“Studious Retirement” 1632–1638“Growing My Wings”
In all its stages but most emphatically in its final forms (1637/1645), Milton’s Maske
Presented at Ludlow Castle is a reformed masque. It makes large claims for the poet’s
educative role as it locates virtue in, and teaches virtue to, a worthy noble family
while delivering a trenchant critique of the Caroline ethos embodied in court
masques. It is in some ways a complement to Arcades, elaborating issues and motifs
briefly treated in that 109-line Entertainment. Both works undertake to reform
their genres and the values associated with them; both have at their center a journey
to a virtuous household; both exalt aristocratic virtue and criticize the court; and
both emphasize the curative powers of local pastoral figures and of good art: poetry,
song, dance. The themes of A Maske explore the nature of temptation, the problem
of deception and illusion in the fallen world, and the danger of taking false pleasures
for true ones. Making the Egerton children’s journey to their father’s Ludlow Cas-
tle a figure for the journey of life to a divine Father’s house, the masque puts on
display their sound education and virtue, intimating that the moral health of the
nation depends upon the formation of such young aristocrats.
There is no close source, but Milton draws eclectically on his wide reading. The
realm from which the Attendant Spirit, first named Daemon, is sent to guard the
children owes something to Plato’s Phaedo and to Spenser’s Garden of Adonis. The
sensualist magician Comus, son of Circe and leader of a beast-headed rout, draws
upon the Circe myth in the Odyssey and in Ovid, on Acrasia’s Bower of Bliss, and
on Jonson’s masque Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue.^94 The central plot situation of two
brothers searching for a sister lost in the dark wood and captured by Comus recalls
Peele’s Old Wives Tale. The trial of the Lady recalls but contrasts with Spenser’s
Amoret enslaved by Busirane (Faerie Queene III, 12): Comus paralyzes the Lady by
magic and tries to seduce her with powerful rhetoric, but unlike Amoret she pro-
duces a powerful verbal defense. Her release by the chaste Sabrina, nymph of the
River Severn, recalls the curative role of the virgin healer Clorin in Fletcher’s
Faithful Shepherdess. The Elder Brother’s glorification of chastity owes much to
Plato, to Renaissance Neoplatonism, and to Spenser’s Britomart. The entire masque
tradition supplies the terms for the main masque scene at Ludlow Castle where the
children dance their victory over temptation; and contemporary Caroline masques
such as Tempe Restored (1632) and Coelum Britannicum (1634) embody the norms
Milton writes against.^95 There are verbal and metrical echoes from A Midsummer
Night’s Dream, The Tempest, and other Shakespeare plays, and the Book of Revela-
tion stands behind some of the imagery of the Spirit’s Epilogue. Also, Milton uses a
mix of verse forms: iambic pentameter for most of the dialogue, octosyllabic cou-
plets (echoing and perverting L’Allegro) for Comus’s address to his rout, and songs
in a variety of intricate stanzas.
Despite the extensive dialogue and some dramatic tension in the Lady’s encoun-