“The unpolluted temple of the mind”:
“the happy trial” not of Chastity but of “the arms of Chastity” in Milton’s Ludlow Castle Mask
by Julian Darius
 It is altogether too easy to read A Mask Presented At Ludlow-Castle, 1634 (a.k.a. A maske 1634 or simply A Maske, though best known as Comus) as a simplistic, dichotomous tale of good overcoming evil, of Chastity overcoming undisciplined revelry and misrule. To do so, even respecting the often glorious verse, obscures the philosophical depth of the work. The Ludlow Castle Mask is, indeed, a simplistic tale of good versus evil -- it was, after all, as William Riley Parker puts it “a children’s entertainment, requested ... and acted by children” (132) -- but it is a Miltonic simplistic morality tale, simultaneously “a dainty peece of entertainment” (as Sir Henry Wootton referred to it) and an encoded moral lesson with profound implications.
The setting is simple enough: a “drear Wood, / The nodding horror of whose shady brows / Threats the forlorn and wandring Passinger” as the Attendant Spirit (36-38).1 first describes it. Comus, lest there be any ambiguity, is introduced before his appearance by his parentage, as the son of Bacchus and Circe, though he takes after his Homeric seductress of a mother (57). Comus is uniquely a seducer, his praise of “Nocturnal sport” (128) occurring even in soliloquy, as is his clearly Satanic expressed methodology, to “Bait... with reasons not unplausible / [to] Wind me into easie-hearted man” (161-162). Also like Satan, Comus knows he’s wrong, saying (in an aside), “I must dissemble” (805). The Attendant Spirit offers Comus’s opposite, ambiguous in origin but angelic in nature, always intervening “to give ... safe convoy” (81) to “any favour’d of high Jove, / [who] Chances to passe through this adventrous glade” (78-79). The Lady, who addresses the Platonic form of Chastity in soliloquy -- “thou unblemish’t form of Chastity, I see ye visibly” (215-216) --, seems to offer no more ambiguity; even Comus recognizes her as a “Virgin sure” (148).
Upon the entrance of the Lady’s two brothers, however, philosophy takes central state. Lamenting “that haples virgin our lost sister” (350), the younger brother is corrected by his older sibling, who argues, in rhetoric directly echoing of Paradise Lost, what we would call there the paradise or hell within:
He that has light within his own cleer brest
May sit i’th center, and enjoy bright day,
But he that hides a dark soul, and foul thoughts
Beighted walks under the mid-day Sun;
Himself is his own dungeon. (381-385)
The second brother argues that this is well and good, but that “beauty ... / had need the guard / Of dragon watch with uninchanted eye” (393-395); pointing out that “Misers” guard their “treasure” (399), he worries for “a single helpless maiden / in this wilde surrounding wast” (402-403). Admitting, I think unironically, “my nature is / That I encline to hope, rather than fear” (411-412), the older brother asserts at some length an ancient argument:
‘Tis chastity, my brother, chastity:
She that has that, is clad in compleat steel,
...
through the sacred rayes of Chastity,
No savage fierce ...
Will dare to soyl her Virgin purity,
... [rather]
She may pass on with unblench’t majesty,
Be it not don in pride, or in presumption.
Som say no evil thing ...
...
Hath hurtfull power o’re true virginity. (420-436)
He follows with a list of classical exemplars (441-449) “to testifie the arms of Chastity” (440) and of, in a delightful turn of phrase, “The unpolluted temple of the mind” (461). The debate is broken off by the brothers hearing sounds -- which the worrisome younger brother fears might be “Some roaving Robber calling to his fellows” (485), but which proves to be the Attendant Spirit -- but the dynamic of this argument shall inform the entire masque.
In fact, the Lady has already foreshadowed this same argument, saying in her first speech: “The vertuous mind, ... ever walks attended / By a strong siding champion Conscience” (211-212). After the Attendant Spirit narrates the situation, the worrisome brother again laments “th’unarmed weakness of one Virgin / Alone, and helpless!” (582-583) -- having apparently forgotten about “the arms of Chastity.” The younger brother asks explicitly, “Is this the confidence / You game me Brother?” (583-584). In reply, the older brother presses his earlier point:
this I hold firm,
Vertue may be assail’d, but never hurt,
Surpriz’d by unjust force, but not enthrall’d,
... [and]
Shall in the happy trial prove most glory. (588-592)
In other words, you can’t rape a purely virginal heart and soul -- “evil on it self shall back recoyl” (593). It is exactly this trial with which the masque, hardly a simplistic trial of Chastity or goodness, concerns itself.
And soon we see just that. As Comus refers to Daphne and Apollo, all but announcing his intention of raping her, the Lady reiterates the older brother’s position: “Thou canst not touch the freedom of my minde / With all thy charms” (663-664). Comus makes a series of attempted seductions, many along the lines of carpe diem, all easily rebuffed by the virtuous Lady -- and tries to get her to drink what he purports to be a cordial but which doubtlessly has more in common with our own date rape drugs. Again evoking a glimmer of the notion of the paradise within, the Lady claims that “the sage / And serious doctrine of Virginity” (786-787) provides her with “More happines” (789) than Comus’s material hedonism. As Comus pushes his date rape drug again, the brothers and the Attendant Spirit rush in, breaking off the seduction-turned-philosophical-argument and smashing the cup to the floor.
If, at this point, line 813 cut to line 922, we would have a different outcome of the trial altogether. We would conclude that “the arms of Chastity” had proved themselves and Comus been proven impotent. In fact, he has been proven rhetorically impotent. But the play takes another direction entirely. In a play laden with sexual imagery and shades of meaning, Comus has apparently used his “Charming Rod” (stage directions between lines 92 and 93), combined with “backward mutters of disserving power” (817), to petrify the Lady with a “clasping charm” or “numming spell” (853). The usually stoic Attendant Spirit, standing before “the Lady that sits here / In stony fetters fixt, and motionless” (818-819), berates the brothers, saying, “ye should have snatched his wand” (815). So much, then, for the invulnerable chastity theory.
Suddenly, all has changed. This should not be happening. “The arms of Chastity” have failed. Purity alone will not cure her. Suddenly, the Lady is no longer facing an impotent trial but, in the words of the Attendant Spirit, is in “hard besetting need” (857).
“The unpolluted temple of the mind” offers no solution. To solve this problem, the Attendant Spirit summons Sabrina, a virginal demi-goddess introduced at this late point. The Attendant Spirit’s rhetoric of invincible Chastity has faded to humbly “implor[ing]” (903) aid for “[this] true Virgin here distrest, / Through ... force, and through ... wile” (905-906) -- all the things from which “the arms of Chastity” were supposed to protect her. The rhetorical defeat could hardly be more utter.
In performing the pagan baptism that cures the Lady, Sabrina’s “insnared chastity” (909) recapitulates the terms of the rhetorical defeat. The Attendant Spirit, once cocky, now sounds more like the scared younger brother: “Let us fly this cursed place, / Lest the Sorcerer us intice / With som other new device” (939-941). The Attendant Spirit concludes the action by promising that their return will be greeted by “mirth and chere” (955), concluding ominously: “the Stars grow high, / But night sits monarch yet in the mid sky” (956-957).
While this might seem guardedly celebratory, the very words and notions evoked are those of Comus’s world. The Lady refers to “the tumult of loud [discordant] Mirth” (202), tying it to the misrule Comus represents, and Comus himself speaks of casual promiscuity as “merry wakes and pastimes” (121). Most crucially, however, Comus dwells in “shades” (521). Against “the Sun-clad power of Chastity” (782) is counterposed Comus’s “Nocturnal sport” (128). He praises night’s “better sweets” (123) and claims “Tis onely day-light that makes Sin” (126) -- that morality only applies to daylight, whereas night is a time of natural sensual carnality. Even earlier, the Lady, having lost her way in her first speech, addresses “O theevish Night” who, “for som fellonious end” prevents guidance to “the misled and lonely Travailer” (199-200). The older brother’s lines that are most reminiscent of the paradise within explicitly connect that enlightened state of those with “light within” (381) to “bright day” (382). Taken in this context, the newly demoralized and frightened Attendant Spirit closes the action with a statement that the licentiousness symbolized by night in the masque acts as monarch, as powerful ruler, even over starry Chastity.
This can only be read as a profound defeat: the angelic Attendant Spirit rushing in fear from the forest, his last words there admitting dejectedly that Comus and all he represents rules like a monarch. “The arms of Chastity” have indeed been tested, and they have failed miserably. What seemed so promising, so certain, turns out to be a Spruce Goose. Good has won, but its philosophy has not; the chaste have won, but “the arms of Chastity” have suffered a resounding rout.
This has resonance with Sabrina’s family history. A “Virgin pure” in life (as previously stated), a “guiltless damsell” (829), she was “Commended [or murdered in] her fair innocence to the flood [of the river]” (831). Her body was recovered by “water Nymphs” (833) who brought her to their lord “Nereus Hall” (835). Nereus “reviv’d” (840) her, transforming her into the “immortal ... / ... Goddess of the River” (841-842). Milton stresses her chastity by having the Attendant Spirit emphasize that “still she retains / Her maid’n gentlenes” (842-843). This fairly confusing origin for this quickly introduced character diverges from the origin for Sabrina or Severn, goddess of the river Severn, given in Geoffrey on Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae (Flannagan 160). These changes and the emphasis upon Sabrina’s chastity and unjust treatment dovetail nicely with, as Flannagan recounts,
[a] locally well-known and protracted case ... in which the Earl [of Bridgewater, for whom the Ludlow Castle Mask was ostensibly written to honor,] had been immersed just prior to the time Comus was produced ... . The illiterate and defenseless Margery Evans, [a fourteen-year-old serving girl,] ... was raped in the Severn Valley, by a gentleman with some local power. Instead of capitulating to her rapist and his servant, she raised hue and cry after them, and was herself unjustly imprisoned. With the help of an aunt who could write, she eventually appealed to the King and his representative, the Earl of Brdgewater. The Earl’s careful unraveling of the case demonstrates ... intelligence, patience, ... and a remarkable sympathy with the downtrodden and oppressed. (111).2
To draw the specific connection Flannagan (who only connects the case to the masques more general them of chastity imperiled) does not, the character of Severn, with her history and emphasis upon chastity, makes a clear reference to the girl who unjustly had her chastity taken from her in the Severn Valley, who faced violent repercussions for doing so, and who the Earl celebrated by the masque had defended.3
This connection has several implications. First, it helps to explain the otherwise admittedly bizarre origin of Sabrina. Secondly, it suggests that the Earl of Bridgewater, and the masque’s original audience in general, knew better -- perhaps even painfully so -- than to believe that “the arms of chastity” were sufficient to defend an attack upon it. As did Milton and his masque.
In fact, the whole trial that the masque stages is rigged. The real dichotomy, I shall argue, is not the simplistic one between Comus and Chastity, nor between “the arms of Chastity” and worry over the very real possibility of violence committed upon the good or even purely good; rather, the real dichotomy is between material chastity and heavenly chastity, or chastity of the mind. Indeed, the play makes numerous disparaging references to the physical world. Not only are Comus’s appeals sensual and not religious, offering only the semblance of philosophy and not philosophy itself, but Comus refers to humans as “mortal mixture[s] of Earths mould” (244). In a hauntingly explicit version of an old trope, the older brother speaks of a hypothetical ghost,
Lingering, and sitting by a new made grave
As loath to leave the body that it lov’d,
And link’t it self by carnal sensuality
To a degenerate and degraded state. (472-475)
Perhaps most powerfully in this vein, the Lady shockingly refers to her body as “this corporal rinde” (664) -- a statement all the more powerful for the attested beauty of its speaker. Attitudes towards the Earth, ultimately derived from longstanding conflicting exegetical readings of the responsibility or lack thereof entailed in God’s granting Earth to man, are evoked throughout Comus’s attempt to seduce through citation of natural abundance as a segue into a carpe diem argument (706-755). While similarly evoking “the brute Earth” (797), the Lady claims that it would “be mov’d to sympathize” (796) by the weight of her inspired argument and would “lend her nervous and shake” (797). This passage, in particular, demonstrates the meta-trial occurring in the masque. Just as the difference between physical chastity and chastity of the mind is elided, the two used interchangeably throughout the text, the Lady both derides the Earth and expects its sympathetic (in both senses) aid. The Earth may become physically corrupt upon the Fall in Paradise Lost, but such was a special case: those days are gone (which is, after all, part of the point). The whole argument in favor of “the arms of Chastity” makes a similar false presumption: that the material world -- or souls within it, their experience filtered through it -- responds to the good. And, as the case of “illiterate and defenseless Margery Evans” demonstrates, such is not always the case.4
I do not mean to suggest that this meta-trial was intended by Milton as somehow the real or secret narrative of the masque. In fact, I suspect Milton only had glimmers of such implications, evoking the paradise within without fully elaborating upon it. As the Attendant Spirit’s reference to “this Ile / The greatest, and best of all the main” (27-28) in his opening speech should remind us, Milton still believed in England as not only preferred by God but as the site of a latter-day Christian utopian polity. Milton’s life and works, at least until after the Restoration, demonstrate belief in active engagement with the material world, and Milton would likely have been more inclined to see this meta-trial, and its demonstrable discrepancy between the physical world and the good, more as an invocation to make the material world respond to spiritual goodness, much as the Earl of Bridgewater made a better world in aiding Margery Evans. The evocations here of the paradise within are not, therefore, offered as an alternative to the material world or “the Ile,” but more likely as a call to bridge the dichotomy between the spiritual and the material, to pull Heaven that much closer to Earth -- perhaps even (as I dare to put it) one illiterate and defenseless girl at a time.
This leads nicely into three brief points on the social implications of the Ludlow Castle Mask. Repelling Comus’s rhetoric about nature’s abundance for the taking and in need of trimming, the Lady speculates along leveler lines upon a different method of such trimming:
If every man that now pines with want
Had but a moderate and beseeming share
Of that which lewdly pamper’d Luxury
Now heaps upon som few with vast excess,
Natures full blessings would be well dispenc’t
In unsuperfluous eeven proportion. (768-773)
Proportion had a deep resonance at the time, suggesting musical and quasi-spiritual mathematical harmony along Platonic, if not Pythagorean, lines. There can be little doubt as to the radical political nature of these lines, which are not as much advocating as speculating on the distribution of wealth to all people (or at least all Englishmen). And while the Earl of Bridgewater had been thought to have Puritan leanings and certainly opposed Archbishop Laud (Flannagan 111), and his aid of Margery Evans may well demonstrate “remarkable sympathy with the downtrodden and oppressed,” his endorsement of such a leveling policy remains in doubt; he was, after all, an Earl. I do not consider Milton a leveller, though he knew levellers and may have had sympathies, and these six lines cannot be responsibly argued to represent more than a speculation of exactly how one might bring Heaven closer to Earth.
Second, the Lady does make a brief statement that must be read as anti-quietist. Bewailing that she even has so much as “unlockt my lips” (756) to defend against his “false rules prancky in reasons garb” (758), the Lady explains: “I hate when vice can bolt her arguments / And vertue has no tongue to check her pride” (760-761). Milton may not have known how to bring Heaven closer to Earth, but he certainly knew that one had to denounce evil and dangerously manipulative rhetoric when one encountered it, and this is a point upon which the Earl of Bridgewater may well have agreed.
Third, this social action is communal and familiar. The Lady is not rescued by her own good graces, but by her two brothers and their spiritual attendant, as well as the “sympathetic” fellow victim Sabrina. Such a theme of the role of community in aiding the good on this earth not only appealed to Milton’s Puritan leanings but was apt for the occasion of the Earl and his family’s arrival, after a procession, in Ludlow to be installed as Lord President of Wales.
In his Ludlow Castle Mask, then, Milton stages a trial for “the arms of Chastity.” It fails, profoundly. Chastity, or virtue in general, is not abandoned, of course, and the Attendant Spirit’s final lines, advocating climbing a spiritual ladder after flattering the Earl himself, seem to retreat from the philosophical point made about “the arms of Chastity.”5 It is as if the Attendant Spirit, running scared just the scene before, feels safe in Ludlow Castle -- a point that advances Milton’s patronage if not the philosophical narrative, defined by trial or test of an idea, and the half-realized meta-narrative, using the counter-dichotomy of Heaven and Earth more as an invocation to social action, depicted as communal and including, perhaps, concern for all people as well as speaking out. Ultimately, however, while Milton almost irresistibly weaves these complex overlaying themes and implications into his masque, it remains an occasional work first and foremost, subordinating its notable philosophy to entertainment and celebration.6
NOTES
This essay was first made available at persiancaesar.com on 3 February 2003.
1 All citations come from The Riverside Milton, ed. Roy Flannagan.
[BACK]
2 See Leah Marcus, who argues that the masque praises the Earl’s protection of this girl.
[BACK]
3 Most critics have ignored the business with Margery Evans for what is known as the Castlehaven Scandal. In 1631, the brother-in-law of the Earl of Bridgewater’s wife, the Earl of Castlehaven, was tried and convicted, then beheaded for rape and sodomy. Castlehaven had a homosexual relationship with his servant and had also watched while this servant raped his wife, Anne Stanley. Castlehaven had also forced, while he watched, the same servant to rape the twelve-year-old wife of his son James -- a son who Castlehaven apparently intended to disinherit in favor of the willing servant. To make matters more complex, James and his young wife, Elizabeth, were also stepsiblings -- he a son from a previous marriage and she a daughter of Anne Stanley from a previous marriage. The ironically named Barbara Breasted is credited with bringing these events to light in relation to Comus. More recently, some, most prominently John Creaser, have disputed such relations (so to write).
[BACK]
4 Critics have had to wrestle with whether the Lady passes the test to her virtue or not. Robert Adams stresses that “it is only after she has given a convincing demonstration of her own moral self-sufficiency that the Lady receives, even indirectly, the help of heaven” (84). Yet this misses the point: moral self-sufficiency is only the superficial point -- that it can be overcome, in spite of the confident rhetoric of so much of the masque, is.
[BACK]
5 This retreat may well have been facilitated by, according to Demaray (120), a pause of hours’ span for elaborate social dancing, the Attendant Spirit delivering the final speech only upon the dance’s conclusion. William B. Hunter, Jr. (47-48) has even suggested that a change of venue may have gone alone with this shift to dancing. Such evidence, however tentative, further argues for a punctuation between the character’s defeated withdrawal from the forest and the final, laudatory speech.
[BACK]
6 This is even suggested in the occasional title. Referring to the masque Comus, then, represents an attempt to remove the masque from its rhetorical occasion.
[BACK]
BIBLIOGRAPHY
- Adams, Robert M. “Reading Comus.” A Maske at Ludlow: Essays on Milton’s Comus. Ed. John S. Diekhoff. Cleveland: Case Western Reserve University Press, 1968.
- Breasted, Barbara. “Comus and the Castlehaven Scandal.” Milton Studies 3 (1971). Pages 201-204.
- Creaser, John. “Milton’s Comus: The Irrelevance of the Castlehaven Scandal.” Milton Quarterly 21.4 (1987). Pages 24-34.
- Demaray, John. Milton and the Masque Tradition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968.
- Hunter, William B., Jr. Milton’s Comus: Family Piece. Troy, New York: Whitson, 1983.
- Parker, William Riley. Milton: A Biography. Oxford: Clarendon, 1968. Rev. ed., Gordon Campbell, ed. Oxford: Clarendon, 1997.
- Flannagan, Roy, ed. The Riverside Milton. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1998.
- Marcus, Leah Sinanoglou. “Justice for Margery Evans: A ‘Local’ Reading of Comus.” Milton and the Idea of Woman. Ed. Julian M. Walker. Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1988. Pages 66-85.
|
