The Argument of Milton’s Comus
- The Argument of Milton’s Comus
Footnotes
1. I have only one substantial debt to record. It is to Professor J. H. Hanford’s “The Youth of Milton” (Studies in Shakespeare, Milton and Donne, University of Michigan Publications, Language and Literature, I, 87–163, especially 139–43, 152). Since I shall have occasion to disagree with him at some points, I wish to express here not only my deep sense of obligation, but also my conviction that his is in general the wisest and most penetrating essay on Milton ever written. In dealing with Spenser I have been helped by the Variorum Spenser and by Mr C. S. Lewis’s brilliant Allegory of Love (1936). My friend Professor Douglas Bush has made some very valuable criticisms and suggestions.
2. Puritanism and Liberty (1938), introd. 39–40, 58–9, 84–5.
3. Cf. Milton’s assertion, in his seventh Prolusion, that “nothing can be recounted justly among the causes of our happiness unless in some way it takes into consideration both that eternal and this temporal life”; and his twofold definition of the end of education (Prose Works, Bohn ed., III, 464, 467).
4. Prose Works, III, 119–22.
5. Faery Queen, 2.12. Cf. Areopagitica (Prose Works, II, 68).
6. Lines 706–80. Comus’ appeal to nature is no invention of Milton’s but a Renaissance Ovidian commonplace, found in Spenser’s Phaedria, and in Marlowe, Donne, Randolph, and others; see Douglas Bush, Mythology and the RenaissanceTradition in English Poetry (1932), 135, 267, and Paradise Regained etc., ed. M. Y. Hughes (1937), xliii–iv.
7. That it is implicit is confirmed not only by such allusions to reason as that in line 529, but by the fact that (as Professor Bush remarks) Milton evidently follows Sandys’ interpretation of the Circe myth.
8. Lines 779–87 (not in Bridgewater MS).
9. Lints 359–475, 584–99.
10. Professor Bush remarks that in their Miltonic meaning Wisdom and Contemplation (lines 375, 377) suggest something above natural reason, I agree chat in another context they would do so. I do not think that they have here a specifically religious content, but that they will take on a religious meaning only when submitted to, and reviewed in the light of, grace. The same thing applies to the image of lines 375–80, which (as he points out) seems to be an allusion to the ascent of the soul in the Phaedrus of Plato.
11. Op. cit., 140–1.
12. I would not be thought to reduce F.2. 3. to a sermon in dull domestic virtue. Spenser, the Platonist, views chastity and love as incentives to high idealism and heroic action. But in Britomart these incentives are expressed in relation to marriage, and not to any cult of virginity: that is the only point with which I am concerned.
13. Nor have the minor characters in which Spenser deals with other aspects of chastity more relation than Britomart to Milton’s masque, with one possible exception, Belphoebe, Spenser’s version of the classical Diana. To Britomart Professor Hanford would trace “the martial conception [that] underlies such passages as Comus 440 ff.” (op. cit., 141). But the conception, though militant, is not martial; and to me the lines with their allusions to Diana and Minerva recall the spirit of Spenser’s portrait not of Britomart, but of Belphoebe. More plausible is Professor Hanford’s contention that the Lady’s rescue which can be completed only by the reversal of the enchanter’s charm, owes something to the rescue of Amoret (F.2. 3. 12. 36), though there is a possible common source in Ovid, Metamorphoses 14.301–2 (Hughes). But least plausible of all is the assumption that Milton’s emphasis on providential intervention to guard chastity requires a source and finds it in the rescue of Florimel by Proteus (F.2. 3. 8. 29 ff.). And anyway these would be mere surface borrowings: the characters and situations of Amoret and Florimel have nothing in common with the Lady’s. In one instance Professor Hanford exaggerates Milton’s divergence from Spenser: it is the one certain and significant borrowing from book...
