith, when he was invited to
contribute a poetic entertainment as part of the festivities in honor of Alice Spen-
cer, Dowager Countess of Derby. The court was then promoting a fashionable cult
of Platonic Love as a benign representation and vindication of royal absolutism and
the personal rule (1629–40), when Charles ruled without parliament. In the court
masques of the 1630s the royal pair displayed themselves under various mythologi-
cal and pastoral guises as enacting the union of Heroic Virtue (Charles) and Divine
Beauty or Love (Henrietta Maria, often personating Venus or Juno).^12 Many of
them contain some representation of contemporary problems and some covert cri-
tique of the personal rule, but their primary effect is to mystify and reinforce it. By
comparison with Jacobean masques, Caroline masques were even more exotic and
prodigiously expensive, sets and machinery were more elaborate, antimasques much
more numerous, and dramatic speech more prominent. The ideality of Charles’s
reign was often imaged in pastoral terms: the queen is Chloris/Flora in Chloridia
(1631); the court is imaged as the Valley of Tempe in Tempe Restored (1632); and in
Coelum Britannicum (1634) the reformed heaven (modeled on the court of Charles)
is represented as a garden with parterres, fountains and grottoes.^13 The king and
queen danced in many masques, symbolizing their personal and active control of all