
Comus (1634) by John Milton,
edited by A W Verity.
Cambridge University Press 1927 (1909)
Come, Lady, while Heaven lends us grace,
Let us fly this cursed place,
Lest the sorcerer us entice
With some other new device.
With these words we’re taken to the nub of John Milton’s masque, which is that a wicked magician has entrapped a maiden, and that rescue may be at hand if nothing further awful happens. This is the stuff of fairytales, and we may expect a happy-ever-after ending, but this isn’t necessarily a given: after all it’s from the Stuart period, when nearly every bit of art had a political dimension, as it had been in the Tudor era.
And we may consider the audience of this intended narrative, the Earl of Bridgewater, lately ensconced in a castle on the Welsh borders where he might oversee a people possibly still uppity about being absorbed into English culture through new laws and a new official language. How would Milton bestride the fence between his Puritan leanings and the royalist sponsor it was written for?
This critical edition of the text has a certain historical value, it being more than a century old, but it still has much to say of worth, I think. Still, the play’s the thing, as another playwright wrote; and whomsoever’s conscience is caught Comus retains a certain curiosity for its poetry and for its concession to the masque genre with, admittedly, a rather sober frivolity.

So, Milton’s Comus is a masque, a curious piece of theatre to our modern sensibilities. In some ways masques are total theatre: there’s a story acted out, there are also fantastic costumes, music, dances, songs, along with visual and sound effects. Yet also there is high-flown language, and classical allusions, and frequent instances of what we’d now call virtue signalling (which may seem the whole point). And Comus has all this in abundance.

What’s the story? Comus is a sorcerer, the son of Bacchus and Circe, who has inherited his father’s debauched nature as well his mother’s skill for transforming humans into beasts. His name is from the Greek word for revelry which is one of the roots of our word ‘comedy’. When a Lady from Ludlow gets separated from her two brothers in a wood Comus tries to persuade her to swallow a potion, to no avail for she is virtuous beyond her years; her distraught brothers fortunately meet a spirit in the form of the shepherd Thyrsis who gives them a botanical charm to protect them from Comus’s wand.

However, when they rush forward to thwart the sorcerer’s design they fail to seize his wand, and so it is left for Thyrsis to invoke Sabrina, the nymph of the River Severn which flows past Ludlow Castle, to lift the stasis that keeps the Lady to her seat: she affirms that it’s “my office best to help ensnarèd chastity.” The Lady and her brothers are restored to their parents in the Castle and we are left with a dance, a song, and a moral from Milton in the guise of Thyrsis:
Mortals, that would follow me,
Love Virtue: she alone is free;
She can teach ye how to climb
Higher than the sphery chime;
Or if Virtue feeble were,Heaven itself would stoop to her.
This is a rare example of the use of trochaic tetrameter in Comus which, along with rhyming couplets is left to songs and scenes of a pastoral nature. Mostly, however, the masque consists of blank verse in iambic pentameter, as when the bespelled Lady says of Comus
I had not thought to have unlocked my lips
In this unhallowed air, but that this juggler
Would think to charm my judgement, as mine eyes,
Obtruding false rules pranked in reason’s garb.
Such phrases as this suits its lofty subject and its characters, since the siblings being originally acted by the sons and daughter of the Lord-Lieutenant of Wales and the Borders, namely Lord Brackley, Thomas Egerton and Lady Alice Egerton. The one and only performance took place at Ludlow Castle in the Marches, on Michaelmas Eve in 1634.
As a drama Comus is as static as the Lady’s forced entrapment in her seat, and for this reason some critics consider this as belonging with Milton’s other poems of around the same period, at a time when the phoney war preceding the English Civil War was ratcheting up. However, though Milton couldn’t help moralising (he even added improving lines to later printed editions) the fairytale framework underlying the flowery diction shines through, with jeopardy and villainy, as in any fantasy script, moving the narrative forward to its eventual resolution. In the skilled hands of a professional company Comus might even work as a modern musical, with or without the original music by Henry Lawes.

I first read this some years ago as I thought it might be a counterpart to Shakespeare’s The Tempest — both have a magician centre stage, there is a young heroine in both and the action of both takes place in an enchanted locale (one an island, the other a “wild wood”). But any resemblance is superficial: Prospero is benign, Comus malign; Miranda is rather more than an innocent pawn but the Lady is both steadfast in her virtue and determinedly assertive in the face of Comus’s importuning; and Prospero’s Isle “full of noises, sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not” is the obverse of Comus’s “adventurous glade”, described in the stage directions:
COMUS enters, with a charming-rod in his hand, his glass in the other; with him a rout of monsters, headed like sundry sorts of wild beasts, but otherwise like men and women, their apparel glistering: they come in making a riotous and unruly noise, with torches in their hands.
In his introduction to this edition Arthur Verity suggests a parentage for this tale of sister lost in a wood, trapped by a sorcerer and rescued by brothers, namely George Peele’s Old Wives’ Tales, the name Comus borrowed from a masque by Ben Johnson, and further details from a Dutch play called Comus written by a Puteanus. My mind went straight away, however, to the Scottish fairytale of Childe Rowland and his sister Burd Helen which, with its similar storyline involving the King of Elfland, hints at a traditional tale lost in the mists of time.
A final word about this edition is in order. Verity’s 1909 volume went through several printings before and after the First World War, attesting to its usefulness; forty pages of introduction plus notes, glossary, appendix, other critiques and an index means the student can fully immerse themself into the poem, its background and its import; and its small format means the reader can easily carry it about in order to increase their familiarity, as I have been doing.
I’ve reviewed this as a contribution to Lory’s Reading the Theatre this March; also its connections with Ludlow in the Welsh Marches make it of peripheral relevance to Paula’s Dewithon, the Welsh Readathon. More, this is a classic play from my Back to the Classics challenge, another book ticked off on my Classics Club list and one more of my #21TBRbooksin2021
Now this is what I call multi-tasking. Nice review, Chris.
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Thanks, Cath, though my apparent multi-tasking is only an attempt to look organised with forward planning!
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it worked, for me! I’m taking notes…
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I’m particularly interested in the fairytale aspects of the basic plot involving brothers coming to the rescue of their sister, evident not only in the Burd Helen / Childe Harold story but also in the Bluebeard tales. Bearing in mind the dreadful events of recent days I’m also mindful that the Lady’s experience is not just a fairytale but, shamefully, a daily threat and peril for most women.
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Ah ha, yes. The fairytale parallels provide an interesting trail to pick up on.
But you’re right, how dreadful to reflect that the threats of those ancient oral tales are still relevant.
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I’m thinking now that I might work up a post on these aspects some time soon.
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Comus as a musical is a great idea; I’d love to see it. A masque, it seems to me, is very much a thing of the moment. It would have to be live.
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The opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympics struck me at the time as very much a masque with its mix of words, music, effects, lofty themes and visual spectacle: I can’t really imagine any one of those working well on its own, and watching it live on TV was a terrific experience, for all its length. So, Comus done live could be something to anticipate, and with one of its central themes, of a predatory male and of masculine toxicity, of distinct contemporary relevance.
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Oh how nice to read a bit about Comus! I have a very pretty copy with illustrations by Jessie M. King and absolutely NO editing or introduction, so all this context is very helpful. I should reread it now. I do like it, and I have always wanted to see a masque, maybe one day…
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I’ve just looked her up and she seems to be an interesting and distinctive artist. At first sight there is a hint of Beardsley in her Comus drawings, both composition and style, but her characterisations seem less grotesque, on just the right side of sentimental. It would be lovely to see a volume stuffed with book illustrations by the likes of King, Blake, Rackham and others, along with selected paintings by many other artists.
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I think that’s a very accurate description. If I have a criticism, I feel that her work in Comus lacks darkness, both figuratively and literally (the pictures are so delicate they are hard to see in the photogravure reproductions).
Your book idea would be a sort of literary version of a masque – you must convince someone to publish it!
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If only I had that influence, Helen! Meanwhile we can always google these images, as I’ve been doing, as the next best thing…
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Handel’s music for this is gorgeous. Great work and lovely illustrations.
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Thanks, Gert. And I believe the Lawes music for this first performance is mostly still extant eg https://youtu.be/n1L_g_JJFX8
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The stuff of nightmares.
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If I’m right in assuming you’re referring to male toxicity in the form of Comus himself, Josie, I absolutely agree, especially in light of recent UK protests at male predators.
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