Professor John Rogers:
In the poem that we looked at last time -- that was the
poem "Ad Patrem" that Milton had addressed to his father --
Milton was attempting, as you remember,
to justify to his father his own interest in becoming a poet.
And so I'm going to ask you to turn back to "Ad Patrem."
This is page eighty-three of the Hughes edition.
This is where Milton is accounting for himself in his
choice of a poetic career. In the second verse paragraph,
Milton tells his father: "do not despise divine poetry,
creation of the prophetic bard. Nothing better shows our
heavenly origins, our divine seed,
our human intellect, those holy traces of Promethean
fire." And look a little further down
in the same paragraph. Milton continues his defense of
what he calls the poet's task. Poets are not only due the
highest respect imaginable here on earth, Milton's explaining to
his dad. Poets are rewarded as well in
heaven. And so Milton writes (this is
page eighty-three): "And when we return to our
native Olympus" -- and in a classically oriented poem such
as this a phrase like "our native Olympus" would always
serve to signify the Christian heaven.
[And w]hen we return to our native Olympus and the
everlasting ages of immutable eternity are established,
we [and he means "we poets"] shall walk, crowned with gold,
through the temples of the skies and with the harp's soft
accompaniment we shall sing sweet songs to which the stars
shall echo and the vault of heaven from pole to pole.
Unbelievable. Now Milton –
and he's being serious here, and we are given every
rhetorical cue possible that Milton is being serious –
has conjured one of the most extraordinary rewards
conceivable for a poet. Forget the paltry crown of
laurel placed atop the heads of great writers in the classical
tradition. What good is that going to do
you? Milton is actually talking
about heaven here. And the reward for the poet's
sacrifice here on earth is not simply eternal fame that had
long been a privileged image. It's a priority status in the
great hereafter. This is Milton's argument.
And if heaven is going to be segregated, as Milton seems to
believe it would be, into hierarchies and classes,
then surely poets would enjoy the privileges of the highest
class of all as they "walk, crowned with gold,
through the temples of the skies" and "with the harp's soft
accompaniment… sing sweet songs."Now we
have to ask: where could Milton have come by such an idea as
this? This image of a special reward
in heaven for certain types of behavior does of course have
some sort of scriptural basis, but there's certainly nothing
in the Bible to suggest that it's poets who are issued the
crowns of gold and, especially, a prominent place
as they enter the pearly gates. And so often,
and this is something that we'll get very used to here,
Milton is incorporating into his own text a biblical text on
a subject almost entirely different from the one of his
own idiosyncratic poem. And as so often Milton has no
choice but to wrench and to violate the biblical text to
force it to say what he wants it to say,
or to force it to say what he needs it to say.Now this
allusion here in this verse epistle to his father is to a
passage from the book of Revelation.
Milton's alluding to what he took to be the divinely inspired
prophesy of Saint John the Divine that ends the New
Testament. I've put this on the handout.
This is from chapter 14 of the book of Revelation.
…I heard the voice of harpers harping with their
harps: And they sung as it were
a new song before the throne…
and no man could learn that song.
[I've skipped a little bit.] but the hundred and forty and
four thousand, which were redeemed from the
earth. These are they which were
not defiled with women; for they are virgins.
So according to John, the presumed author of
Revelation, it's not poets who get to wed
their songs to the soft voice streams.
It's not poets who are crowned with gold as they learn the song
no other men could learn. These are honors reserved
exclusively for virgins, honors reserved only for those
who do not defile themselves with the sins of the flesh.
And so it's as if something in the figurative world of Milton's
poem to his father has -- I don't know, how do we put it?
-- has gone awry and unless we're willing to concede,
and we're probably not, that all poets are necessarily
male virgins, you can pretty much safely say
that there's a significant disjunction here between
Milton's own text and the passage,
the text in the book of Revelation, that he's alluding
to. This is an opportunity for us
-- this is what I get paid to do and what you're getting credit
[laughs] for learning to do –
it's this type of signifying gap that compels us as literary
critics to dive in and to begin to explore.So the first
question is, how do we understand the
slippage here from the biblical virgin to the Miltonic poet --
and more generally, what could poetry
possibly have to do with virginity?
I hope you remember from the Sixth Elegy, the Sexta
Elegia, that we read a few classes ago that Milton had told
his friend Charles Diodati that an aspiring epic poet should
only drink water; two, should refrain from eating
meat; and three, should keep his body
chaste. And the figure of the poetic
rewards for chastity continues to surface throughout Milton's
early works. You remember the "Letter to a
Friend" that we looked at for the last time.
Milton seemed to have decided against marriage as he was
making the decision to wed himself to his poetry instead.
And in the group of poems that were assigned for a section last
week, you saw Milton alluding to just this passage,
although you might not have known it, in Revelation 14
whenever he would speak of the music of the spheres.
So in "At a Solemn Music" and in the poem "Arcades,"
Milton turns to what he considered to be the greatest
song of all: the music of the heavenly spheres.
And he indicated that there are only a few just men -- just,
honorable men -- who can even hear those celestial notes.
It would appear that Milton's suggesting that it's chastity
that actually establishes something like a precondition
for hearing and learning that inspired song that's actually
sung before the throne of God in Revelation.
So true poetry for Milton, true prophetic poetry,
the kind of song that can actually vie with the most
perfect music of the spheres, is only accessible,
and presumably only producible, by the virgin.Now we can't
neglect the first question here, which is at least for me:
did Milton really believe this? Could Milton actually have
believed that poetic success was in some way contingent on what
it is that you do, or what it is you don't do,
with your body? And obviously we don't have him
here. Who knows the degree of honesty
that he would bring to our question if he were here?
We can never know the answer to the question of Milton's actual
beliefs; but we know how Milton wanted
to represent those youthful beliefs,
which is exactly what he does in the prose treatise with the
wonderful title An Apology [for]
Smectymnuus. Don't be put off by the
name. Smectymnuus is a made-up
name, though Milton didn't make it up.
It's an acronym comprised of the initials of five
Presbyterian ministers, which,
when combined, forms the name -- it almost
sounds obscene -- Smectymnuus.So the
Apology [for] Smectymnuus was written in
1642. It's about eight years after
Comus. I know we haven't gotten to
Comus yet, but I'm trying to put this in
to context. In this pamphlet,
this prose treatise, Milton is looking back at this
exuberant affection for the very idea of chastity that he had
held in his youth. You'll note -- and there's no
reason you need to read more of this, but the Hughes edition
only includes a small portion of the actual pamphlet.
So this treatise as a whole is Milton's defense of these six
Presbyterian ministers who wrote a treatise criticizing the
authoritarian structure of the English church.
Milton was also at this time becoming an opponent of the
Anglican church government, and he was writing and
publishing attacks on the church alongside those of the
Smectymnuus group.Now the Church of England establishment
always countered these puritan treatises in attack of their
position. In a particularly vicious
critique of so-called Smectymnuus,
an anonymous Anglican opponent attacked not only these six
Presbyterian ministers but attacked Milton as well.
I think this might be the first time that John Milton is
actually attacked or brought to the attention of the English
people in print. So we have this anonymous
attacker who dismisses Milton's earlier political treatises,
especially The Reason of Church Government and other
early works. He dismisses Milton in an
unscrupulous ad hominem attack.
He argued that this John Milton fellow simply couldn't be heeded
on matters of the church, or on matters of the state,
because Milton himself had absolutely no moral authority.
He accused Milton of frequenting playhouses,
and also of frequenting . .
. bordellos.
We ask ourselves, "Milton?! Our John Milton frequent a
bordello?!" You must agree with me that
although Milton may have had some wayward,
bordello-oriented thoughts, there is no way in hell that
this unspeakably self-controlled young man would actually find
himself in a whorehouse.The accusation is absurd,
and Milton knew it was absurd, but he loves the attack
nonetheless. You can tell he does because it
gives him this extraordinarily happy opportunity of defending
himself and justifying himself, which is what he does with a
special vigor -- this is on page 695 of the Hughes -- in
the Apology. Milton explains the
preposterous of the idea that he has ever visited a prostitute.
In fact, he claims, he was so far from such
debauchery that he had devoted his entire early life to the
ideal of virginity. Now Milton knows that this
might sound a little silly coming from a young man.
And he acknowledges here finally that the ideal of
virginity is an ideal for which women are typically
praised -- and of course this goes without saying.
In patriarchal societies there tends to be an inordinate degree
of interest placed on the virginity of young women.
It matters more for women than for men.
It's as if the commodity of the bride is deemed truly valuable
only if it can be guaranteed pure and untouched.Milton
recognizes that way of thinking as a double standard,
and he isn't satisfied with this vulgar double standard;
so he comes up with a vulgar double standard of his own.
This is the argument: Since men are clearly what he
calls "the perfecter sex," surely they should be held to
even higher standards of bodily purity even than women.
So given the elevated status of men, it's all the more important
that men should remain pure and chaste.
And so we have Milton arguing -- this is on the top of page
695 and I'm quoting here: [I]f unchastity in a
woman, whom St. Paul terms the glory of man,
be such a scandal and dishonor, then certainly in a man,
who is both the image and glory of God, it must,
though commonly not so thought, be much more deflowering and
dishonorable; in that he sins both against
his own body, which is the perfecter sex,
and his own glory, which is in the woman,
and that which is worst, against the image and glory of
God, which is in himself.
Nor did I slumber over that place [and he's referring to
that text in the Bible that we just looked at]
expressing such high rewards of ever accompanying the Lamb with
those celestial songs to others inapprehensible,
but not those who were not defiled with women...
Now the place in the Bible over which Milton couldn't slumber
was obviously the passage from Revelation 14.
It has to be said that the young Milton lost a lot of sleep
over this passage. Milton, we know,
was seriously looking forward -- or we have to assume he was
seriously looking forward -- to high rewards in heaven as a
virgin and as a poet. He would hear and sing those
songs to others inapprehensible, the celestial music.
We can see that Milton astutely exploits -- it's brilliant --
the sexist implications of Saint John's treatment of virginity.
For both John of the book of Revelation and for John Milton,
it's the superior male of the species that's been singled out
for the glorious practice of sexual abstinence.Now this
passage that we're looking at, the passage from the
Apology, has been written, well,
after all of the poems that we're reading for today.
Milton is writing here from a slightly different -- we can
think of it as a more mature -- perspective.
So in 1642, you see Milton softening a bit,
in part because he's interested in getting married himself and,
in fact he's married within a month of the actual publication
of this treatise. This is why he tells us
parenthetically that marriage must not be called a defilement.
He's beginning to change his mind.
But at the time period that we are examining,
the period in which he writes Comus,
the early 1630s, Milton seems very much
interested in remaining virginal forever,
avoiding even the sanctioned loss of virginity which is the
state of marriage. Milton's college nickname as he
tells us in the Prolusion Six -- this is a college exercise --
Milton's college nickname was the Lady.
Now it's true that Milton's skin -- and he tells us this
innumerable times, and it's vouched by others --
his skin was very fair and he to an unusual degree wore his hair
quite long. He must have had,
it is conjectured, a rather ladylike appearance as
a young man. But I suspect that it was
primarily Milton's intense interest in his college years in
his own virginity that led our young poet's classmates at
Christ's College, Cambridge to call him The Lady
of Christ's.It's too easy -- and you know where I'm going
with this -- it's too easy but it's also too delicious
to take this little biographical fact of Milton's college
nickname and use it in some way as a tool for reading A
Mask. This is a brief theatrical
piece that Milton writes in 1634 and which he publishes in 1637.
The heroine of the masque, as you know,
doesn't seem to have a Christian name.
She's not Britney or Lindsay. We're only asked to think of
her as the Lady, by her title.
And while it would be ridiculous for us to read the
entire masque as the poet's own completely unfettered
autobiographical fantasy, there is clearly -- and this is
undeniable -- a Miltonic set of interests and a Miltonic set of
anxieties charging and fueling this work.But first we need
to establish a few things about the occasion for this piece and
about the genre, the literary genre of the
masque in general. Milton's masque was the
product of a commission and as its full title suggests -- A
Mask Presented at Ludlow Castle -- it was
commissioned to be performed at a specific locale,
obviously, Ludlow Castle, which is in the west of
England, still there, near Wales -- on the border of
England and Wales, and this piece was performed
only once on the religious holiday of Michelmas night.
Now the theatrical form of the masque differs in a number of
ways from the more familiar dramatic form of the play,
with which we're all obviously much more comfortable with.
In the first place, a masque is nearly
always occasional. It's nearly always commissioned
by the king to be performed at court before a private audience
of select nobility, or it's commissioned -- as in
the case of this masque -- it's commissioned by an aristocratic
family to be performed at the aristocratic family's estate to
honor or to celebrate a specific occasion.
And so in the case of A Mask here, it's the Lord John
Egerton, the Earl of Bridgewater who commissioned Milton to write
a piece honoring his own inauguration in his new role as
the Lord President of Wales.So Milton wrote this
masque with a specific cast and a specific audience in
mind. He wrote it to be performed by
Bridgewater's three children: the Lady Alice,
who obviously played the Lady, and Bridgewater's two sons
– they're John and Thomas -- and
they play the Elder Brother and the second brother,
respectively. Alice is fifteen years old at
the time, not an entirely unreasonable age for an actress
or an amateur actress playing the maidenly but strong-headed
Lady of Milton's masque. But her brothers were -- and
this is a little sillier -- her brothers were eleven and nine:
unusually young actors, we might think,
to be engaged in such high-flying philosophical
debates as these two characters find themselves in.
Whatever awkwardness of casting we have in this original
performance we'll cast that aside.
We have no choice but to understand that Milton's
masque is serious business.The whole
production is one of the utmost seriousness.
The music for the masque, which still exists at least,
the melody still exists, was written by Henry Lawes,
the most important musician working in England.
He had just come from writing the music for a number of
masques by the celebrated playwright and masque-writer Ben
Johnson. It seems that Lawes himself
actually played the role of the attendant spirit,
that beneficent, slightly frightening figure who
hovers over the entire landscape of the masque.
Now it's been conjectured -- this is for 100 or 150 years
now -- that the actor playing Comus in this first and only
performance in the seventeenth century was none other than our
John Milton himself. I am quite sure that there are
no historical grounds whatsoever for this conjecture other than
our perfectly perverse desire to imagine the young,
self-described virginal Milton uttering the wanton and
absolutely beautifully lascivious speeches of the
magician and, of course, would-be molester
Comus. And who could deny the
satisfaction of hearing our buttoned-up young Milton
[laughs] speaking one of Comus'
magnificently sly and suggestive lines such as -- with all that
false innocence: "What hath night to do with
sleep?" he asks -- Comus asks -- the
Lady. As excited -- as aroused -- as
we might find ourselves by this imagining of Milton actually
playing Comus, of course his performance in
that role can't be asserted in any way definitively.Now as
I mentioned, the title of this piece was
originally A Mask Presented at Ludlow Castle,
and it seems actually to have been known by the
reading public by this title for a good hundred years or so.
But at some point in the eighteenth century,
the masque seemed informally to acquire an
alternative title, Comus, and it's as
Comus that all readers since have almost always referred to
the masque -- and this, of course, is a mistake.
It's a misnomer, but the historical
transmutation of Milton's title we have to take as instructive.
So I want to propose that the literary traditions' renaming of
this piece from A Mask to Comus is more than just a
slip, or more than just a random
shift of terms or of names. On the face of things,
to call this masque Comus is absurd.
Comus is obviously the villain. And for those of you who have
read Paradise Lost, you'll notice that the
characterization of Comus prepares Milton in a lot of
important ways for his much later characterization of the
character Satan. Comus and Satan are both
seductive. They're both rhetorically
gifted tempters, and they actually share a lot
of rhetorical figures and moral concerns in common.
At times when we read Paradise Lost it seems
almost as if Satan were quoting or alluding to Comus.But
it's, of course, the Lady
who's the heroine of this piece. If we were asked to refer to
the masque by the name of one of its characters,
I think we'd feel obliged to call it The Lady,
or maybe The Trials and Tribulations of the Lady or
The Ultimate Triumph of the Lady -- something like that,
and we would name the masque after the Lady because it's
she who represents the moral and doctrinal message that the
masque itself espouses. The Lady is at the dogmatic
heart of this relentlessly didactic work of
literature.What did I just say? Did I say that the Lady is at
the dogmatic heart of this relentlessly didactic work of
literature? Is it possible to say that the
Lady successfully -- does that make any sense?
Is it possible to say that she successfully conveys a moral
program that we can any way identify as the official
doctrine of the masque? The casual renaming of the
masque, which happened well after Milton's death,
suggests that readers have been perhaps less persuaded by the
moral vision relayed by the Lady,
and that they've been perhaps overly persuaded by the subtle
temptations of Comus. And this confusion,
I think, has everything to do with the fact that this is no
ordinary moral that we have in this work of literature.
The focus of the masque is the loaded -- you'll
grant me this -- and the always awkward subject of chastity.
The actual morality of the kind of chastity that the Lady
believes in, I think, raises a lot of questions about
the clarity of the distinction being formed here between good
and evil. So I'm partially going to
retract what I had said about the Lady's place at the very
heart of this work.Okay. Look at line 205,
page ninety-five in the Hughes.
We're treated to the Lady's singular investment in the
integrity of her body in her first speech.
Of course, the Lady is alone. Why is she alone?
Because her brothers have naturally done what any brother
would do accompanying a sister in a dangerous forest at night.
They have abandoned her to pick berries or any such cooling
fruit as the kind, hospitable woods provide.
[laughs] Dr.
Samuel Johnson, the greatest of all
eighteenth-century literary critics, is absolutely
flabbergasted that Milton would have these brothers do something
so stupid. It's so dark in the woods all
alone that the Lady can see nothing.
But nonetheless she can hear the riot and
ill-managed merriment of Comus and his riotous crew.
And I'm going to ask you to think of all of the images here,
the figurations of listening and hearing in the masque.
The Lady is overwhelmed not by what she can't see but by what
she can hear: A thousand fantasies
Begin to throng into my memory, Of calling shapes
and beck'ning shadows dire, And airy tongues that syllable
men's names On Sands and Shores and desert
Wildernesses. Now I submit that the Lady
would appear to be less in control of her fantasies than
she is of her rigorously disciplined behavior.
However unyielding her dedication to her virginity,
and we have to say that it's unyielding,
the Lady is incapable of disciplining utterly her
imagination. And the rudeness and swill
insolence of Comus' band of evil pranksters are almost matched --
perhaps they're even bested -- by the uncontrollable shapes
that throng into the Lady's memory.
It's almost as if the Lady were in some way harboring her own
demons. It's as if we have an instance
here of what – {this is an idea that I got
from the Milton lecture that I took when I was a sophomore
here; my professor suggested that
this is an instance of what) -- Freud would call the return of
the repressed. As the Lady labors to preserve
her virginity, she conjures a menacing but
nonetheless sensual image of "airy tongues that syllable
men's names."Now, being the Lady,
she pulls her socks up. She quickly recovers from this
brief lapse, a momentary lapse, into sensual reverie.
She addresses all of those virtues that she cherishes so
highly. Look at line 213:
O welcome pure-ey'd Faith, white-handed Hope,
Thou hov'ring Angel girt with golden wings,
And thou, unblemish't form of Chastity,
I see ye visibly, and now believe
That he, the Supreme good, t' whom all things ill
Are but as slavish officers of vengeance,
Would send a glist'ring Guardian, if need were,
To keep my life and honor unassailed.
This lady doesn't need the -- who cares where her brothers
are? -- she doesn't need their
protection because God prizes chastity above all things and
would gladly send a glistering guardian to keep her honor
unassailed. Now we might agree that this is
a reasonable enough fantasy of female invulnerability,
but of course, there is nothing in our sad
experience with sexual menace that actually bears the theory
behind this fantasy out.But think of how the Lady has
expressed this sentiment: "O welcome,
pure-ey'd Faith, white-handed Hope,
/ And thou, unblemish't form of Chastity…"
Faith, hope and chastity. Do we read this right?
You may recognize the allusion. The allusion here is obviously
to the passage in 1 Corinthians that you can find on your
handout. This is one of the most famous
verses in the Christian Bible. Saint Paul enumerates what we
now call the cardinal virtues: "And now abideth faith,
hope, charity, these three;
but the greatest of these is charity."
Now we're not, of course, surprised by Paul's
list of the virtues. Charity, or what he seems to
have been thinking of as the selflessness of Christian love,
is a virtue generous and capacious enough to encompass
all of the others -- but faith, hope and chastity?
"And the greatest of these is chastity"--?!?
It's as if in some way we're being invited to measure the
Lady's speech against the scriptural text that supplies
its rhetorical foundation. And I think it's impossible not
to see that when Milton substitutes [laughs]
the virtue charity with the far more circumscribed -- however
virtuous it is, it's the much more
circumscribed -- ideal of chastity.
There's something at least a little peculiar going on.
The Lady, it could be said, appears to overvalue her
chastity, and it's in the general overvaluation of
chastity that we can best see the ways in which this text,
Comus, begins to burst loose of the orthodox Christian
morality that we tend to associate with pious Christian
literature like this -- especially the literature of the
masque.Now it's the Elder Brother in the masque who
offers us an even more -- if you can imagine it -- even more
magnified view of the virtue of virginity.
The Lady herself had argued that heaven would send a
glistering guardian down to defend her physical -- her
bodily -- integrity or physical innocence.
But the Elder Brother goes further even than that.
And it's his theory of the rewards due virginity that
really just flings this masque far from the reaches even of
anything even resembling mainstream protestant orthodoxy
or, for that matter,
orthodoxy of any kind. This is the Elder Brother,
line 453, page 100 in the Hughes, chatting with his
younger brother: So dear to Heav'n is
Saintly chastity, That when a soul is found
sincerely so, A thousand liveried Angels
lackey her, Driving far off each thing of
sin and guilt, And in clear dream and solemn
vision Tell her of things that no gross ear can hear,
Till oft converse with heav'nly habitants..
And Milton, or the Elder Brother here,
is clearly thinking of Revelation 14,
in which it's only the pure spirit -- or the virgin -- that
can even begin to hear the new song being sung before the
throne of God. The Elder Brother is explaining
that these angels will: Begin to cast a beam on
th'outward shape, The unpolluted temple of the mind,
And turns it by degrees to the soul's essence,
Till all be made immortal. It was one thing for the Lady
to imagine -- you know, crazy as it was,
for the Lady to imagine -- a rescue squad of angels to zip to
her aid at the first hint of a physical assault.
And it was okay for Saint John to suggest that virgins are
granted the best perquisites in eternity.
But think of what the Elder Brother has just given us.
He's staged a scenario far beyond the wildest theological
conjectures. As the critic William Kerrigan
has helped us to understand, the Elder Brother is arguing
that so dear to heaven is saintly chastity that heaven
doesn't even permit virgins to die.
The thousand liveried angels begin to cast their special beam
on the virgin's outward shape -- that's her body,
the unpolluted temple that houses her virginal mind.
This angelic laser begins slowly the gradual process in
some kind of extraordinary science-fiction sort of way of
transforming the virginal human body to the essence of the soul
itself. It's as if this celestial laser
beam were designed so as to actually shift the atomic
structure of the pure corporeal frame of the virgin's body until
that body is so rarefied, so pure and ethereal,
that it's nothing but soul. She's been transmogrified from
body to soul. She's safe!Now never mind
that our own experience with virgins has failed to afford us
such a spectacle of bodily transformation.
The Elder Brother is issuing this theory without any
consideration, obviously,
whatsoever of earthly reality and we're shocked by -- I don't
know how else to put it. Because this is a theological
conjecture, I think we're shocked by what is almost the
heretical daring of what this brother has just said.
Unfortunately, your editor,
Merritt Hughes -- and in this respect he's like all editors of
Milton -- does his very best to tame the outrageousness of the
Elder Brother's speech. He follows the old editorial
wisdom that holds that Milton can't possibly mean what he's
actually saying here. Hughes tells us that Milton's
thinking of Plato and that the Elder Brother is referring to
the platonic theory that the noble spirit is released from
the body after death. But -- and this will be our
mantra, I hope, for the rest of this semester
-- we must not permit Merritt Hughes or any Milton editor to
prevail in their efforts at papering over the implications
of a passage such as this.There is,
of course, no mention whatsoever here of a soul being
released from a body after death.
That would be an entirely orthodox image and we wouldn't
be startled by its presence. But what the Elder Brother is
saying is that the virginal body is actually transmogrified into
soul. The dirty business of physical
death never has to take place at all.
True virginity can provide the body with the release even from
that seemingly inexorable fact of death.Well,
we're prepared in no way to respond meaningfully to a speech
such as that, and clearly the second brother
joins us in his bafflement: [laughs]
the magnificent non sequitur that he gives [laughs]
in response to the speech of his brother's.
The second brother says at line 475: "How charming is divine
Philosophy!" The Elder Brother has obviously
upped the ante in the masque's overvaluation of
virginity. It's possible that in this
general drama of overvaluation that Milton's working -- just
because this whole thing is so extreme -- to distance himself
from his own youthful interest in the virtues of virginity.
That's one conjecture at least. There seems to be something
like a gentle parody, maybe even a mocking tone,
that fills the lines of the Elder Brother's ecstatic
speech.In any case, the question of value and
valuation is an important one in Comus,
and it's important in part because the rhetoric of the
masque is saturated in the economic,
the commercial, and the financial imagery that
we were looking at in the last lecture.
Milton we know -- we know this already -- gives pride of place
to the images of money and trade that he inherited from his
father; and so we're not surprised that
the central conflict in Comus is loaded with the
rhetorical tokens of commerce and exchange.
Look at line 679 of the poem. This is page 106 in the
Hughes. Comus is marshaling a series of serious
and perfectly ingenious arguments in his attempt to
seduce the Lady, which is really simply an
attempt, ostensibly, to get her to drink from the
glass of cordial julep which she has steadfastly refused.
"Drink up though," he tells her. And this is line 679:
Why should you be so cruel to yourself,
And to those dainty limbs which nature lent
For gentle usage and soft delicacy?
But you invert the cov'nants of her trust,
And harshly [to nature's trust] deal like an ill borrower
With that which you receiv'd on other terms…
"So nature has lent you your dainty limbs for a purpose,"
Comus tells her, "but you're inverting the
covenant of nature's trust, refusing to use and to spend
those gifts that nature has given you."
According to Comus, the Lady is an ill
borrower. She doesn't spend her bodily
wealth and fulfill the terms of nature's loan.
And so for Comus, the Lady is hoarding the
natural asset of her physical beauty.
Look down further, line 739. "Beauty is" -- Comus continues:
Beauty is nature's coin, must not be hoarded,
But must be current [in currency], and the good thereof
Consists in mutual and partak'n bliss,
Unsavory in th'enjoyment of itself.
With this phrase, "mutual and partak'n bliss," we
develop an overwhelming sense that Comus seems to be trying to
get the Lady to do something more simply than drink a sip of
the cordial julep from his charmed cup.
The discussion is obviously in some way really about sex,
and it's the Lady's virginity,
of course, that's at stake here.
With this accusation of the misuse of borrowed funds,
we recognize the strange and, I think in this context,
rather ill-fitting subtext behind Comus' seduction.
Comus is adopting the language from that parable in Matthew
(Matthew 25) that had proven so significant and,
I think, so painful for the young Milton.
For Comus, nature is just like the harsh master who had given
each of his servants a portion of money and who expects those
coins, who expects those talents,
to be put to use. The Lady's talent has to be
spent -- it has to be invested -- in order to fulfill the
covenant of the trust between the master and the servant.
But the Lady is hoarding that natural gift just as that
unprofitable servant had buried his talent in the earth.Now
the Lady, it's been noted before,
is never really able to respond to Comus' accusation of her
hoarding. She discusses what she would
like to say in response to Comus, but she doesn't then go
on significantly to say it. She says nothing after this
encounter, remaining silent or speechless for the rest of the
masque, but Milton clearly
finds, I think, something threatening here.
If Comus can be seen to pose a genuine threat to the Lady,
it could very well be the threat posed by the power of
Comus' particular kind of poetry.I should have put on
the handout, and I failed to do that,
the name of a couple of works of Milton criticism that are
especially valuable with respect to what I'm about to argue and
to which I'm indebted. One is the chapter on Comus
in a book by John Guillory called Poetic Authority,
and the other is the entire book by Angus Fletcher on
Milton's Comus, titled The Transcendental
Mask. Both Guillory and Angus
Fletcher are examining the troubled relation of Milton to
one of his favorite poets. It's surely not insignificant
that Milton's Comus contains more echoes of
Shakespeare than anything else that Milton wrote,
and it's surely not insignificant that the Lady's
first song is actually addressed to the nymph Echo.
The masque is all about the act of hearing song and the
ethics of proper listening.The Lady's first
line in the masque is, in fact, about the music that
Comus is producing that she hears: "This way the noise was,
if mine ear be true, / my best guide now."
Comus and the Lady are continually listening to each
other's songs, and the Lady's goal is in some
way to develop a way of listening that isn't at the same
time overwhelming or perhaps deafening.
Now what the Lady listens to might well be overwhelming
indeed. It's the speeches of Comus far
more than those of any other character that are filled with
echoes and allusions to the great plays of Shakespeare.
Shakespeare presents himself as something like a powerful
temptation in this masque. We remember that Milton's
anonymous attacker in 1642 had not only claimed that Milton
could be found skulking around the back alleys of London's
brothels. Milton was also a denizen,
it was alleged in this attack -- he was a denizen of London's
playhouses. You can't help but notice that
Milton in the Apology for Smectymnuus doesn't even
begin to respond to that accusation.
It's like the Lady with the accusation of hoarding.
Shakespeare in the theater seemed to represent a temptation
greater even than promiscuous sex -- or perhaps akin to sex.
It's as if Milton places the beautiful poetry of Shakespeare
into the mouth of this evil magician so as to dismiss all
the more easily the easy, "L'Allegro"-mode of poetry that
Shakespeare seems for Milton to embody.Now we've been
charting for a couple of weeks now Milton's long-standing
project to purge his lips of secular interests and to cleanse
his literary consciousness of the tempting influence of
secular literary voices, and one of those voices is
obviously Shakespeare's. And so it's an understandable
ploy on Milton's part that he needs to vilify Shakespeare by
identifying that great poet, his older contemporary,
with Comus. But the standoff between Milton
and Shakespeare, much like the standoff between
Comus and the Lady, is not as easily resolved as it
might seem to be. The logic, the beauty,
of Comus' rhetoric seems often to overpower the Lady's own,
which is itself admittedly beautiful and powerful.
And we see in the poem itself an anticipation of the struggle
that results eventually in the eighteenth century in the new
title of the masque. Comus has successfully
[laughs] -- eventually –
edged the Lady out as the center of the entire work.
In the play itself, in the fiction of the play,
Comus' argument simply leaves the Lady in silence -- and more
than just silence. She's actually incapable of --
she's capable, but only partially capable --
of speaking, but she's actually physically incapable of moving.
Most awkwardly, the Lady is physically stuck to
her seat. She's stuck to a -- this is
remarkable: she's stuck to a "marble venomed seat smeared
with gums of glutinous heat." Think about that.
All this, Comus explains (this is line 658):
Nay Lady, sit; if I but wave this wand,
Your nerves are all chain'd up in Alabaster,
And you a statue; or as Daphne was,
Root-bound that fled Apollo.
Now this isn't the first time that we have in Milton the
representation of the turning of a person to marble.
This is actually a recurrent figure in the early poems,
a figure of frozenness or of -- isn't it wonderful that there's
a term for being turned to marble?
Marmorialization. This marmorialization appears
in a lot of the early poems. I'm thinking of "On
Shakespeare," the poem "The Passion," as well as
"L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso."
And there's a moment in a lot of these poems in which the
speaker finds himself motionless, immobile -- actually
turned to stone. In "On Shakespeare" it seemed
to be the specter of Shakespeare that elicited this set of terms
and images, the idea of being frozen or marmorialized.
"ost make us Marble with too much conceiving," Milton had
told Shakespeare in that poem.The Lady in Milton's
masque is placed in a similar predicament by the
Shakespearean power of Comus. She's rendered motionless and
she's finally unable to speak. She's unable to speak except to
hint at a doctrine of virginity that finally she is incapable of
articulating but -- and this is where we have to end this
session -- the Lady does by the end of the poem get up from her
seat. She's released from her
paralysis and she proceeds happily with her brothers,
by the end of the poem, to honor their father in Wales.
And if we wish to continue this analogy, and I certainly do,
between the poet Milton and the virgin Lady,
we can see that this is a release that John Milton the
poet has been waiting some time for.
And so it only stands to reason that we pay some attention --
and we'll have to do this next week -- to how this release
actually works. Just briefly,
a supernatural figure, the nymph: it looks like
Sabrina, but it was likely pronounced Sabrina.
The nymph Sabrina rises from a stream and unglues -- unglues --
the Lady from her seat.Now the mysterious mechanics of
Sabrina's magic are profoundly mysterious,
and so I'm going to ask you to look especially closely for the
next class at the Sabrina episode.
I also want you to look closely at the lines that are noted on
the syllabus. These are lines that were added
a couple of years after the performance of Comus.
These are lines added when Milton actually gets around to
publishing the masque in 1637. So this is my final thought
here. If Milton as a poet who had
never really published anything significant thinks of himself as
a virginal writer, then there's an important way
in which Milton loses his virginity with his published
version of Comus in 1637. So for next week -- no,
for Wednesday, reread Comus.
