Milton's Comus, 1634
To this year 1634 (September 29) belongs, too, the
performance of Milton's Comus, an entertainment, masque-like in form,
presented at Ludlow Castle before the Earl of Bridgewater, Lord President of Wales.
This was not Milton's first venture in this kind. He had already furnished part
of an entertainment presented to the Countess Dowager of Derby at Harefield a
year or two before and now known as Arcades. 1 It appears to have
been Lawes' friendship that procured for Milton both of these opportunities to
display his lyrical talent, as Lawes wrote music for both and personally
superintended the performance of Comus.
Milton's part in Arcades includes three lovely lyrics and a speech of the Genius
of the Wood. Comus is a far more elaborate production, and, even if not in
strict parlance a masque (from the circumstance that it does not clearly involve
a ball nor contains masquers), marks in more than one respect a return to the
simpler and purer conception of such entertainments in earlier time.
Comus presents a coherent situation expressed in an obvious and well
sustained allegory. Comus is not dramatic, as those who have seen it in
revival must confess; but the beauty and pure elevation of its thought, its
lyrical music combined with "a certain Doric delicacy, "give force to the words
of its earliest eulogist when he declares, "I must plainly confess to have seen
yet nothing parallel in our language: Ipsa mollities." 2.
Although staged with no such pomp as that which distinguished the masques at
court in this year, Comus exhibits three changes of scene, a wild wood, a stately
palace, and the exterior of Ludlow Castle, in the great hall of which the masque
was given. The participants were by no means all new to such devices, for not
only was Lawes the guiding spirit, but Viscount Brackley and Thomas Egerton,
sons of the Earl of Bridgewater (who with their sister the Lady Alice acted the
chief parts of Comus), had already appeared as actors in Cœlum Britannicum.
Similar productions to Milton's in kind if not in degree of excellence are The
Spring's Glory, a dainty and poetical trifle intended for the prince's birthday,
May 29, 1638, by Thomas Nabbes, and A Masque at Bretbie, on Twelfh Night, 1639,
by Sir Aston Cockayne, presented to his kinsman, the Earl of Chesterfield.
Spring's Glory is no more or less a masque than Comus. Cockayne's
is in no wise notable, and probably represents the average of many a private masque
which wise if envious Time has suffered to perish or lie buried in those ungarnered fields,
the muniment rooms of many an English ancient family.3
Notes:
1 The countess dowager, a patron of poets from Spenser to Milton, was the wife,
by her second marriage, of Lord Chancellor Ellesmere. Sir John Egerton, his son
by a former marriage, married Lady Frances Stanley, the countess dowager's
daughter by her first marriage, and became Earl of Bridgewater.
Thus Arcades and Comus were celebrations within the same family
2 Letter of Sir Henry Wotton to Milton, April 13, 1638.
3 Ebsworth, Carew, 134 and 164.