Comus

1. Comus • 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

2. The Plot • 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

4. The Castlehaven Family

5. 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 and his servants, and the conversion of Elizabeth Audley (Alice Egerton's twelve- vear-old cousin) into a ‘whore.’” (BB 201) “[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) “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) “On Monday, April 25, 1631, the Earl of Castlehaven was arraigned, tried, and sentenced to death for crimes of rape and sodomy.” (BB 212)

6. 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)

7. Barbara Brested, “Comus and the Castlehaven Scandel” • 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)

8. “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) • “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] • “fair off-spring” (C 34) • Play’s story - Comus tries to seduce The Lady

9. However... • 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.”

10. However... • “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)

11. 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)

12. References • 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 andthe 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