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  • Milton's Comus as Children's Literature
  • Lee A. Jacobus (bio)

History and legend erroneously tagged Milton as a fun-spoiling puritan who disliked his own children enough that he made them read to him in ancient tongues they did not themselves understand. But enlightened biographers have dispelled much of this mist. He wrote about children; he taught them and respected them; and they, including his daughters, spoke well of him in later life. In light of this, then, it may be easier for us to consider the question of whether or not Comus can be seriously thought of as an example of children's literature.

The question is made credible first because the leading role and two important supporting roles were actually played by children and written as children's parts. Further, Comus has a very specific didactic quality emphasizing problems of virtue and faith specifically pertinent to an adolescent girl. Then, the ambiguity of the genre, with a melodramatic quality more familiar to the mid-nineteenth century stage than to the Stuart masquing hall, tends to put Comus—with its children threatened by a magician in a mazy wood—generically close to what we usually consider children's literature.

When the masque was performed at Ludlow Castle in 1634, the Lady Alice Egerton was fifteen years old. She played the Lady tempted to abandon her virtue and her chastity by a night-rioter, Comus (son of Circe), when he discovers her lost in a wood on her way home to her father's house. The parts of the Elder Brother and the Younger Brother were played by Lady Alice's brother, Lord Brackley, then eleven years old, and her brother, Thomas, then nine years old. The Attendant Spirit, from the courts of Jove, was played by an old family friend, Henry Lawes, who also wrote the music and managed to get Milton to write the masque itself.

W. R. Parker, the most recent biographer of Milton, suggests that Milton may actually have played the part of Comus, the tempter. However, it is likely that this part and Sabrina's were played by professionals. A villain such as Comus would most decorously be portrayed by someone who was not close to the family for the same reason the adult Attendant Spirit should be a friend, someone like her music-master, whom she could rely upon in life as well as in fiction. The moral function of the music-master is then doubly significant.

The actual occasion for the composition of the masque was the installation of the Earl of Bridgewater, John Egerton, as President of Wales, an honorary position with no responsibilities. The performance was at Ludlow Castle, the Earl's residence near Wales, on Michaelmas night, September 29, 1634. The masque does not directly celebrate this occasion. Critics have suggested that the successful trial of John Egerton's daughter, in the face of the powerful tempter, [End Page 67] is praise enough for the occasion. Yet it seems odd that the entire focus of the entertainment should be directed to Lady Alice, and so little (11.35-6) to the father.

Perhaps this would seem less odd if it were not for the existence of Milton's other masque, Arcades. This masque, one-tenth the length of Comus, and much more "normal" for the genre of the masque as Jonson established it, was composed for a celebration we can know little about. Its subject is clearly the Dowager Countess of Derby, the Lady Alice Spencer, the step-mother, by marriage, of John Egerton. The date of this piece may be as early as 1632 or as late as 1634. French Fogle has surmised that it may have been written to celebrate the seventy-fifth birthday of the Countess—thus marking it at May 4, 1634. In any event, it clearly celebrates this grand lady, and with no shifts of attention to her progeny. She is described as providing the "blaze of majesty . . . Too divine to be mistook," which illumines all. Had Milton intended to praise her stepson in the vehicle of a masque, he could easily have done so.

Comus does not have the same intention as Arcades...

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