Comus
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A Mask Presented at Ludlow Castle, 1634
Words written by Milton, the music by Henry
Lawes
First performed at Michaelmas, 1634 in
celebration of the Earl of Bridgewater’s
promotion to Lord President of Wales
The Plot
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The Spirit (who acts as the chorus) is sent by Jove to protect three children
who are lost in the woods; The Lady and her two brothers
The two brothers leave The Lady as they search for help
Disguised, Comus deceives The Lady into following him and he captures her.
He repeatedly accosts her and she repeatedly says no
The Spirit finds the two brothers and, disguised as a shepherd, leads the
brothers to their sister and Comus. They save The Lady but Comus escapes
The spirit calls up Sabrina the nymph who finally frees The Lady from her
seat
The Castlehaven Family
The Scandal
“Testimony and reports of the trial in diaries
and letters describe the rape and promiscuity
of the Earl's wife (sister to the Countess of
Bridgewater), homosexuality between the Earl
“[The Earl] delighted in calling up his
servants, making them shew their privities, and
her looke on, and commended those that had
the largest.” (BB 212)
and his servants, and the conversion of
Elizabeth Audley (Alice Egerton's twelvevear-old cousin) into a ‘whore.’” (BB 201)
“On Monday, April 25, 1631, the Earl of
Castlehaven was arraigned, tried, and
sentenced to death for crimes of rape and
sodomy.” (BB 212)
“he could not enter her body without art ; and
that the Lord Audley fetched oil to open her
body, but she cried out, and he could not enter;
and then the earl appointed oil the second time;
and then Skipwith entered her body, and he
knew her carnally.” (BB 214)
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Trial in April 1631
“[Earl of Bridgewater] made no effort [...] to have Castlehaven pardoned”
(BB 214)
Castlehaven was put to death in 1631, his sentence lowered to hanging from
being drawn and quartered because of his stature. Six months after, the
Countess of Derby’s daughter (Anne) and grandchild (Elizabeth) were
pardoned by the king
This was BIG - “[1631] was a plague year [...] It must have been a duller
year than usual for gossip until the Ear was imprisoned” (BB 218)
“By 1634 [...] the public had for three years been able to point to a vivid
example of an aristocratic girl (not to mention her aristocratic mother) who
had yeilded to sexual offers of an implicit and potentially sadistic sort” (BB
217)
Barbara Brested, “Comus and the
Castlehaven Scandel”
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Scandal was “a matter of great shame for the rest of the family” (BB 212)
Some sections of the script (about 70 lines) were cut “to reduce the explicit
sexual content” (BB 201)
The cuts and “the masque itself were probably designed to repair the
Bridgewater family’s reputation, damaged by the trial” (BB 201)
“Comus affirmed the Bridgewaters’ possession of the aristocratic values
which their relatives so notoriously lacked” (BB 201)
“it is difficult to believe that Comus could have been written and performed
with no thought in anyone’s mind of how it might allude to that scandal” (BB
217)
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“Vertue” (C 9)
“I would not soil these pure Ambrosial weeds / With the rank vapours of
this Sin-worn mould” (C 16-17)
“Blu-hair’d deities” (C 29) > “tributary gods” (24) [Bridgwater “held the
highest public office in his family” (BB 214)]
“Nation proud in Arms” (C 33) = Wales [Lord Bridgewater was Lord
President of Wales]
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“fair off-spring” (C 34)
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Play’s story - Comus tries to seduce The Lady
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John Peter: “[Comus] was consoling the Egertons, offering them a most
graceful reassurance’ after the appalling events.”
Karmelich Mundhenk: Comus celebrates “a double [event]: the appointment
of Bridgewater as Lord President and the deliverance of the entire family
from the embarrassment of the recent scandal”
Christopher Hill: “one object of the masque would be to proclaim the
spotless virtue of the Egerton ladies, unlike their too notorious relatives.”
However...
However...
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“Milton’s Comus: The Irrelevance of the Castlehaven Scandal” John Creaser
“[Brested’s argument] is not an inherently unreasonably hypothesis [...] It
cannot merely be assumed that all relatives of Castlehaven and his family
were tarred with the same brush” (JC 25)
“Bridgewater was nominated to the Lord Presidency at the very height of the
scandal, six weeks after Castlehaven’s execution and the day before the trial
of the two servants” (JC 26)
“The standing of the family does not seem to have suffered in the early 1630s
[...] all unmarried daughters, except Lady Alice the youngest, made good
marriages in these years” (JC 26)
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Does seem odd that Milton would use the scandal to provide a setting for the
masque yet deem it insensitive to make the comparison to explicit
Brested’s article has become authoritative: as the arguments has “echoed by
critic after critic they have hardened into orthodoxy” (JC 25)
“generations of scholars who were aware of the scandal made no connection
to the masque” (JC 25)
“While it might have been tactless of him to have incorporated the scandal
unmistakably into his text, it would have been imprudent of him not to have
provided any irresponsible cynics determined to recall it” (JC 32)
References
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Brested, Barbara, ‘Comus and the Castlehaven scandal’, Milton studies, 3 (1971) 201-224
{<http://eml.manchester.ac.uk/lib/ENGL30542/ENGL30542_499.pdf> [accessed 30th September
2010] (whole page)}
Creaser, John, ‘Milton’s Comus: The Irrelevance of the Castlehaven Scandal’, Milton Quarterly, 21
(1987) 24-34 {<http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1094-348X.1987.tb00737.x/pdf>
[accessed 30th September 2010] (whole page)}
Hill, Christopher, Milton and the English Revolution (1977), 44
Mundhenk, Karmelich, ‘Dark Scandal and the Sun-Clad Power of Chastity: the Historical Milieu of
Milton’s Comus’, Studies in English Literature, xv (1975), 141-52
Peter, John, ‘Make It New’, Essays in Criticism, xxvii (1977), 336