The Life of John Milton: A Critical Biography

“Studious Retirement” 1632–1638

of life and art, but now in starker terms of good and evil. Comus’s perversion of
natural sensuality is opposed to the “Sun-clad power of Chastitie” (782) in the Lady

• with both concepts receiving nuanced and complex definition over the course of
  the work. Milton’s Comus is not the traditional belly god of drunkenness and
  gluttony but has the power and attractiveness of a natural force and a contemporary
  cultural ideal. As Cedric Brown notes, he is the right tempter for the occasion,
  presenting these young aristocrats with the refined, dissolute, licentious Cavalier
  lifestyle they must learn to resist.^99 His beast-headed rout images the deformation of
  human nature when passions supplant reason, and their antimasque dances display
  the art associated with this manner of life: “Tipsie dance, and Jollitie” (104), pro-
  ducing what the Lady recognizes as the sound “Of Riot, and ill-manag’d Merri-
  ment” (172). Poised against the Comus-ideal is the Lady’s chastity and the better art
  embodied in the songs of the Lady, the Attendant Spirit, and Sabrina, and especially
  the masque dances at Ludlow Castle.
  That better art points to the overarching concept of chastity as the principle that
  orders sensuality, pleasure, and love, holding nature, human nature, and art to their
  right uses. Those uses include the dynastic marriage Lady Alice surely expects;
  virginity is the proper, though only temporary, condition for her. Milton’s masque
  seeks to detach the larger virtue of chastity from the “idolatrous” Catholic queen
  and the court’s mystifications of her chaste marital love by vesting it in a learned
  Protestant virgin. But Milton undermines any notion of magical powers attaching
  to chastity or virginity. The haunting music and poetry of the Lady’s Echo Song
  leave Comus awestruck, but do not deflect him from his licentious purposes, as
  Fletcher’s Satyr was transformed by simply viewing the virgin Clorin. In the debate
  between the Lady’s brothers, the younger, a pessimistic realist, expects his sister to
  suffer rape or worse violence, given her exposed condition in an evil world, while
  the elder, a Platonic idealist, believes that chastity alone will protect her from sav-
  ages, bandits, or any other evil – as if she were a Diana or a Clorin or a militant
  Britomart “clad in compleat steele” (421). But in the Lady’s sounder view, chastity
  is a principle of spiritual integrity, not a physical state or a magic charm. In the dark
  wood and when paralyzed in Comus’s chair she confronts the reality of deception,
  physical danger, and sexual violence, yet insists upon her power of spiritual resist-
  ance:

Thou canst not touch the freedome of my mind

With all thy charms, although this corporall rind

Thou hast immanacl’d, while heav’n sees good. (ll. 663–5)

At Comus’s castle Comus and the Lady display their opposed values and rhetori-
cal styles in a formal debate on the questions, what kind of pleasure accords with
nature, and what is the nature of nature? In an initial exchange Comus offers the
Lady his Circean cup of sensual pleasure, ease, refreshment, balm, and joy as the