“Studious Retirement” 1632–1638occasions Castlehaven had his servants rape his wife and stepdaughter (who was
married to his own son); he was also accused of sodomy with his servants, and of
popery.^26 The more prosperous family of the dowager countess’s second daughter
Frances, wife of John Egerton, Earl of Bridgewater, lived at Ashridge, only 16 miles
away. Milton’s entertainment makes tactful use of the dowager countess’s role as a
bulwark of strength to her family, without referring directly to the notorious
Castlehaven scandal.
Arcades was performed in the great hall by some of the countess’s resident and
visiting grandchildren and some others. It proposes to reclaim pastoral from the
court, intimating the superiority of these Harefield festivities and the virtues of this
noble Protestant lady and her household over the queen and her suspect pastoral
entertainments. The term “Entertainment” relates Arcades to the genre usually em-
ployed to welcome visiting royalty or their surrogates to a noble house; most often
its topics praise the visitor who brings the benefits and virtues of the court ethos to
the hosts. But in Milton’s reformed entertainment it is the visitors, coming in pas-
toral guise from the “Arcadian” court, who pay homage to a far superior rural
queen of a better Arcadia, directed by Genius, its guardian spirit. The countess
replaces the king in the chair of state, and displays royal and divine accoutrements.
A “sudden blaze of majesty” flames from her “radiant state” and “shining throne,”
which is also a “princely shrine” for an “unparalel’d” maternal deity: “Such a rural
Queen / All Arcadia hath not seen.”^27 The critique of the court is sharpened in a
pair of lines added in the Trinity manuscript to the two last songs by Genius: “Though
Syrinx your Pans Mistres were / Yet Syrinx well might wait on her.”^28 The Arcadia/
Pan myth had been taken over by the Stuarts, so these lines exalt the countess above
Henrietta Maria and the Caroline court. That comparative valuation would not be
lost on this audience: the countess herself had danced in Queen Anne’s masques;
one Egerton grandchild, Penelope, had danced in Chloridia (1631), and three more
- Alice (the Lady of Comus) and her elder sisters Katherine and Elizabeth – had
danced in Queen Henrietta’s Tempe Restored (1632).^29
Milton also began to explore here what his Maske would develop fully: a stance
toward art and recreation that repudiates both the court aesthetics and Prynne’s
wholesale prohibitions. Genius – probably acted by a servant–musician attached to
the countess’s household – is the gardener/guardian of the place, embodying the
curative and harmony-producing powers of music and poetry. The virtues of
Harefield are said to be nurtured by good art as well as by the ruling Lady. Genius
cures conditions that symbolize the evils of the fallen world – noisome winds,
blasting vapors, evil dew, worms with cankered venom – and he nourishes all
nature by his “puissant words.” Also, he hears the music of the spheres (inaudible to
mortals) and recognizes music’s capacity, “To lull the daughters of Necessity, / And
keep unsteddy Nature to her law” (69–70). His songs attempt some imitation of
that music as they both celebrate and nurture the countess’s virtue. Genius’s last
song calls on the visitors to leave off their Arcadian dances to serve this more excel-