Professor John Rogers:
Milton is typically cited by literary historians as one of
the first major English poets to praise in verse the institution
of marriage. In this respect,
he seems to have followed Spenser -- Edmund Spenser,
whose Faerie Queene is in large part a tribute to the
sacrament of marriage, although interestingly
The Faerie Queene, the great Spenserian poem,
never actually manages to feature a marriage between two
human beings. The only marriage that actually
appears there is a marriage between two rivers.
Nonetheless, The Faerie Queene can be
said, however strangely, to be the first great poetic
celebration in English of the institution of marriage.
This was important to Milton, and one of the big set-piece
speeches in Paradise Lost -- and you may remember it if
you've read that poem -- is the hymn that begins "Hail,
wedded Love." Milton is adamant throughout
the epic in his insistent imagining Adam and Eve quite
specifically as a married couple and a married couple -- and this
is important to Milton -- a married couple with an active
sex life. They're a couple whose marital
blessing had been granted by none other than God himself.
Now the treatises that Milton wrote on the rights of divorce
in the 1640s are also extravagantly pro-marriage.
A happy marriage for Milton was founded on a couple of
like-minded opinions and values, their ability to converse with
one another -- and so this is why the notion of divorce for
reasons of incompatibility is so important to Milton,
because compatibility in marriage is the very essence of
marriage. I can only imagine though,
at this point in the semester, what will become Milton's
eventual championing of marriage is pretty hard to imagine,
in part because we're just devoting our second class to a
literary work given almost entirely to the virtue of
chastity. And there's every indication
that -- and I mentioned before, of course -- there's every
indication that a lot of these early works bespeak something
like a serious interest in the ideal of a lifelong state of
chastity.Chastity is not only an obsessive topic in the
early poems for Milton or in the published treatise that we
looked at last time, The Apology for Smectymnuus.
It's also a subject that we can find in the reading journal
that Milton kept for the better part of his life.
The text into which any early modern seventeenth-century
writer would jot his or her thoughts into,
his reading notes, was always called a commonplace
book. Milton, like so many of his
contemporaries, kept a commonplace book and,
as you can imagine, he kept it for the most part in
Latin. Actually we have Milton's
commonplace book, his reading notes,
and you can find it all in English translation in volume
one of The Complete Prose Works of John Milton.
It's in the CCL collection.Now one of the
entries in Milton's commonplace book that touches on the subject
of chastity strikes me as a particularly charged one for its
terrifying image of violence. I've never really known what to
do with this. I think that the entry could be
seen as in some way helpful for our understanding of this poem,
the Mask. So this is what we know.
Sometime in the year 1639, Milton read a history book
entitled The General Chronicle of England in
which there is a discussion in a treatise on medieval England --
a discussion of a brutal Danish invasion in the ninth century of
a Catholic convent in the English city of Coldingham.
Milton jots down the historical detail from this account that
seems to have caught his attention,
and this is what he notes as particularly memorable:
The nun Ebba cut off her nose and lips and urged the
other sisters [the other nuns in the convent]
to do the same thing so that frustrated in this way the Danes
would make no attempt against their virtue.
It's the violence of this horrible act of self-sacrifice,
this tragic act of self-sacrifice -- an act of
self-sacrifice intended obviously to preserve the state
of virginity -- that grabs our attention and presumably grabbed
Milton's. In order to avoid the violation
of their virginity at the hands of the brutal Danish brigands,
Ebba leads a convent full of nuns to disfigure themselves,
severing nose and lips. As you can imagine,
there's no historical evidence that anything like this took
place, and it actually seems to be
something of an urban legend among medieval writers
recounting early Christian convents.
This same story about the nuns' disseveration of their nose and
their lips seems to have been told about just all of the early
Christian nunneries -- a strange cultural fantasy manifesting
itself in some way -- but nonetheless Milton includes this
in his commonplace entry with no commentary,
no observation, and no interpretation of
it.I think we could make some estimation of its
significance if we juxtapose it with Comus since The
Mask attempts to tackle, in a much more expanded form,
so many of the same issues. Comus is an elaborate
meditation not simply on chastity but also on the threat
of rape. And of course,
as I mentioned last time, Comus himself suggests nothing
more than wanting to get the Lady to drink a sip from the
charmed cup, but it's clear from his
language that the subtext at least behind his seduction
involves, in some way at least,
an intimation of the Lady's sexual submission.
The potential danger besetting the Lady is certainly a subject
of some concern for her dutiful brothers.
You remember they're wandering around the forest without her
picking berries. The younger brother,
the second brother, is most concerned about his
sister's safety -- so I want you to look at this passage.
This is line 398 of Comus, page ninety-nine in the
Hughes. So the second brother says
that the Lady is an open target out there for an assault:
You may as well spread out the unsunn'd heaps
Of Miser's treasure by an outlaw's den,
And tell me it is safe, as bid me hope
Danger will wink on Opportunity [will not allow itself to see
opportunity], And let a single helpless
maiden pass Uninjured in this wild
surrounding waste. So notice first here that the
younger brother compares his sister's virginity to a miser's
treasure. In this particularly odd image
you have something like a veiled accusation -- and it's not
unlike Comus' accusation -- that the Lady is hoarding her
God-given treasure of her chastity,
with all of the resonances of the parable of the talents
that we see in Comus' similar language.
But you also notice the sense of limitation and the
vulnerability associated with the physical state of virginity
here. As wonderful as the Lady's
chastity might be, it's certainly not going to
protect her from the dangers lurking in this wild surrounding
waste. If anything,
her chastity will only attract such injuries.As we saw in
the last lecture, the elder brother holds an
entirely different theory of chastity, and of course,
it's a lot more optimistic. He believes that a virgin like
the Lady is secure or safe from the violent attacks imagined by
his younger brother. So look at line 423 of
Comus, where the elder brother explains that the
chaste Lady can actually travel anywhere she pleases utterly
unafraid. "She may trace huge forests" --
I mean, both of these positions [laughs]
are voiced with such magnificently hyperbolic
rhetoric: [She]
may trace huge Forests and unharbor'd Heaths,
Infamous Hills and sandy perilous wilds,
Where through the sacred rays of Chastity,
No savage fierce, Bandit or mountaineer
Will dare to soil her Virgin purity.
He dismisses his brother's entirely practical argument,
because for him chastity is a lot more than a simple exercise
of sexual abstinence. It's a positive force,
and it exerts an actual and somehow palpable,
discernible force in the world. The "sacred rays of chastity"
are going to be emanating from the chaste maiden and protecting
her like some magical force-field,
and actually will keep her safe from the physical assaults of a
savage bandit or a mountaineer.Now this is just
a thought exercise, but were the Elder Brother to
read The General Chronicle of England that Milton had read
in 1639, I am assuming he would have
found incoherent the story that had so interested Milton:
the story about Saint Ebba, the nun, who was driven to such
terrible lengths to protect herself and her fellow sisters
in the nunnery from attack. For the Elder Brother,
Ebba's bodily purity should itself exude a sufficiently
powerful strength that the terrible Danes would be repelled
by the sacred rays of her chastity.
So you get something like a conflict developing in Milton's
mask. It's a tension between the
extravagant virginal idealism of the elder brother and what I
have to concede is a much more practical sense of virginity's
limitations voiced by the Second Brother.
So Milton is actually staging a debate between these two
positions, enacted on the stage in 1634 by a nine- and an
eleven-year-old boy, I'll remind you.The very
presence in a theatrical piece of a long and weighty
philosophical debate like this one could easily be seen as
having a pretty tedious effect. Milton is taking a pretty great
risk here. It's worth asking what's at
stake because this is such an odd thing to find;
and so I want to consider a way in which this debate between
these two brothers can be seen as related to other debates and
other conflicts between competing aspects of Milton's
own consciousness -- that would be one perspective -- and maybe
more grandly, between opposing factions in
the culture of seventeenth-century England at
large.First, though, I need to say a couple
of words about the word chastity as I've been using
it throughout the discussion so far of Comus both today
and Monday. Up to this point -- and some of
you may have felt this -- I have been throwing the word
chastity around a little promiscuously.
In throwing it around with this kind of looseness,
I've been reproducing what I take to be a certain sloppiness
in Milton's text. I've been speaking of chastity
as if chastity and virginity were absolute synonyms,
or always synonyms -- just forever interchangeable -- and
this simply isn't true in the seventeenth century.
Now it goes without saying that we all know what virginity is.
Virginity is that bodily state that predates an act of sexual
intercourse and therefore, at least for most of Milton's
contemporaries, that is the bodily state that
predates marriage.Chastity, however, was beginning to mean
something new in the period. For a lot of Protestants in the
early seventeenth century, the word chastity could
also be used to refer to the state of what could be called
married chastity: married chastity was a type of
bodily purity that could be extended -- or a spiritual
purity as well -- that could be extended even into marriage.
This is sort of the theory. If a couple practiced
temperate, moderate, and more or less dispassionate
acts of sexual intercourse, they could be said to remain
chaste -- a married couple, of course.
They could keep for themselves the prestigious title of
"chaste" even though they were obviously performing an act that
almost anyone in an earlier period would assume disqualified
them from being called chaste. And so there opens up a kind of
distinction between virginity, which is, of course,
actual physical sexual abstinence, and chastity,
which for some could actually include the moderate practice of
sex within marriage.It's one of the interesting and curious
features of the Protestant mask,
Comus, that this is a distinction that's never really
observed or acknowledged. Virginity and chastity seem to
be used often and kind of awkwardly, I think,
interchangeably. The confusion between these two
words is closely related, I propose, to some of the
confusions and dilemmas confronted by the work as a
whole. I'll go so far as to say that
some of the semantic difficulty here in our understanding of the
word chastity has something to do with an
indisputably awkward element of Comus' plot:
and that's the fact that for so much of this mask,
the Lady is stuck to her seat.I mentioned at the
beginning of the lecture that Milton would go on to become the
English language's premier poet of marriage,
but it's important to note that the celebration of marriage is
not at all an obvious thing for an English poet in Milton's time
to be attempting to strive toward.
And in fact, it's just at this point in
early modern England that marriage is beginning to assert
itself as a cultural ideal -- a religiously inflected cultural
ideal. Throughout the Renaissance,
throughout the sixteenth century, the popular ideas about
marriage and celibacy were still firmly tied to the values of the
Roman Catholic Church well after the actual Reformation.
Roman doctrine, of course, had prized the state
of celibacy, insisting that it was the superior state over
marriage. Now, it's true that -- and
this has always been the case -- that a proper marriage was
obviously always one of the church's sacraments,
and marriage obviously had always received the church's
blessing; but nonetheless the higher
ideal would still seem to be celibacy.
It was the ideal embraced by priests and nuns,
and it was the ideal to which all Christians theoretically at
least were in a position to aspire to.
It's in the period in which Milton is writing that the tide
is beginning to turn. The Protestant Reformation,
and especially the rising energies of Puritanism in the
early seventeenth century, are beginning to do a lot to
change this state of affairs. And so over the course of the
century, you can see a gradual -- as if something like this
could actually be charted. Nonetheless,
I think it's safe to say you see a gradual decline in the
cultural idealization of virginity and a corresponding
increase in the valuation of marriage in this new form of
chastity that we can think of as married chastity.
It's a transition, an evaluation of marriage that
is not at all an easy one, however.
There are debates. There are disagreements even
among Puritans about which state, virginity or married
chastity, is the superior one in the eyes of God.
It's in light of this ongoing cultural tension in the period
that, I think, we can understand some of the
strange confusions concerning chastity that we find in the
poem that we're looking at.Now one of the moments in
which this tension between virginity and chastity seems to
be most pronounced is in the encounter between Comus and the
Lady that we looked at in the last class.
Comus attempts to seduce the Lady, you'll remember,
with something like an economic theory of natural beauty.
For Comus, nature has given us all of her riches and it's our
duty, it's our obligation, to spend them,
to consume them, and to luxuriate in nature's
generosity. You could think of this,
and this has actually been described by critics,
as something like an aristocratic theory of natural
expenditure, because Comus imagines in this
fantasy rhetorical world of his something like an almost endless
supply of natural wealth: nature's wealth can continually
and forever be spent and expended.Now the Lady
responds to what we can think of as his aristocratic debauchery
with an economic theory of her own,
and we haven't looked at that yet.
So this is line 768 of Comus, and in the
Hughes edition it's on page 108.
This is the Lady's retort. She explains that nature,
of course, wants us to "live according to her sober laws /
and holy dictate of spare Temperance."
In this description of the moderate and temperate enjoyment
of nature, the Lady is giving us something like a Puritan
economic theory. This is her argument, line 768:
If every just man that now pines with want
Had but a moderate and beseeming share
Of that which lewdly-pamper'd Luxury
Now heaps upon some few with vast excess,
Nature's full blessings would be well dispens't
In unsuperfluous even proportion…
I think it's sometimes hard to remember in reading a speech
like this that the Lady is actually talking about chastity.
Her argument sounds -- and some of you may recognize this
argument -- it sounds so distinctly like a political
argument, an argument from political
economy. It actually,
it's been shown, seems to foreshadow the
political philosophy of Milton's much younger contemporary,
John Locke -- the notion that nature demands that every human
individual has just enough, is given just enough to be
self-sufficient. But when you remember that the
subject at hand is actually in some way sex,
then you can begin to associate the Lady's image of this
moderate consumption of natural wealth with some version of --
if this makes sense -- some version of an act of sexual
consummation. The Lady's call for a tempered,
moderate distribution and consumption of natural goods
seems to point us toward something like a particular
attitude toward sex; and if this is sex she's
seeming to refer to, it's clearly not virginity
that's at stake. This isn't sexual abstinence
that the Lady's pointing to. With her vision of the moderate
and temperate enjoyment of nature's beauty,
the Lady is sketching this new seventeenth-century ideal of
married chastity: the ideal of the temperate,
moderate indulgence in sexual pleasure, of course,
within the sanctified confines of marriage.This makes
sense. We have to assume that the Lady
is resisting Comus' advances because she has before her the
higher ideal of married chastity.
One day she will become a wife herself, and it's in her husband
that she will eventually invest the talent of her bodily wealth,
to use the metaphor that we get from Matthew 25.
It's a perfectly reasonable sentiment to include in an
example of the particular genre that Milton is writing his mask
in. The form of this mask is
that of the romance. It's a literary genre that
dates back to late classical Greece and which typically
charts the trials and tribulations of a hero,
in many cases the trials and tribulations of a virginal
heroine. The romance heroine is often
threatened with rape, but by her cleverness or by
good luck or a concatenation of forces she can always invariably
avert that tragedy; and by the end of the work she
can present herself to her future husband as a virgin.
This last twist is without question the central element of
the conventional romance plot, and this remains a central
element in the Harlequin romances, for example,
that are still, I think, consumed so
voraciously even today: after her brush with danger,
after her brush with sexual peril,
the romance heroine always gets married in the end.
The story has to end that way. And her marriage is invariably
seen as her reward for all the trouble she's been
through.Now given this, the romance frame of Milton's
Comus, we're not surprised actually to see --
even though we don't see at the end her actually getting
married, we're not surprised to see the
Lady in this speech embracing the form of chastity that
promises something like an eventual turn to marriage.
This makes sense. And it's with this hint at the
state of married chastity -- this seems like a healthy
perspective -- it's with this hint that the Lady ended her
speech at the only seventeenth-century performance
of Comus, which,
as you know, took place at Ludlow Castle in
1634 on Michelmas night. At this original performance of
the mask, the Lady's speech read by
the Lady Alice Egerton, age fifteen,
ended at line 779 in your text. I think after hearing the Lady
end her speech at line 779 that the audience could reasonably
expect that the Lady would someday get married.
But you can see from the text that you have in your Hughes
editions -- or any edition, any printed edition now -- the
speech continues in the version of the mask that we have.
While Milton wrote most of the mask in 1634,
he published it in 1637, and it's at this point three
years later that he seems to have inserted into the Lady's
speech, and also elsewhere in the poem,
certain lines for the published version.
So the Lady's speech in the printed version continues at
line 779 and this is what the Lady asked.
How can you not love this? "Shall I go on?
/ Or have I said enough?" Clearly, Milton is in some way
[laughs] wonderfully speaking through
the Lady here. Then we get the Lady again:
Shall I go on? Or have I said enough?
To him that dares Arm his profane tongue with
contemptuous words Against the Sun-clad power of
Chastity Fain would I something say,
yet to what end? Thou hast nor Ear nor Soul to
apprehend The sublime notion and high
mystery That must be utter'd to unfold
the sage And serious doctrine of
virginity. She's speaking reluctantly here.
She'd love to tell Comus something about chastity,
but he has neither ear nor soul to apprehend the sublime notion
and high mystery. The speech is proceeding rather
smoothly and, I think, kind of explicably as
the Lady defends the sun-clad power of chastity.But look
at the end of the passage that I've just read,
a few lines down. The doctrine that the Lady
wishes to advance suddenly seems so absolutely not to be a
doctrine of married chastity. It's the sage and serious
doctrine of virginity that concludes the speech.
It's clear that something's happened between 1634 and 1637.
Milton's Lady doesn't proceed as we expect her to,
to marshal further arguments for the moderate fulfillment of
one's conjugal obligations. There's no more talk of
temperate sex or the virtuous and the virtuous moderation
that's so important to the ideal of married chastity.
The Lady begins to speak instead of the unyielding virtue
of sexual abstinence that's absolutely central to an
entirely different kind of doctrine: the doctrine of
virginity.So we have to ask this question:
What's happened? The Lady has claimed that she's
hesitant to say anything at this point to Comus.
How could such a debauched character possibly understand
the mysterious truths about chastity?
Interestingly, she refuses to unfold for her
audience the sage and serious doctrine of virginity,
but she does anticipate what that doctrine of virginity would
look like if she were to unfold it.
She explains to Comus what would happen should she actually
choose to break her silence, should she actually choose to
unleash all of the rhetorical powers that she has pent up
inside of her. In some important way,
I think, the Lady can be seen as being in the same position
that Milton had been representing himself in so many
of the early poems. He was continually imagining
himself to be someone on the verge of saying something
spectacular, but he wasn't quite there yet.The lady
continues. Look at line 792:
Thou art not fit to hear thyself convinc't;
Yet should I try [and she means, "should I try to voice
the doctrine of virginity"], the uncontrolled worth
Of this pure cause would kindle my raptspirits
To such a flame of sacred vehemence,
That dumb things would be mov'd to sympathize,
And the brute Earth would lend her nerves, and shake,
Till all thy magic structures rear'd so high,
Were shatter'd into heaps o'er thy false head.
She's making a strong a claim as is possible to make for her
potential for rhetorical power. She implies that she's the
equal to any of the great poetic heroes that Milton so admires.
As a virginal orator, should she choose to unleash
her powers, she would have the power of an Orpheus moving dumb
things to sympathize -- Orpheus being one of Milton's most
prized mythological figures of the powerful poet.
She'd have the strength of a Samson, the biblical hero,
who could shatter huge structures over the heads of his
enemies. She has way more power than she
needs, it would seem, to destroy a petty little mages
like Comus.The power that the Lady claims for herself as a
virgin is titanic, and it allows us to understand,
I think, why she has slipped from her discussion of married
chastity to this new discussion of what seems to be -- or what
she claims is -- virginity. The lapse makes a certain kind
of sense, I think, because it's virginity and not
married chastity that the Lady imagines will allow her to
demonstrate such a remarkable show of rhetorical strength.
It's almost apocalyptic in its force.
It promises something like the power of God as he brings the
shattering close of the entire Christian narrative to an end at
the Last Judgment and beyond. One of the cultural phenomena
fueling, I think, this rhetorical burst of the
Lady's is the prevalent seventeenth-century anticipation
of the end of the world, the millennium -- all of these
apocalyptic beliefs that were swirling around almost all of
the sectarian religious figures in the seventeenth
century.Given all of these cultural resonances,
there's a lot riding on the Lady's claim for her rhetorical
powers here. You can understand that initial
hesitation when she asks, "Shall I go on?
/ Or have I said enough?" She's probably said way more
than enough in her testimony to the potentially apocalyptic
power of her virginal speech. She's making extraordinary
claims for virginal oratory. It has all of the power of
prophecy that Milton had been associating with the biblical
prophets; but, as I mentioned before,
she doesn't deliver this anticipated speech and so
virginity's power remains untested.
We can't know just what force virginity would exude,
and so the speech leaves us where we began,
in a state of uncertainty concerning the ultimate strength
of this virtue of sexual abstinence.
It leaves us where we began: asking what,
finally, what is virginity good for?
We're reproducing the problem that the two brothers were
rehearsing in their debate.So the Lady in the
1637 version of this poem, of this mask,
is at an impasse. She's stuck between competing
ideals of bodily purity just as surely and as firmly as she is
stuck to her seat. This is a kind of meta-literary
allegorization that I'll be performing here:
you could also think of Milton the poet as being stuck at this
same juncture. He's stuck between two meanings
of chastity -- chastity as absolute virginity,
and chastity as the moderate and beseeming sexuality
sanctioned within marriage. He's also stuck between two
models of speech with which we have become quite familiar by
this point. On the one hand,
he wants to wait before he talks.
He wants to keep anticipating producing the great speech,
which is exactly what the Lady has been doing;
but on the other hand Milton's possessed of a competing desire
to speak and to speak now -- to publish, to succeed,
to consummate his talents. It's as if Milton were
paralyzed, almost, at this moment in his choice
between these various alternatives.Now we know
that the Lady doesn't end the mask happily.
Imagine [laughs] what it would be like if this
were the case. She doesn't end the mask stuck
to Comus' chair. It's important to figure out
exactly how the Lady gets unstuck, and so that's what
we're going to look at now. You'll remember there's first
the bungled attempt by the two brothers to release her.
They forget to reverse Comus' wand when they rush in to his
lair. That didn't pan out.
They had even obtained, with the help of the attendant
spirit, the magical herb Haemony with all of its Homeric
associations, but this, too,
seemed inadequate to the task of rescuing their sister.
The Lady is only rescued once the attendant spirit calls on
the nymph Sabrina, the genius loci --the
natural spirit of the Severn stream, which is the river that
separates England from Wales. Milton uses for his source for
the character Sabrina another character named Sabrina from
Spenser's The Faerie Queene.There's a
wonderful work of literary criticism -- I mentioned it last
time -- on Milton's indebtedness to Spenser in the book by John
Guillory called Poetic Authority.
I urge you to look at it if you're interested.
The fact that Sabrina, this little character here,
has her origin in Spenser is important.
Spenser is the great early Christian poet in English of
holy matrimony, and according to Guillory's
brilliant argument, he has the power to counteract
-- Spenser does -- the magical effect that Shakespeare wields
through the character of Comus. The Lady had claimed for
herself a remarkable set of powers, but she wasn't yet ready
to use them. She was paralyzed in speech
just as she was prevented from even moving.
It was almost as if Sabrina's assent from the Severn stream to
assist the Lady in her time of need suggests Spenser's arrival
from the realm of English literature to assist the young
poet, John Milton.
Edmund Spenser arrives, arises to help Milton overcome
the paralyzing effect of the Comus-like power of
Shakespeare.Let's see if this makes any sense.
Look at line 852 of Comus. This is page 110 in the
Hughes. The attendant spirit explains that Sabrina is
in possession of precious vialed liquors that have the capacity
to heal. So line 852;
Sabrina can unlock: The clasping charm and
thaw the numbing spell If she be right invok't in
warbled Song, For maid'nhood she loves,
and will be swift To aid a Virgin,
such as was herself, In hard-besetting need.
This will I try And add the power of some
adjuring verse. The power of verse has
everything to do with the power wielded by Sabrina to save the
Lady from her paralysis. If "right invok't in warbled
Song," Sabrina can actually be called down for assistance -- or
called up for assistance.It's just this
interest in the right, the proper form of warbled song
that's so important here. She represents a power that
might enable Milton to warble a right or proper song.
She represents a power that might enable Milton perhaps
someday actually to fulfill, to consummate his
much-anticipated poetic promise. But how does she do that?
Look at line 910. This is page 111 in the
Hughes. Sabrina says to the Lady as she rises from the
water: Brightest Lady look on me,
Thus I sprinkle on thy breast Drops that from my fountain pure
I have kept of precious cure, Thrice upon my finger's tip,
Thrice upon my rubied lip; Next this marble venom'd seat
Smear'd with gums of glutinous heat
I touch with chaste palms moist and cold.
Now, if this a scene, as it's been argued,
of Sabrina's baptism of the Lady, it's a curious baptism
indeed. We might think that Sabrina's
"chaste palms moist and cold" would only make more frigid and
more frozen the body of the Lady,
but in fact it's just the opposite that happens.
Think of the delicate, really beautiful sensuality
here in Sabrina's speech. I don't think we were expecting
this. She evokes the beauty of the
Lady's rubied lip. How inappropriate!
The eroticization of the Lady's beauty has up to this point come
exclusively from Comus. In touching the Lady's
fingertip, it's as if Sabrina were awakening for the first
time the Lady's sense of touch.Now the Lady,
we know, has an exquisite and powerful sense of hearing.
She's a poet and she has an impeccable ear,
but this fiercely virginal Lady has not up to this point even
begun to develop her other sensory realms.
When Sabrina touches the surprisingly sensual rubied lip
of the Lady, she's in essence baptizing,
I think, and sanctioning the erotic drives that the Lady has
been so fiercely repressing. She baptizes the entire domain
of non-auditory sensual experience that the Lady so
forcefully avoids. And you can think of Sabrina as
she touches so gently the Lady -- this is [laughs]
to use the wonderful phrase that John Guillory used actually
in this very room when I took the Milton lecture as an
undergraduate -- that what Sabrina is doing is (and this
dates John Guillory -- this is a very ‘70s phrase) is
activating the Lady's "erogenous zones."
There's something to that. With this magical touching of
the Lady with her precious liquor, Sabrina saves the Lady
from her paralysis. Milton's stage direction should
say it all, it's very simple: the lady just "rises out of her
seat."I don't want to suggest that Sabrina's work is
purely erotic here. There's a lot more than sex
implied in this redemptive touching.
In touching the Lady's rubied lip, she's also,
I think, releasing the lady's hesitation to speak.
After Comus' masterful seduction, replete with all its
allusions to the parable of the talents from Matthew 25,
the Lady, you'll remember, had been so hesitant to speak
("I had not thought to have unlocked my lips / in this
unhallowed air"). When she does unlock her lips
ever so slightly [laughs] -- when she does unlock her
lips, she does so only to anticipate
the effect that her speeches would have if she were to unlock
them even more. Everything is entirely
conditional and future-oriented. Sabrina's touching of the
Lady's lip seems to unlock, perhaps permanently,
the rhetorical hesitation that has paralyzed the Lady,
and the Lady is liberated. Of course, we have no evidence
of the Lady's rhetorical liberation.
There's no further speech on her part, but it's an important
action, I think, nonetheless.The touching of
the Lady's lip touches us in other ways as well though,
at least in this lecture, because we remember that
unfortunate, that horrifying image of the lip that Milton had
noted in the commonplace book. Saint Ebba had not only severed
her nose, she had also severed her lip.
I think it's worth thinking about, at least for a moment,
of the oddity of this terrible act of self-mutilation.
The superfluous action suggests that there was something more at
stake, perhaps, than Saint Ebba's attempt to
ward off sexual assault. To disfigure the mouth -- this
is how I would interpret it -- to disfigure the mouth has a
primary effect in rendering one at least temporarily speechless.
I think there's a connection here between the image from the
commonplace book and the treatment in Milton's mask of
this strangely conjoint phenomenon of virginity and
speechlessness. In a little scene from the
early English history that Milton had selected from his
reading, you have an image of silencing,
of a horrifying and unredeemable speechlessness that
is so closely connected to virginity.
It would seem to be the terrible fate of Saint Ebba to
die both speechless and virginal that Milton is struggling to
avoid here.So yeah, Comus is a celebration
of virginity, and it might even be a
celebration of Milton's endlessly anticipatory -- the
mood of imaging himself as a great poet.
But these virtues, however great,
I think, are also associated in the mask with the Lady's
petrifaction, her fixation on the seat that
Comus has fashioned for her. It's one of the duties of the
mask's plot to get the Lady out of her seat.
And you can see in the song that Sabrina sings something of
the mechanism, perhaps, by which this
transition is effected. Look at line 897.
We're almost done here. Sabrina rises from the water
and appears gradually on the land, making a transition a lot
like the one the Lady will eventually have to make.
She sings -- Sabrina sings: Whilst from off the
waters fleet Thus I set my printless feet
O'er the Cowslip's Velvet head, That bends not as I
tread… Now her feet are,
of course, printless because she's airy and ethereal,
and she leaves no tread on the cowslips or the flowers -- but
this is an odd phrase, you'll concede:
"printless feet." Its oddness is important.
Feet, of course, has a lot of
meanings, and Milton's poetic feet, the material of the verse
written in six and eight and ten syllables in this poem,
are also in 1634 printless -- they're unpublished.
When Comus is first performed, Milton's poetry hasn't yet been
printed, but it's almost as if Sabrina seems to have died
printless or unpublished so that Milton wouldn't have to.
It's a sacrifice on our poet's behalf.
That would be one literarily allegorical way to think of
it.Now as I noted earlier, there's a difference between
the two existing texts of Milton's Comus.
There's the performance version of 1634 and the printed
version of 1637, and the additions to the text
that Milton is making for the published version reflect,
I think, his sense that he, like the Lady,
is in the process of making an important transition.
He is no longer -- or no longer wants to be -- an infans,
a poetic virgin, a speechless poet.
There's also another transition that he's making,
and this involves the subject of virginity:
not a speechlessness, but his actual abstinence.
I'll just point you quickly to this passage.
Look at line 1003; it's on page 113 in the
Hughes. After we have the Lady wandering through the
forest, she joins her father with her brothers and we get
this: But far above in spangled
sheen Celestial Cupid,
her fam'd son advanc't, Holds his dear Psyche sweet
entranc't After her wand'ring labors long,
Till free consent the gods among Make her his eternal
bride... You can see an image here of
Cupid's eventual marriage to Psyche as a pointed reference to
the likelihood that the Lady, too, will become someone's
eternal bride. In 1634, in the first version,
we didn't have this anticipation of the Lady's
future marriage. This passage didn't exist.
The Lady remained much more fixed in her idealization of
virginity and a lot more silent in her responses to Comus,
but it's almost as if the prospect of publishing this mask
seems to have induced in Milton an interest in trying to move
beyond the idealization of virginity,
beyond simply the anticipation of future power.
And you're getting to see something like an intimation of
John Milton the published poet, a poet whose energies are going
to be directed toward making his poems public.
The poet of anticipation is beginning to think of himself as
the poet of achievement, and the poet of the radical
power of virginity is beginning to redirect a lot of his
interests to the radical power of married sexuality.Now it
won't be until another four or five years after the publication
of Comus that Milton will himself actually be married,
but the transition from virginity to married chastity
charted in this poem that we've been looking at nonetheless
reflects a marked interest in the nature not only of Milton's
personal life but in the nature of his literary interests.
He's beginning to put aside all of those literary anxieties
induced by his reading of Shakespeare,
and it's as if he's more and more willing to use as a kind of
literary assistant, or helper, Spenser:
the great poet of holy matrimony and married sexual
bliss. In the works that Milton is
going to be publishing now with greater and greater frequency,
it's this Spenserian ideal of marriage that will be the new
and, believe me, the endlessly complex Miltonic
subject.Now for next time we'll be reading Lycidas,
which is about the death of a friend -- and the death of a
friend, in fact, who died a virgin,
we have to assume. It's not about marriage,
and marriage will still seem quite a ways off,
I fear, when you read Lycidas,
but we will be marking the transition to the poetry of
marriage soon enough. This is probably the most
difficult poem linguistically that we'll be reading all
semester. It repays innumerable readings
and re-readings, so I urge you to read it
seventy-five times, let's say, before you come to
class on Monday. Thank you.
