“Studious Retirement” 1632–1638then imagines that we might answer their song “with undiscording voice” as we
did before sin distroyed that harmony. The poem concludes with a prayer that we
might sing in tune with Heaven until God joins us to his celestial consort. The form
again recalls the Italian madrigal with irregular line lengths – chiefly pentameter,
though with some seven-syllable lines and a concluding alexandrine – and a rhyme
scheme that moves from alternating rhymes to couplets, breaking that pattern with
the rhyming lines 9 and 15. This brief ode shows Milton in full command of the
sublimities of the high lyric.
Sometime in 1634 Milton received a commission for a masque in honor of the
Earl of Bridgewater, to celebrate his first visit to the regions he was charged to
administer by his appointment in 1631 as Lord President of the Council of Wales
and Lord Lieutenant of the Welsh and border counties. The invitation may have
come directly from the Egerton family who knew Milton from Arcades, but it was
more likely tendered by Lawes who, as servant to Bridgewater and music master to
his children, had charge of planning the entertainment. Milton’s Maske was per-
formed on Michaelmas night (September 29, 1634) in the great hall at Ludlow;
Henry Lawes contributed most and perhaps all of the music.^38 Bridgewater’s char-
acter and Ludlow’s distance from the court gave Milton space to create for this
occasion a masque that radically challenges the cultural politics of that court genre.
Though a royalist and a friend of the king and Buckingham, Bridgewater was a
Calvinist, a conscientious judge, and a governor who resisted Laud’s efforts to im-
pose rigid religious conformity in his region.^39 Milton’s reformed masque builds
brilliantly upon the specific occasion, presenting the earl’s three unmarried children
- Lady Alice, age 15, the young heir John, Lord Brackley, age 11, and Thomas, age
9 – on a journey to their father’s house for a celebration, aided by a Guardian Spirit
who is Alice’s own music master, Lawes. But their journey takes on overtones of
the journey of life and of contemporary life, with the children lost in the dark
woods and the Lady confronting the temptations of Comus. With his bestial rout
Comus is made to figure on one level Cavalier licentiousness, Laudian ritual, the
depravities of court masques and feasts, as well as the unruly holiday pastimes –
maypoles, morris dances, Whitsun ales – promoted by the Book of Sports Charles I
had reissued the previous year. Comus embodies as well the seductive power of
false rhetoric and the threat of rape.
Milton titled his work simply A Maske and dated it 1634 in the Trinity manu-
script: it is discussed on pages 76–81. The TM text shows several kinds and stages of
revision, all in Milton’s hand.^40 Pre-performance changes involve shifting or adding
to some passages and altering stage directions as Milton gained, probably from Lawes,
a better sense of the resources available – singers, dancers, machinery. Given the
length of the masque, Milton probably began writing in the spring and turned a fair
copy (now lost) over to Lawes before Lawes left London in early July to accompany
the Egertons on their “Progress” in the region.^41 Subsequently, performance re-
quirements and social decorum led someone, probably again Lawes, to make ex-