“Studious Retirement” 1632–1638If every just man that now pines with want
Had but a moderate, and beseeming share
Of that which lewdly-pamper’d Luxurie
Now heaps upon some few with vast excesse,
Natures full blessings would be well dispenc’t
In unsuperfluous even proportion,
And she no whit encomber’d with her store. (ll. 768–74)In Caroline court masques the evils of social disorder and disruption are commonly
associated with the lower classes, not, as here, with the waste and extravagance of
the court and the wealthy elites. The Lady refuses to answer Comus’s challenge to
chastity and virginity on the ground that he is utterly unable to understand those
concepts, but her few words opening that topic leave him awestruck, as her song
did earlier.^100 Finding his rhetorical art countered by her logic and “sacred vehe-
mence” (795), he turns to force.
The rescue scene demystifies the divine interventions and the male heroics com-
mon in masques. Set against Comus’s role as magician and illusionist is the Attend-
ant Spirit’s role as teacher, dispensing heaven’s aid through human means, not
miracles. He advises the brothers how to rescue their sister, and provides them with
haemony (sound education in temperance or in scripture), like the moly that pro-
tected Ulysses from Circe. But surprisingly, the brothers’ brave but impetuous sword-
play achieves only a partial rescue: they chase Comus away but cannot release the
Lady – perhaps because as males they cannot reverse the phallic power of Comus’s
wand. The Spirit then has recourse to female power tendered through poetry, a
story by his teacher Meliboeus (Spenser, in FQ, II.x.19) about an innocent virgin
murdered because she was the product of an adulterous union and then trans-
formed into the nymph of the Severn river which flows near Ludlow from Wales.
Sabrina’s tainted origin points to original sin as the source of the Lady’s plight,
paralyzed in a chair “Smear’d with gummes of glutenous heate”(916) – subject, that
is, despite her own virtue to unruly sensuality and unable to free herself, to attain
salvation by her own merits.
When the Spirit’s song invokes Sabrina the masque transformations begin, and
issues only partly settled by debate are resolved in song and dance. Sabrina’s trans-
formation from victim to deity, and her existence in the world of poetry and myth,
make her an appropriate emblem and agent for the divine grace necessary to free
the Lady. As agent of grace, she sprinkles water drops in a ceremony suggestive of
baptism. As a classical female deity, she is invoked from among a company of fe-
male water deities and protectors of humans – Leucothea, Thetis, Parthenope, Ligea,
and other nymphs – whose nurturing care can aid their mortal sister.^101 As daughter
of Locrine, she calls up heroic myths of Aeneas, Anchises, Brut, and Trojan Britain
as an impetus for national reformation, connecting the Egertons with that heroic
past rather than the present Stuarts. As a personage in Spenser’s poem and as a singer