“Had Milton never achieved fame as author of Paradise Lost,”
writes Thomas H. Luxon, “Comus might
have been forgotten in history as a minor performance in an age that saw much
grander courtly spectacles of this now disused sort. Milton's subversions of
the genre's conventions, however, as well as his puritan formulation of a
classical ideal of self-governance, distinguish Comus as a complex and fascinating piece of
dramatic literature.” One of the many interesting ways in which Comus deviates from the
conventions of the Masque in 17th century England (from the
“Jonsonian mold”, as William Shullenberger puts it) is in its emphasis on a sense
of self-governance or ‘temperance’ rather than patriarchal or royal authority.
In traditional masques, the Queen’s ‘virtue’ is usually shown to be derived
from the King, making the woman simply a vessel for the absolute power of the
monarch. In his book, Lady in the Labyrinth: Milton's Comus as Initiation (2008), Shullenberger argues that in Comus it is the Lady alone who acts as an
"exemplary agent and embodiment of virtue," without any mention of
her father (the King’s proxy) or the King. This choice, Shullenberger further
discusses, may indicate Milton's dissent from the conflation of spiritual
education and politics in the structure of court masques. This view is
reflected in Maryann Cale McGuire’s classification of Comus as a "dissident masque," or
the "work of a Protestant radical who rejected absolutist institutional
authority, emphasized the primacy of the individual pursuit of enlightenment,
and posited that stasis is impossible in the fallen world." Here, I shall
try to explore this shift of attention from patriarchal authority to
self-governance in Comus. One of the
most interesting aspects of the Masque, I believe, is the nature of the Forest
where the action takes place. It is a marginal space, at once a binary opposite
to the structured, social space of Divine and Royal control, and at the same
time a necessary ‘other’, a sphere of interaction and decision making that can
help a subject internalize the systems of control that the King or the
Attendant Spirit represent and preach. It becomes important to look into the
interactions between the characters and the Forest, giving rise to a narrative structure
where neither patriarchal control nor divine intervention, but only personal
engagement and internal reasoning will help the protagonist resist the
malevolent, chaotic margin-dweller that Comus represents.
John Milton wrote Comus,
the only masque he ever composed, on commission to celebrate the
first visit of John Egerton, the
first Earl of Bridgewater to his
(relatively) new administrative seat, Ludlow
Castle in Shropshire; it was performed for the first
time on the night of Michaelmas (September 29) in 1634. Egerton had been
appointed Lord President of Wales and Lord Lieutenant of Wales and the Marches
of Herefordshire, Monmouthshire, Shropshire and Worcestershire in 1631, but he
first visited Ludlow in 1634. Egerton’s own children, Alice, John and Thomas,
acted in the masque, and Henry Lawes, Gentleman of the Royal Chapel, who was
commissioned to compose the music for the masque, played the part of the
attendant spirit. The entire play takes place of course, in a “drear wood”,
home to many malevolent entities, the most dangerous among them Comus. A child
of the sorceress Circe and the god Bacchus, Comus represents the Dionysian side
of Nature. Like his mother on her island, he too is a margin-dweller,
inhabiting the forest, emerging to ‘hunt’ only under cover of night, in the “thick shelter of black shades imbowr'd.”
He offers to weary travelers his “orient liquor in a crystal glass,” a magic
potion of sorts, that changes the drinker’s head into the head of an animal,
while the torso and the limbs remain unaltered.
What is interesting and
important in this context is what happens to his victims after this
transformation. Usually, in folklore and oral traditions, the transformation of
the human into the bestial (partly or completely) is the result of a trick or a
deception, rendering the victim incapable of reconciling himself or herself
with human society anymore. More often than not, the victim retains full human
consciousness, and has to suffer humiliation, loss of material wealth and
social status (generally leading to the deceiving antagonist usurping these
lost possessions) and even torture, in silence. In the end, the balance is
restored when the victim, either through his or her own wits or through divine
intervention and mercy, is returned to human shape, all the wrongs redressed
and the antagonist punished (often, interestingly, by being turned into animals
themselves.) The Arabian Knights contain no less than five separate
narratives that follow this pattern (the animals being horses, dogs and in one
occasion, an ass), the Grimms’ Fairy Tales give us the accounts of
princes turned into birds and deer after drinking from enchanted pools, and
Indian mythology too, lists stories of heroes turned into parrots and bears
after disobeying some higher rule. In Comus, however, there is no such
sense of suffering following the transformation. The beast-men, instead of
lamenting any loss, “Not once perceive
their foul disfigurement/ But boast themselves more comely then before/And all their friends, and native home
forget/ To roule with
pleasure in a sensual sty.” The forgetting of the “native home” and the adoption of
Comus’ “ominous woods” as a new habitat point towards the peculiar nature of
Milton’s marginal space, the forest. It is a space, defined by its otherness
from the controlled human society, that defines itself not as a “lesser” or
corrupted version of Society, but as everything Society is not. When Comus
proudly calls his crew as “We that are of purer fire,” he is appealing to a
sense of freedom from the norms that the Lady and her brothers seek to follow,
at once a freedom and an alienation from divine and societal control. He does
not seek to enter into engagement with the tenets of chastity or “strict Age
and sowre severity” except for the sake of countering them, not subverting but
renouncing altogether. His seduction of travelers and transforming them into
his bestial companions, therefore, is an act of reclaiming subjects, from the
territory of control and authority into the marginal space of Night and Forest.
The effect the forest has on the lady is
interesting. The Lady, a daughter of the “noble Peer of mickle trust,” quite
closely allied with the order of society representing control (Jove, Neptune,
the society that celebrates Chastity and Temperance), is openly apprehensive
about the forest. Since this masque alludes to classical myths quite
frequently, the different remarks the Lady makes about the forest are
important. One cannot help but notice that she immediately equates the forest
with the images of rough villagers, ‘Wassailers’, the deity Pan and the
suffocating presence of Night. It is important because all of her remarks
allude to sections of society that have been marginalized by the powerful
ruling classes. Her fear of being confronted by “rudeness and swill’d
insolence” of the rural folk reveals her aristocratic upbringing. As a highborn
lady, she has been brought up within the conventions that teach her to be
suspicious of the lower strata of the society her family has the power to rule,
to not associate with them, to mark them as the strange, uncouth ‘Other’
against whom the identity of the “well-mannered” aristocratic family is to be
constructed. Similarly, in contrast with the deities she and her brothers
answer to, Jove or Neptune or even the Christian “Giver” she alludes to later,
Pan is a minor deity, often confined to the realm of shepherds and rustic
people, not to the glorified pantheon paying homage to the major deities like
Zeus (Jove) or Poseidon. Even “theevish Night”, so often alluded to in both the
Lady’s and her brothers’ descriptions of the forest, is associated with Nyx of
Greek Mythology, closely associated with Tartarus, the spirit of the endless
pit where the Titans are imprisoned, and Chaos. It becomes evident that even in
the allusions, the boundaries are being clearly marked to separate the ‘Society’
from the ‘Margin’, if we may call them by these names in this context. Comus’
forest is his own realm, and what he seeks is to break away, not to engage.
Comus’ appreciation of the Lady’s song,
too, reaches us through his comparison of the Lady to minor deities and
marginal figures of mythology; Scylla and Charybdis, the Sirens, the Naiads and
Sylvanus, all figures confined to marginal folklore, quite far removed from the
Olympian pantheon. “But such a sacred and home-felt delight,” he says after
listing all these figures, “Such sober certainty of waking bliss/
I never heard till now. Ile speak to her/And she shall be my Queen.” When Comus addresses the
Lady as the “forren wonder…unlesse the Goddesse,” the suggestion recalls
Aeneas’ reaction to seeing Venus after the Trojan shipwreck, “O dea certe” (Aeneid 1.328.) Venus, the same deity Comus invokes with his very
first line in the masque, almost as a patron of the evening, the “Venus [who]
now wakes and wak’ns love.” The feeling one gets, therefore, is not of Comus
looking at the Lady as a representative of an
order different from the one he belongs to and has interacted with till
now. He is simply listing her as the best
among the ones he alludes to. He wants to claim her into his realm, the
Margin. Comus does not engage in a debate with the Lady about Chastity and
Temperance because he wishes to confront Society, he does it simply because the
Lady, being as much a representative of Society as he is of Margin, cannot be
claimed into this new space without being engaged first. It is a debate of
ideologies, with the preacher of one belief system trying to convert another
into his own.
How then, is this binary between the
Society and the Margin helping Milton move away from the conventional emphasis
on patriarchal authority to self-governance? To answer this, it is important to
look into the question of power within the narrative, more specifically, the
power to fight Comus’ enchantment. If the Margin, like in many other texts, had
represented a corrupt, “lesser” version of Society, where balance in the end is
achieved by correcting the flaws in the system and purging the Margin to claim
it back into Society, the patriarchal control (be it of the father, of the King
or of God) would have had a part to play in disciplining and obliterating the
subversions. However, Milton’s Margin is an absolute binary he creates by
alluding to primary binaries like light and darkness, God and minor deities,
binaries which have no apparent chance of being reconciled or reclaimed into
one another. Thus, patriarchal control is powerless in such a scenario where
the Margin refuses to resemble the Society in any way. The Attendant Spirit, in
spite of protestations of his own divine nature and his duty to attend to the
Lady and her brothers’ “defence and their guard,” can do little to stop Comus.
When he sees Comus laying his enchantment on the Lady he is supposed to
protect, he can do nothing but “Amaz’d [he] stood, harrowed with grief and
fear,” and in the end achieves no greater end than merely informing the
brothers of where she is being held, and praying to Sabrina to help them in the
end. The brothers, too, after they hear about the plight of their sister,
immediately decide on the masculine resolution to all problems, by strength of
arm and their “just swords.” But, as the Spirit informs them, here in the
Margin, “thy sword can do thee little stead.” In Comus’ own realm, so far
removed from the space of patriarchal control, the disciplining devices of the
Society will have no effect. It is only the Lady, in her personal strength and
self-governance, who can resist Comus and his enchantment. The Margin thus
creates a narrative space where self-governance as a weapon only necessary but
also the only choice. It is a perfect way to highlight the power of one’s
personal reasoning and will, and Milton chooses to place his characters within
a scenario which, in its absolute ‘otherness’ from Society, leaves the
characters no chance to appeal to a higher power for deliverance, but forces
them to fight themselves. This seems particularly relevant in the light of what
Thomas H. Luxon calls Milton’s “puritan-leaning yet classically rooted sense of
self-governance and temperance”, which is being explored in Comus deeply in the absence of the
patriarchal authority of Society. In the end, too, when the water-nymph Sabrina
is invoked for delivering the Lady, she does not represent the patriarchal
order either. She is a female deity, representing the Margin as much as the
ones Comus alludes to earlier, and even the Spirit, a servant of the
patriarchal Jove, has to invoke marginal deities who are confined to local
myths and folklore (and are sometimes, as mythology describes, quite anti-Jove)
like Oceanus, Glaucus, Tethys, Palaemon, Parthenope and Ligea. Sabrina,
therefore, represents a sense of order without control in the Lady’s context; a
female savior who does not claim to control, but simply reflects the Lady’s own
will-power in resisting Comus.
Does the elder brothers’ claim, then, seem valid in this
context? He consoles his younger sibling by confirming how their sister’s
Chastity will protect her from every peril possible. However, what is
interesting is the difference between the way in which the brother thinks it
will protect her, and the way in which the Lady ultimately protects herself.
While the brother thinks of Chastity as a celebrated, quality gifted to the
obedient daughter by the divine patriarchy, a quality which shall protect the
Lady from Comus, the Lady in fact protects her chastity from Comus. Decision,
choices and strength of will are what help her stall Comus long enough for the
brothers to arrive, not any inherent strength in chastity. True, she is
repeating the conventions taught to her by Societal control in her rebuttal of
Comus’ agreements, but that rebuttal too is derived from her own capability to
hold her own ground. It is the Margin, the utter alien space that gives her the
opportunity to portray her own self-governance and strength of will in decision
making, as it is a common “function” of the forest to enable the protagonist to
make strong decisions, as Vladimir Propp discusses in Morphology of The
Folktale. Thus, even within the scheme of “Good defeating
Bad,” Milton is hinting at strength of individual spirit and will-power as the
source of ‘good’, not an abstract quality in its own essence like Chastity or
Temperance. While certain qualities are to be celebrated, it is important to
keep in mind that it is the human spirit that keeps them protected and
celebrates them, not the other way round. This is the general feeling one can
derive out of Comus, and to make this
come into play, the marginal forest, in all its ‘otherness’ plays a huge part
in setting the stage.
Kabir Chattopadhyay
PG-II
PG-II
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