1. Introduction

Until fairly recently, literary critics have worked within a historical paradigm that claimed that childhood wasn't discovered until relatively late in the seventeenth century.Footnote ¹ Perhaps this is why childhood has not been much discussed in the writing of John Milton (1608–74), including his Mask Presented at Ludlow Castle, commonly called Comus, which is explicitly about three children who get lost in the woods on their way to their father's house. But it is worth examining the Mask's dramatic confrontation specifically in terms of childhood and youth, because here, as much as in its formal and religious radicalism, the work generates its dramatic interest and points most profitably toward Milton's later career.Footnote ² Perhaps even more importantly, approaching the Mask in this way both demonstrates the bedeviled status of childhood in early modern English culture and shows why this status became a focal point for discussions of agency and authority. As the literary, legal, and educational discourses all made clear, childhood presented a dilemma with very adult implications, especially in the liminal period of youth: how could the young shed their ignorance without shedding their innocence? Milton engages this question in the Mask by implying, rather surprisingly, that youth's peculiar poetic receptivity — the ability to enter a charming, if dangerous, world without being corrupted by it — offers a potential route to a powerful kind of adult voice.

The claim that the Mask's true radicalism derives from its treatment of childhood requires explanation, because scholars have become accustomed to the idea that Milton's big innovation in the work is writing a reformed, or chastened, Puritan masque.Footnote ³ There is obviously some truth to this idea. Most masques lack a real sense of trial or dramatic engagement, at least if we consider productions like Jonson's Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue or Inigo Jones's Carolinian extravaganzas to be norms of the genre. They are vehicles for flattery that present threats in the form of antimasques, which are then dispelled by the mere glance of a king or queen representing ideal, Neoplatonic virtues.Footnote ⁴ By contrast, in Milton's Mask the evil figure Comus promptly captures the virtuous aristocratic protagonist and binds her to a chair with troubling “gumms of glutenous heat,” where she remains, stuck, after her brothers botch the rescue operation.Footnote ⁵ Far from embodying powerful Neoplatonic virtues, they finally need divine assistance to set her free. By the end, they've been through a genuine trial, “hard assays” as the Attendant Spirit puts it, and Milton has replaced what Victoria Kahn calls the “Neoplatonic rhetoric” of earlier masques with a kind of Protestant balancing act between works and grace.Footnote ⁶

It is a mistake, however, to read too much specifically theological radicalism into this formal revision, as we can see by turning to the Gospel reading for Michaelmas, the day the Mask was first performed.Footnote ⁷ The Gospel for the day was Matthew 18:1–10, in which Christ instructs his disciples to “become as little children” to “enter into the kingdom of heaven,” warning that “whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.”Footnote ⁸ It may be going too far to argue that Milton's masque was specifically inspired by this liturgical moment, but the Gospel is clearly relevant to the Mask's action, where children take the leading roles and where they are indeed offended grievously. Accordingly, we might get a good idea of the Mask's religious and political orthodoxy by seeing how it relates to conventional explications of this scripture.

The gold standard for such a reading is John Boys (1571–1625), the Dean of Canterbury from 1619 until his death in 1625, whose systematic eleven-volume exploration of the church's lectionary was popular enough to require twelve reissues between 1610 and 1616. With William Laud (1573–1645) in the ascendant throughout the early 1630s, Boys's ardent Calvinistic predestinarianism may have looked a bit less orthodox by the time Milton wrote A Masque in 1634, but it was anything but radical. It is, in short, quite close to middle-of-the-road theological thinking in the schismatic world of seventeenth-century England.

In his explication of the Gospel for Michaelmas, Boys deals with the injunction to “become as little children” by first listing all the ways in which we should not be like children, rehashing much of the conception of childhood familiar from classical and scholastic sources like Bartholomaeus Anglicus (ca. 1203–72). Children, for example, are known for “eating dirt and paddling in the mire.”Footnote ⁹ Because children are “ignorant,” “inconstant,” and controlled by an appetite for play and pleasure, the “child plaies with the light of the candle till his fingers be burnt” and “doth esteem an apple more then his fathers inheritance.”Footnote ¹⁰ Finally, after listing all the dangers of being like children, Boys gets around to what Christ meant when he told his disciples to emulate them: purity and humility. Children are “chast in body, pure in mind” and “they stand not reasoning what manner of thing it is that their father commands, but instantly they follow his will and word as their rule to work by.”Footnote ¹¹ Boys emphasizes the desirability of passivity and obedience for several more pages, driving home the conservative message that if men heeded Christ's injunction there would be fewer “state-criticks” who “speake ill of such as are in authority.”Footnote ¹² For Boys, as for the Neoplatonists and conservative churchmen described by Leah Marcus, the child is “a rich and complex symbol, not only for humility and anti-intellectualism, but for a whole range of values associated with an England of the past and rapidly disappearing.”Footnote ¹³ It is a viewpoint Marcus finds sharply different than that of “forward-looking” radical Protestants and “Puritanism.”Footnote ¹⁴

Despite its conservative political application, however, Boys's theology doesn't necessarily preclude human action. His final word on the relationship between childlike passivity and grace could be a gloss on the action of Comus itself: “the good which a man doth, is both the work of God, and the work of man; of God in being author in giving grace, of man in being actor in using grace.”Footnote ¹⁵ This is essentially the interaction between “hard assays” and grace that we see in Milton's masque. For example, when Barbara K. Lewalski calls the work “in every respect a reformed masque, a generic tour de force,” she is describing both her claim that Milton's masque dispenses with elaborate stage machinery — which may have been impractical for a private entertainment anyway — and that its principle character is “unable to attain salvation by her own merits” and so must receive help from Sabrina, the “agent for the divine grace necessary to counter these effects.”Footnote ¹⁶ Since Reference WoodhouseA. S. P. Woodhouse declared in 1942 that the “argument” of the Mask was the manifestation of this doctrine of grace, represented by Sabrina, over and against nature, critics have debated which characters represent grace and how specifically it acts in the world.Footnote ¹⁷ But in no case have they concluded that grace in Milton's Mask acts in a fundamentally different way than Boys described its action in the world.

In other words, the way Comus allegorizes a doctrine of works and grace may be an interesting departure from typical masques, but it is not necessarily radical or uniquely Miltonic.Footnote ¹⁸ What is more radical and Miltonic, in both the poetic and political sense, is the way the work embraces Boys's notions of grace and works while rejecting his orthodox quietism. And to see how Milton succeeds at this we need to turn not to the Mask's theology but to its children, who negotiate in dialogue and song Milton's longstanding anxiety about how unripe youth actualizes adult will and prophetic voice. Rather than falling easily into either the camp of backward-looking pro-childishness or forward-looking anti-childishness that Marcus describes, Milton's Mask explores the uneasy transition from childhood to adult responsibility as the locus of tremendous creative and spiritual power.

2. The Children of Comus

Although the Mask's protagonist is called “the Lady” (Milton's own nickname at Cambridge), she is introduced less grandly as one of three children lost in the woods. The roles were originally written for and performed by Alice Egerton and her brothers, a girl of fifteen and two boys of decidedly “youthful bloom” at ages eleven and nine.Footnote ¹⁹ As Roy Flannagan explains, “though young by modern standards, Lady Alice was at fifteen a marriageable adult.”Footnote ²⁰ But this is not quite accurate. Though she was of marriageable age, she was less than a full adult in the eyes of the law and society, and marriageable only with her father's permission. According to the sixteenth-century statute in place at the time, it was illegal for any person to carry away or “by secret Letters, Messages, or otherwise [to] contract Matrimony” with a girl under age sixteen without the knowledge of her father or guardian.Footnote ²¹ Doing so would not only incur a five-year jail sentence for the seducer (if he were over age fourteen), but would also provoke a sort of legal death for the girl, who would instantly lose her inheritance: “If any Woman Child or Maiden, being above the age of twelve Years, and under the age of sixteen Years, do at any time consent or agree to such Person … then the next of Kin of the same Woman Child or Maid, to whom the inheritance should descend, return or come, after the Decease of the same Woman Child and Maid, shall from the time of such Assent and Agreement have, hold, and enjoy all such Lands, Tenements, and Hereditaments.”Footnote ²²

As William Blackstone (1723–80) later claimed, this appears to have been a preventative measure, since it was held that “stolen marriages, under the age of sixteen, were usually upon mercenary views,” but it also reflects the ambiguous legal status of the woman child who, between the ages of twelve and sixteen, was just old enough to dispossess herself but not old enough to bestow herself.Footnote ²³ Before twelve, after all, her consent would simply not be considered a possibility: the marriage would be void and the seducer would be imprisoned, his act equivalent in the law's eyes to abduction by force. It is the woman child's peculiar ability to exercise a will that is not quite her own that causes the problem and implicates her in the crime.

Likewise, at fifteen a woman child's own “defilement might be by her consent,” as the judge and legal writer Matthew Hale (1609–76) puts it, so that a rape charge was not automatic in the event of an allegation of sexual attack.Footnote ²⁴ Indeed, such allegations were regularly scrutinized for signs of the woman child's willing transgression. In contrast, before the age of ten or twelve consent or nonconsent was irrelevant, and a felony rape conviction would automatically be triggered by evidence of sexual relations. (According to Hale, the years between ten and twelve were ambiguous, since an Elizabethan statute evidently gave female children the ability to consent to sex at age eleven, one year before the common law recognized such an ability.)Footnote ²⁵ Strikingly, such legal ambiguity was not limited to the woman child, but was shared by her male counterparts between the ages of four and (at least) twenty-one — a peculiarly low age for adult status according to English legal scholars, who regularly claimed the civil law placed that status at twenty-five or thirty.Footnote ²⁶

For example, according to the authoritative account of the common law written by John Perkins (d. 1545), “an infant of the age of four may make a will, and it shall be good.”Footnote ²⁷ But for the prominent legal theorist Sir Edward Coke (1542–1634) the age an infant had a will, and so could make one, was eighteen years.Footnote ²⁸ It was all rather vague, as Coke notes, since “the full age of male and female according to Common Speech is said the Age of 21 years. And the Age of Discretion is called the age of 14 years.”Footnote ²⁹ On any given issue and in any given case involving an infant under the age of twenty-one, the ability to choose could apparently outstrip the ability to make choices fully motivated and rational.

William Perkins's Christian Oeconomy shows that if the Common Law delayed for a long while the expectations of full adult will, “the court of conscience,” like Continental civil law, could delay that expectation even further.Footnote ³⁰ Perkins, often labeled a moderate Puritan but perhaps better understood as one of the period's bestselling theological authors and voices for a unified church, never allows that marriages made “without the free and advised consent of Parents” are more than “mere nullities.”Footnote ³¹ In short, no amount of achievement or do-gooding could absolutely rid a young man or woman of the status of infancy before at least the age of twenty-one, and even longer in cases where the will of a child or apprentice came into conflict with that of a parent or a master.

An evil act, however, could do the job instantly. The doctrine here was “malitia supplet aetatem,” malice supplies the age, a principle first cited in English common law in 1338.Footnote ³² Specifically, the dictum emerged as the solution to one of the first tests of legal responsibility in English law, the knowledge-of-good-and-evil test that crossed over into the common law from theological treatments of Genesis.Footnote ³³ “An infant of ten years of age killed his companion and concealed him,” according to the year book's account of the trial, “and [the judge] caused him to be hung, because by concealment he showed that he knew how to distinguish between good and evil. And so malice supplies the age.”Footnote ³⁴ Thus wrongdoing — specifically the attempt, like Adam, to conceal the crime — could thus supersede conventions and uncertainties about when childhood ended. In this sense, mankind's Fall gets reiterated with each generation, and it is precisely this Fall that enters one into full adult society. Power, will, and the ability to take an oath and speak words that bound came much more certainly from involvement with sin than from an extended spring of innocence. To be innocent was of course preferable to being guilty, but it was also, as the OED has it since the sixteenth century, to be “deficient in intelligence or sense,” to lack the ability to speak or act with purpose.Footnote ³⁵ A woman child, like her male counterpart, found herself in a kind of double bind: while being innocent was a kind of absence, discovering agency and will often meant revealing another kind of deficiency, an inheritance of sin. Even with the good and evil test, the question of when adult responsibility began was thorny, a place where rules about absolute justice and responsibility seem not to apply.

This was the uncomfortable status of the child's agency in the overlapping legal and theological discourses of early modern England, and it is the challenge facing the three lost siblings in Milton's Mask. They are initially identified, not by their own will or actions, but in relation to their father, a “noble Peer of mickle trust, and power.”Footnote ³⁶ The description of the education given to this peer's “fair offspring” emphasizes their youth and early development: they are “nurs't in Princely lore,” a phrase that both implies their early instruction in the courtly arts and recalls traditional injunctions to begin forming noble children by nursing them at their noble mother's breast, or at least avoiding the transmission of negative traits by debauched nursemaids.Footnote ³⁷ These are, in other words, babes in the wood, suddenly cut off from the tutelage that has directed their every move. And without this direction, explains the Attendant Spirit, who was played by their real-life tutor Henry Lawes (1596–1662), they are cast into an abyss:

• their way

• Lies through the perplex't paths of this drear Wood,

• The nodding horror of whose shady brows

• Threats the forlorn and wandring Passinger.Footnote ³⁸

This depiction of the woods has a particular occasional significance, as Stephen Orgel points out: the masque celebrated the ascension of John Egerton (1579–1649) to the position of Lord President of Wales, a representative of civilized rule at a time when the English generally considered Wales “wild and uncivilized.”Footnote ³⁹ But the “horror” of the place clearly transcends anything even the untamed Welsh countryside has to offer, and it is not, ultimately, the powerful peer who confronts this horror, but his children: despite all the attention critics have given to the relationship between the Mask and Egerton's sociopolitical position, the threat of these perplexed paths is not to law or order, but to “their tender age.”Footnote ⁴⁰

J. C. Maxwell suggests that the description of the wood and its hopelessly tangled paths echoes Aeneid 9.391–92, and I would add that the allusion to youth in peril is more significant than the verbal similarity.Footnote ⁴¹ Virgil's lines also describe an unbearded youth, Euryalus, who strays into the woods and is abducted in his bloom.Footnote ⁴² But Virgil's youth, unlike Milton's, does not survive the foray along his “perplexed path” into the “deceptive woods.”Footnote ⁴³ And this highlights that Milton's three lost children ultimately face a different kind of threat than Virgil's, risking not their lives, but their humanity itself, in the forest, where they encounter the scion of Circe and Bacchus, who “Excells his Mother at her mighty Art.”Footnote ⁴⁴ If any weary traveler drinks Comus's potion “their human count'nance, / Th' express resemblance of the gods, is chang'd / Into som brutish form of Woolf, or Bear, / Or Ounce, or Tiger, Hog, or bearded Goat.”Footnote ⁴⁵ The change is so perfect, in fact, so pleasurable, that the victims who while away their lives in Comus's “sensual stie” never realize that they have forgotten their homes, their families, and the spark of divinity that made them human.Footnote ⁴⁶

3. Childhood and Circean Transformations

This is rather bad luck for the children of Milton's Mask, because youth's vulnerability to such enchantments was a long-established fact. Joseph Glanvill (1636–80) of the Royal Society even attempted a scientific explanation for why “Witches are most powerful upon Children and timerous Persons, viz. because their Spirits and Imaginations being weak and passive, are not able to resist the fatal Influence.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Comus's “orient liquor in a Crystal Glasse, / To quench the drouth of Phoebus” also allures on aesthetic, physical, and emotional levels in a way that is particularly dangerous to youth.Footnote ⁴⁸ The “intemperate thirst” it quenches may be “fond,” but it was also thought to be a defining trait of every child, as John Boys highlights when he notes that a child governed by such natural appetites would trade an inheritance for an apple.Footnote ⁴⁹ The child responded naturally to such stimulus, which is why educators from Vives to Comenius proposed that learning should progress from the sensible to the intellectual, an argument Milton took up himself in Of Education: “because our understanding cannot in this body found it selfe but on sensible things, nor arrive so cleerly to the knowledge of God and things invisible, as by orderly conning over the visible and inferior creature, the same method is necessarily to be follow'd in all discreet teaching.”Footnote ⁵⁰

Comus offers liquor, not learning, but through his mother Circe he has a well-established ancestry in the humanistic pedagogical discourse. In De pueris, for example, Desiderius Erasmus (1466/69–1536) describes abusive, incompetent schoolmasters as Circe figures capable of turning children into beasts. He argues that Circe's ability to encase “human souls within bestial bodies” is not merely a fiction, since even Augustine believed that men could be transformed into werewolves.Footnote ⁵¹ He then turns the tables on parents who allow schoolmasters to instill “beastly” qualities like anger and drunkenness in their children: “If there was a Thessalian witch who had the power and desire to transform your son into a swine or a wolf,” he then asks, “would you think that any punishment could be too severe for her?”Footnote ⁵² Beating and harsh treatment, Erasmus argues repeatedly, are treatments fit for beasts and can only produce beastly behavior.

For Erasmus and for many of his English followers, the imaginative world of literature was the obvious antidote to Circe figures who were distinctly uncharming. To engage the human meant engaging human emotions through the gentle discipline of passionate play, to bring children up in a “louing and gentle manner,” as the Puritan schoolmaster John Brinsley (1581–1624) put it, “as it were in playing.”Footnote ⁵³ The key was to find something that had a powerful effect on the child's imagination, and it was this effort that made poetry and drama so central to the humanist program. These literary forms had been associated with childishness at least since Aristotle claimed that “the beginnings of poetry in general” could be traced to the child's “instinctive” imitation.Footnote ⁵⁴ As Michael Witmore argues, such notions underpin the view of the child in Renaissance England as a figure of pure mimesis with “a prodigious capacity for deep absorption in imagined worlds.”Footnote ⁵⁵

But there was a flipside to the child's poetic receptivity, and this too had a long heritage. Plato's concerns about poetry, after all, center on the notion that “imitations, if they are practiced continually from youth onwards, become established as habits and nature,” and that this makes the poet, an “imitator of phantoms,” particularly dangerous to the young.Footnote ⁵⁶ This vulnerability created a problem for humanist educators: play and pleasure were needed to engage the child, but this always had the potential to develop into what headmaster Richard Mulcaster (1532–1611) described as an uncontrollable “poeticall furie,” or worse.Footnote ⁵⁷

Accordingly, even as they promoted literary engagement, humanist educators like Roger Ascham (1514/15–68) made it clear that Circean transformation derives from the mimetic nature of childhood itself, and that simply removing the threat of beating won't remove the threat of bestial devolution. The school must be the house of “playe and pleasure,” Ascham agrees, but pleasure without learning is dangerous: “[If the child] glutte himself with vainity, or walter in filthiness like a Swyne, al learnyng, all goodnes, is sone forgotten: than, quicklie shall he becum a dull Asse, to understand either learnyng or honestie: and yet shall he be as sutle as a Foxe, in breedyng of mischief, in bringyng in misorder …. [P]ride in them selves, contempt of others, [is] the very badge of all those that serve in Circes Court.”Footnote ⁵⁸ As he confronts the tendency of children to roll in a sensual sty, Ascham shifts dramatically away from the depiction of learning as sweet and pleasurable to emphasize that learning, like the Circean antidote moly, is difficult to swallow: “The true medicine against the inchantmentes of Circes, the vanitie of licencious pleasure, the inticementes of all sinne, is, in Homere, the herbe Moly, with the blacke roote, and white flooer, sower at the first, but sweete in the end: which Hesiodus termeth the study of virtue.”Footnote ⁵⁹ On the one hand, the child must be nurtured and engaged; on the other, it must be controlled to avoid its turning into something monstrous. As Erica Fudge explains, the line between human and beast was not a firm one during the early modern period, and not only Ascham but also luminaries as diverse as Comenius, Vives, and Mulcaster agreed that the human was not just born, but had to be made.Footnote ⁶⁰

Milton shows how complicated this construction could be in Elegia prima, which in this regard is an important precursor of the Mask. In the elegy — a verse letter to Charles Diodati — he embraces the delights of theatrical play to distinguish his tender sensibilities from those of his “unfeeling” Cambridge tutor.Footnote ⁶¹ This passage has been the center of much debate over whether Milton had actually come into conflict with his tutor — whether he had been disciplined, or even whipped and rusticated — but he could just as well be reenacting one of the many Erasmian anecdotes in which the tender student recoils from the “threats” of a harsh pedagogue and discovers true learning in the embrace of literature and drama, which “ravish [him] completely.”Footnote ⁶²

All seems well; this is precisely the result that Erasmus recommended. At its very end, however, the elegy takes a puzzling turn. Circe enters the poem in the final six lines, in a version of the metaphor more akin to Ascham's than Erasmus's, and the youth renounces his apparently ideal education as he resolves to return to the “barren fields” of Cambridge: “But I, while the blind boy's indulgence allows it, am preparing to quickly flee these fortunate city walls, to escape the infamous halls of deceptive Circe, with the aid of divine moly.”Footnote ⁶³ The lines imply that Milton has been enjoying his education a little too much and transforming, perhaps without fully realizing it, into something less than human. The youth's very positive sensitivity — whether to the beauty that strikes him “senseless,” the books that master him, or the drama that moves him to tears — also puts him at some undefined risk.Footnote ⁶⁴ It will take divine aid to escape: that of the plant moly, which will reappear in Milton's Mask. But what kind of escape is this? The deceptive halls of Circe, Milton's own wanderings through a labyrinthine program of independent study, will merely be replaced by the halls of Cambridge, which Milton derides in the third prolusion for being dominated by other deceptions, such as the scholastics' “useless and barren controversies,” a “workshop of tricks and fallacies.”Footnote ⁶⁵

The Circean temptations may have threatened the youth's humanity, but they also put him in touch with divinity in a way that the barren university curriculum did not. In other words, it is precisely his wandering through the Circean halls of poesy that makes him eligible for divine moly, that allows him to know it even exists, even if the herb's rather unsatisfactory effect in Elegia prima is to transport him from danger to dullness.Footnote ⁶⁶ In the Mask, Milton ultimately embraces the conclusion he could not quite reach in Elegia Prima: escape is not a salvation from this wandering, but a result of it. In fact, by the time he wrote his Apology Against a Pamphlet eight years later, Milton had embraced this idea as part of his own poetic trajectory, describing how his “younger feet wander'd” into realms of erotic and romantic poetry, but “that even those books which to many others have bin the fuell of wantonnesse and loose living, I cannot thinke how unless by divine indulgence prov'd to me so many incitements … to the love and stedfast observation of that vertue which abhorres the society of Bordello's.”Footnote ⁶⁷ Likewise, for the children of Comus, the Circean allurement of the shadowy poetic world helps create the will and authenticate youth's Orphic voice.

4. Learning to Sing: Echo and Translation

Milton places the idea of Orphic song front and center in the Mask, using it in both familiar and surprising iterations. In the first scene, for example, the Attendant Spirit adopts the guise of a shepherd with the ability to “still the wilde winds when they roar, / And hush the waving Woods,” which J. Andrew Hubbell claims sets up a “typological relationship” between Orpheus and the Attendant Spirit.Footnote ⁶⁸ This may be so, but the association of Orpheus with various pastoral figures was also fairly conventional.Footnote ⁶⁹ More surprising and original, and ultimately more meaningful, is Milton's association of the mythic bard with the Lady: a lost child with no poetic vocation, but one who develops a powerful voice in the course of the masque.

Like most major figures in Milton's poetry, Orpheus has been much discussed.Footnote ⁷⁰ From early poems such as Il Penseroso and Lycidas to the later Paradise Lost, Milton invoked the “Thracian bard” as both an aspirational and a cautionary figure.Footnote ⁷¹ Orpheus controls the world and he is able to suspend even the torments of hell; he is, however, torn apart by the Thracian women, who are moved to fury by his decision to forsake women and devote himself to singing of young boys.Footnote ⁷² He is, then, not incidentally connected with youth, since these songs celebrating juvenescence are among Orpheus's primary poetic achievements in the Metamorphoses. Indeed, while Orpheus is not himself young in Ovid's work, Milton often writes about him as if he were, as in Lycidas, where the narrator parallels the death of this “inchanting son” with the premature demise of Edward King.Footnote ⁷³ In short, Orpheus is a figure for the power of the vatic voice and its charms, and for the risks incurred by the poet who lays claim to it, transforming the raw material of youth into world-shaking speech. In Milton's poetry and prose, this voice has a particularly rarefied function as the place where poetry and prophecy meet, where eloquence becomes the mark, not only of poetic achievement, but also of the inspired figure, such as Ezekiel, whose words could turn a desert full of bones into a vast army of breathing men.Footnote ⁷⁴

The Attendant Spirit makes the analogy between the Lady and Orpheus when she first wanders onto the stage, lost and alone, and sings a song that he says “might create a soul / Under the ribs of Death.”Footnote ⁷⁵ This ex nihilo creation, which changes Death himself into something vital, recalls Orpheus's triumph in Hades, where his beautiful song procures the release of his wife, Eurydice, by moving Pluto to tears. Likewise, even Comus agrees that the Lady's song exhibits something more than human power, and the would-be ravisher himself claims to experience “ravishment” at the sound.Footnote ⁷⁶ Indeed, her song is unlike anything else in the masque: on the most basic level, it is more structurally complex than other songs in the work, incorporating a greater number of verse forms, including the masque's only Alexandrine, “And give resounding grace to all Heav'ns Harmonies.”Footnote ⁷⁷ But while the song is the first and most overt association of the Lady's vocal power with Orpheus, it is not an isolated one. The trope runs throughout the Mask, and when Comus later holds the Lady captive it underpins her claim that her words defending chastity would have tangible effect:

• dumb things would be mov'd to sympathize,

• And the brute Earth would lend her nerves and shake,

• Till all thy magick structures rear'd so high

• Were shatter'd into heaps o're thy false head.Footnote ⁷⁸

Whether she actually has this power is a question for debate, and one we'll return to. Regardless, it is intriguing and surprising that she can claim this power and even convince others of her abilities, when her only experiences thus far are loss, darkness, and captivity. After all, while the Lady's chastity and innocence, as well as her humble reliance on grace, fit precisely into the dominant concept of childhood that underpins John Boys's Michaelmas commentary, her ability to speak with authority does not: one key way we should emulate children, according to Boys, is to “studie to be quiet.”Footnote ⁷⁹ If we are offended we “may complain to the Church our Mother,” who alone has the authority to speak for us and seek redress for our wrongs.Footnote ⁸⁰ Reserve was even more expected of the female child than of her male counterpart. While humanist prodigies like the Lady's brothers were expected to perfect the arts of eloquence, even the most enlightened educational handbooks for young women tended to view female literacy as a tool for cultivating decidedly quiet virtues.Footnote ⁸¹ The female child's goal was conversation rather than oratory, and while she might be an exemplary student of virtue, she was hardly expected to become its public advocate.Footnote ⁸²

The youth's superior receptivity to grace, then, is only one part of the story. The other part, the explanation of how the Lady develops her voice, must be found in her encounters with shadow and danger, and in youth's characteristic receptivity to the poetic forms that danger takes in this masque. The Lady's song is the first clear evidence that, as Comus puts it, “somthing holy lodges in that brest,” and it is worth regarding in some detail:

• Sweet Echo, sweetest Nymph that liv'st unseen

• Within thy airy shell

• By slow Meander's margent green,

• And in the violet-imbroider'd vale

• Where the love-lorn Nightingale

• Nightly to thee her sad Song mourneth well.

• Canst thou not tell me of a gentle Pair

• That likest thy Narcissus are?

• O if thou have

• Hid them in som flowry Cave,

• Tell me but where

• Sweet Queen of Parly, Daughter of the Sphear,

• So maist thou be translated to the skies,

• And give resounding grace to all Heav'ns Harmonies.Footnote ⁸³

The oddities of this song have often been noted. For example, the Lady's choice of mythological allusions does not immediately inspire confidence. As Shullenberger puts it, Echo is “cursed by the goddess [Juno], dispossessed of an originating, self-generating voice, wasted by a love she cannot express,” and ultimately dies, “withering into a voice of pure reflexivity.”Footnote ⁸⁴ The Lady also doesn't do her brothers any favors by associating them with Echo's love, Narcissus, who famously succumbs to his own “pure reflexivity,” pining away with an inexpressible love for his own image. If they are, cleverly, the beautiful images of one another, they are also both merely images, a pair of mirrors reflecting one another in a kind of infinite regress. For Milton's contemporary George Sandys (1578–1644) in his gloss on Ovid's version of the episode, this is the consummate image of “youth, that is, the soul of a rash and ignorant man, [who] beholds not his owne face, nor considers of his proper essence or virtue, but pursues his shadow in the fountaine.”Footnote ⁸⁵ If the imagery is forbidding, then, it may also be quite appropriate to the plight of three lost children attempting to exercise personal agency for the first time.

But this still doesn't explain how the Lady achieves the ravishing power of her haunting voice. A key to this question may lie in another oddity of the song that Orgel notes: the “baffling” lack of an answering echo.Footnote ⁸⁶ We might expect such an answer to the Lady's plaint, since it was typical of the familiar genre of seventeenth-century echo songs and poems. For example, a song in Jonson's masque Pan's Anniversary invokes Echo this way:

• Echo, the truest oracle on ground,

• Though nothing but a sound

• (Echo: Though nothing but a sound)

• Belov'd of Pan, the valleyes Queen

• (Echo: The valleyes Queen)

• And often heard, though never seene

• (Echo: Though never seene).Footnote ⁸⁷

Sometimes the echo even provided instruction, as in Herbert's poem “Heaven,” where Echo responds to the query “what is the supreme delight?” by answering “Light.”Footnote ⁸⁸ But neither Milton's text nor Lawes's setting of the song includes any echo — no comforting return of “resounding grace to all Heav'ns Harmonies,” or, as Lawes's manuscript has the line, “hold a Counterpointe to all heav'ns harmonies.”Footnote ⁸⁹ According to Orgel, the lack of an answering echo emphasizes “that the Lady has only herself to rely on,” that she is in fact surrounded by multiple versions of the self — in other words, solipsism.Footnote ⁹⁰ By the same token, Comus and the Attendant Spirit are versions of one another, Sabrina is a version of the Lady, and “freedom is the mirror image of bondage.”Footnote ⁹¹ There is something to this, though freedom is never quite as simple as a mirror image of anything in Milton. The intermixture of freedom and bondage, good and evil, is always more complex than the neat opposition and separation that a mirror image implies, since, as Milton later notes of sin and virtue in Areopagitica, “the matter of them both is the same.”Footnote ⁹²

And so, to the various mirrorings and echoes that Orgel and others have cited in the Lady's song and in the masque's mythic structures, we could add that her song is itself an echo of Comus's own auditory presence, but with a unique, productive power.Footnote ⁹³ It has often been noted that Comus, with his superior “command of metaphor and poetic language,” gives us some of the most evocative poetry in the masque.Footnote ⁹⁴ Even more than his mother, Comus locates himself in a world of poetry and allusion that is much like the shadowy realm of ideas that evidently enchanted the young Milton. His opening recitative, for example, builds to a wild dance as he shifts from stately, seductive imagery in iambic pentameter to a quickening, Puckish tetrameter, to the seven-syllable line (catalectic trochaic tetrameter) that reappears in every subsequent lyric in the Mask:

• The Sounds, and Seas with all their finny drove

• Now to the Moon in wavering Morrice move,

• And on the Tawny Sands and Shelves,

• Trip the pert Fairies and the dapper Elves;

• By dimpled Brook, and Fountain Brim,

• The Wood-Nymphs deckt with Daisies trim,

• Their merry wakes and pastimes keep:

• What hath night to do with sleep?Footnote ⁹⁵

Leah Marcus insightfully demonstrates that these “merry wakes and pastimes” have political implications as a critique of Caroline court culture.Footnote ⁹⁶ But to argue that the primary effect of lines like these is critique, or that the primary expected response of reader or audience is to place them on the “opposite pole” from virtue, as Stanley Fish does, is a bit perverse.Footnote ⁹⁷ Certainly Milton leaves little doubt that Comus and his crew are not nice: the passage later invokes the orgiastic fertility goddess Cotytto and the witch Hecate, and in the Trinity Manuscript Milton describes the following dance as a “wild rude & wanton antick.”Footnote ⁹⁸ But just as the antic is disorder shaped as a pleasing artistic effect, the images of the “finny drove,” and all nature, moving in harmony with the moon are also profoundly beautiful, a version of the animating power of chastity (through the allusion to Diana) that the Lady will later make her own.

The Lady's song is prompted directly by this poetry. She stumbles onto the stage by following the sound: “this way the noise was, if mine ear be true, / My best guide now, me thought it was the sound / Of Riot, and ill manag'd Merriment.”Footnote ⁹⁹ She says she would be “loath” to meet the insolent “Wassailers” who made the noise, but she still seeks it out.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Why? She says that she is pressed by necessity, looking for directions and nothing more. But this search exposes her to a world of fantasy, “calling shapes, and beckning shadows dire, / And airy tongues, that syllable mens names / On Sands, and Shoars, and desert Wildernesses,” and it is only when she has entered this realm of imagination that she claims to see Chastity “visibly” and begins to sing.Footnote ¹⁰¹ In the likely performance version, though not in the later printed texts, the Lady ends her song with the vision of Echo holding “a Counterpointe to all heav'ns harmonies.”Footnote ¹⁰² But her route to this heavenly image is through holding a counterpoint to Comus's harmonies.

As it developed in the Renaissance, the art of counterpoint typically involved two voices or melodies moving according to distinct rhythms yet forming a harmonic whole, and in both its imagistic and metrical echoes the Lady's song counterpoints Comus's recitative in this way.Footnote ¹⁰³ Her imagery — a sweet nymph, flowery caves and valleys, the brim of a languid stream — harmonizes with Comus's own vision of pert fairies, dimpled brooks, and flower-bedecked nymphs. She also echoes his use of tetrameter and the seven-syllable line, his ability, which has been unique in the masque until now, to use these shifting verse forms, through the medium of her voice, to create tangible effects.

But here she also goes beyond echo. For where the pace of Comus's verse quickens as he builds to a crescendo of orgiastic dance, hers spreads out and slows down, shifting in the final lines of her song into iambic pentameter and the Alexandrine — the work's longest line — that resounds with the harmonies of heaven. Comus notes the calming effect, “at every fall smoothing the Raven doune / Of darkness till it smil'd,” and says it is unlike anything he has ever heard.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ In this sense, the Lady's song reenacts something of the process of humanist education (at least Milton's version of it), which promised to unleash a powerful personal voice by using even materials of questionable morality to engage the child's passionate nature.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ This is related to the idea that what “purifies us is triall, and triall is by what is contrary,” Milton's famous pronouncement from Areopagitica that is often used to describe how this masque differs from others in the genre.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ But it is not quite the same thing as the outright clash between good and evil that this is sometimes made to imply, because while Comus is clearly the bad guy to be shunned, he is not just “what is contrary.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Something in the Lady responds to him. And just as she hopes to see the damned Echo “translated to the skies,” her song and words throughout the rest of the masque attempt to translate her response to Comus into something heavenly.

As Shullenberger suggests, in her song “the Lady begins to figure out who she is by reading her own situation in relation to classical stories,” and soon finds herself “at that threshold between the imaginary and symbolic orders where the imagination, if it anchors itself patiently in chastity, discovers its power to transfigure violence against the person into inviolable voice.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ But this kind of purposive reading does not just happen. It is enabled by the Lady's passionate response to something less purposive, to being lost in the realm of riot and shadowy dreams. As it calms the night and ravishes her would-be ravisher, her song is a precursor to her development of an independent Orphic voice that may never quite be inviolable. And it is also still enough of an echo to raise the question whether Comus is in fact ravished by his own version of narcissism. The immediate impression it leaves on him, after all, is “home-felt delight,” a Miltonic coinage that editors often gloss as “heartfelt” or “intimate,” with a possible allusion to the Egerton family's domestic virtues.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ More obviously, it seems to mean that the Lady's song resonates with something that was already in Comus's heart, where it hits home with surprising force. The only response the Lady receives to her echo song comes from Comus, who welcomes her with his own echo of Ferdinand's greeting of the “wonderful child” Miranda in The Tempest: “Hail forren wonder.”Footnote ¹¹⁰ As the intertexts mount, who echoes whom? Is it really possible to talk about resistance, will, or individual voice when the actual experience is shadows on top of shadows, echoes responding to echoes?

5. The Voice that Outstrips the Will

This kind of experience may be inevitable for a Lady who is still in the liminal childhood space between having and not having a voice and will of her own. The failure to recognize this is the largest problem with the numerous articles that relate the Mask to the legal case of the fourteen-year-old rape victim Margery Evans, which was carefully investigated by the Mask's sponsor John Egerton, or the rape of Alice Egerton's thirteen-year-old cousin, who was a victim in the sensational Castlehaven sex scandal.Footnote ¹¹¹ In both cases, a powerful man preyed upon a woman child, but gaps in the law made it difficult for her to claim justice.Footnote ¹¹² The legal system could readily accept that female children of this age consented to their own defilement, thus exonerating their attackers, but these cases show that the system often failed to recognize the child's will, and thus credit her resistance, when this would convict her assailant. There are uncanny similarities between these cases and Milton's Mask, which also depicts a woman child menaced by an imbruting force. But for this very reason, scholars connecting them tend to overlook the central experience of the Mask, which is neither about the Earl of Bridgewater's superior legal judgment nor even, really, about sex, so much as about three children's encounters with allurement and shadow and their attempts to exercise their will in the world.Footnote ¹¹³ What makes both the Lady's situation and these legal cases problematic from an interpretive point of view is the grey area surrounding consent and childhood, and the corresponding breakdown of any authoritative frames of reference that would make violation absolutely a crime or resistance absolutely a possibility. The cases, in other words, do not necessarily look like Milton's Mask because of influence, but because they lay bare a genuine intellectual problem of the era, one that Milton had experienced firsthand in his own path towards a poetic vocation.

After all, Lady Alice, who is delivered from Comus and handed to her father because no other fate is imaginable, is not the only one in A Mask with no legal will of her own: her brothers are in precisely the same position. And while their transition into married life would obviously take a different form from their sister's, their halting transition from dependency to adult agency would not necessarily differ from her experiences in the masque. Nor, for that matter, would the transition to adult agency differ tremendously for A Mask's twenty-five-year-old author, who was beyond the age of consent but still living in his father's house. Just two years earlier, in Sonnet 7, Milton described himself as surprised by time and startled by the disjunction between his external appearance and internal feelings of immaturity: “How soon hath Time the suttle theef of youth, / Stoln on his wing my three and twentieth yeer!”Footnote ¹¹⁴ The poem is a meditation on youth's paradoxes and ambiguities, as the poet protests his unreadiness in bouts of punning virtuosity that, like his appearance, “might deceive the truth.”Footnote ¹¹⁵ It is in this spirit that the young poet reinterprets the parable of the talents from Matthew 25:14–30 with a parable on his own talent: “Be it less, or more, or soon or slow, / It shall be still in strictest measure eev'n.”Footnote ¹¹⁶

Yet in Ad Patrem, which was written around the same time as A Mask, Milton was still uneasily attempting to justify his “youthful songs” to his father, taking the child's traditional role of supplication as he offered “due reverence” to the man who was funding his son's apparently interminable education.Footnote ¹¹⁷ During this extended educational wandering, the young poet claims to have been inspired by encounters with darkness and shadow that look strikingly like the Lady's, and he is eager to cultivate a voice with the “power to stir the profound depths of trembling Tartarus, to bind the gods of the underworld.”Footnote ¹¹⁸ However, as the poem progresses he finds this longed-for Orphic voice not in moments of praise, but in conflict with and rebellion against the patriarch who was also a musician: “What pleasure after all will there be in music well attuned if it is empty of the human voice, or empty of words and their meanings, or of rhythms of speech? Such strains befit woodland choirboys, not Orpheus.”Footnote ¹¹⁹ This is not a rejection of music, as some critics have implied: Milton's argument hinges on his ability to depict music and poetry as a unity, to draw the father into the enterprise of the son.Footnote ¹²⁰ But it is a strange bit of one-upmanship in a poem that begins as a thank-you to an accomplished authority figure.Footnote ¹²¹ Activating the Orphic voice, after all, is not a zero-sum game. It requires a clash, an act of will, a violent transformation of youth's receptivity to its surroundings into the ability to control them. Music and poetry may be united, father and son may each have “one half of a god,” but by the poem's end there is no question who's playing second fiddle.Footnote ¹²²

In the Mask, as in Ad Patrem and in the law, the youth forges a path to adult agency over very treacherous ground. Like Ad Patrem, A Mask pays homage to a father. But both works really are more interested in the dramas of the will that take place without, or even against, the father, moments when an individual must choose freedom or subjection, voice or silence, even if the governing paradigm would seem to deny them the option of choice. If the Lady's song echoes her dreamy, poetic, dangerous surroundings and their local Lord Comus, this is not really transgressive — a favorite critical term to describe any moment when Comus's power seems less than neatly contained.Footnote ¹²³ Instead, it is a necessary result of the child's status as depicted in contemporary religious, educational, and legal discourses, and of Milton's version of humanism as an educative process with no foregone conclusion. To captivate and educate the child, divine philosophy must indeed be “charming,” as the Younger Brother ironically notes in response to the Elder Brother's defense of chastity and his description of a charnel house full of dead and degraded bodies.Footnote ¹²⁴ And in this sense A Mask's principal charmer is no worse a tutor than the Attendant Spirit.

Indeed, what is fascinating about the Elder Brother's defense of chastity is that it is painfully, embarrassingly wrong, despite its own eloquence and charm. Like the Lady's echo song, his ability to speak powerfully seems to outstrip his ability to speak purposively. With wonderful confidence he proclaims his sister's secret weapon:

• 'Tis chastity, my brother, chastity:

• She that has that, is clad in compleat steel,

• And like a quiver'd Nymph with Arrows keen

• May trace huge Forests, and unharbour'd Heaths,

• Infamous Hills, and sandy perilous wildes,

• Where through the sacred rayes of Chastity,

• No savage fierce, Bandite, or mountaneer

• Will dare to soyl her Virgin purity,

• Yea there, where very desolation dwels,

• By grots, and caverns shag'd with horrid shades,

• She may pass on with unblench't majesty.Footnote ¹²⁵

Yet Comus has attempted to soil her virgin purity, has captured her and led her deep into the woods. Shortly the brothers will find that rather than sauntering casually past danger she has been glued to a chair with “gums of glutenous heat,” a very physical predicament that contrasts dramatically with the Elder Brother's picture of a chastity that can translate flesh itself “to the souls essence, / Till all be made immortal.”Footnote ¹²⁶ Ultimately, of course, the Lady's virtue emerges from her trial intact, but this requires a major revision of the Elder Brother's depiction.

If his seemingly triumphant speech leads him down the garden path, then what is the point of this schoolboy debate? For one thing, in its own echoes, allusions, and oppositions, it generates some pretty impressive poetry: the boy might not be Orpheus yet, but the language here works about as hard and productively as it does anywhere in the masque. In this brief passage, for instance, the OED says Milton offers the first recorded usage of three words, quiver'd, unharbour'd, and unblench't, and this is the first use of ray in a figurative sense to describe “mental and moral influences.” It is truly generative language. This original voice, however, doesn't yet manifest an independent will so much as it shows the will in vitro, enfolded in the literary echoes that give the passage its shape. “Unharbour'd heaths,” for example, is sandwiched between borrowings from Horace and Shakespeare, respectively: “trace huge Forests,” according to John Carey, echoes a passage from A Midsummer Night's Dream, while “Infamous Hills” recalls a passage from Horace's Odes. Footnote ¹²⁷ And these aren't the only borrowings: Carey also attributes “compleat steel” and “mountaneer” to Shakespeare, while those caverns “shag'd” with shades are a Spenserianism.Footnote ¹²⁸ As the Elder Brother continues his wild-eyed evocation of chastity's miraculous powers, he serially invokes Fletcher's Faithful Shepherdess, Shakespeare's Hamlet, Homer, Spenser, and Plato, and records new usages for at least two more words, Imbodies and damp.Footnote ¹²⁹ Of course, the allusive fabric of Milton's work is so rich and ubiquitous that this kind of structure is not unique. But this is precisely the point: the young boy, like his sister, finds his voice through a process much like the one employed by the young poet.

While the debate between the brothers locates them within the same educational process as their sister, her developing ability to speak truth to power provides the Mask's real excitement. The brothers show potential, but the Lady most obviously realizes this potential as she transforms from a lost girl invoking a voiceless nymph into a firebrand. The change is apparent from the moment she opens her mouth in Comus's palace, responding to his threat to chain her nerves in alabaster or leave her “Root-bound” like Daphne: “Fool do not boast, / Thou canst not touch the freedom of my minde / With all thy charms.”Footnote ¹³⁰ This seems to be a case where malice supplies the age, but this is a righteous anger, a zeal that speaks with authority even as it continues to claim the “credulous innocence” of childhood.Footnote ¹³¹ As Milton explained years later in De Doctrina Christiana, zeal doesn't just happen: it is not merely inspiration, but just such an angry response to external stimuli, that provokes a “feeling of indignation against things which tend to the violation or contempt of religion.”Footnote ¹³² Milton inserted the Lady's proud, disdainful retort in revision — originally in the Trinity Manuscript Comus rattles on for upwards of twenty lines while she sits mute — and this revision nicely enacts her will coming into its own, transmuting the stuff of charming echoes into self-actuating voice.

Comus continues to tempt her with “all the pleasures / That fancy can beget on youthfull thoughts,” but now it is his understanding that is barren and limited.Footnote ¹³³ He offers a rich, if tired, idea of cavalier excess, and is shocked when she returns it to him in radically altered form, as a vision of abundance for all. Indulge your “dainty limms,” he says, echoing exponents of carpe diem from Horace to Samuel Daniel and Thomas Carew.Footnote ¹³⁴ Nature is made for enjoyment, indeed, demands it:

• Wherefore did Nature powre her bounties forth

• With such a full and unwithdrawing hand,

• Covering the earth with odours, fruits, and flocks,

• Thronging the Seas with spawn innumberable,

• But all to please, and sate the curious taste?

• And set to work millions of spinning Worms,

• That in their green shops weave the smooth-hair'd silk

• To deck her Sons, and that no corner might

• Be vacant of her plenty, in her own loyns

• She hutch't th' all-worshipt ore, and precious gems

• To store her children with.Footnote ¹³⁵

Time is fleeting, and nature's bounty, which is expressed in the Lady's virginity, must be consumed, exploited. For if beauty is left unconsumed “like a neglected rose / It withers on the stalk with languish't head.”Footnote ¹³⁶ That description of the rose, along with the rest of Comus's “List Lady be not coy” speech, is not in the Bridgewater manuscript, but the addition really does not enrich Comus's arguments so much as show how threadbare they are — and this barrenness, contrasted with his lush imagery, supplies one of the poem's supreme ironies. Years before, in Sonnet 130, Shakespeare had killed the already-hackneyed rose-as-female-beauty image, proclaiming that he saw “no such roses” in his mistress' cheeks, and when Herrick and other Cavaliers employed the trope, they nearly always did it with a wink and a nudge.Footnote ¹³⁷ Comus is either too unsophisticated to employ a similar irony (which seems unlikely) or he thinks the Lady is too childish to need it.

Of course, Comus is wrong. The Lady is not about to trade her whole inheritance for an apple, as children are wont to do. She rightly understands that his proffered vision of nature here is shallow, tawdry. This is worth noting, by the way, in response to critics who view A Mask as “essentially static”: the view espoused by Comus here is a debasement of his earlier view of nature's harmony, and he looks smaller for it, just as Satan gradually, dynamically, looks smaller throughout Paradise Lost.Footnote ¹³⁸ Ultimately, it is hard not to think of this self-described spirit of “purer fire” as a child gone wrong himself, like those “of a more delicious and airie spirit” that Milton describes in Of Education: trapped by a barren education, they retire “to the enjoyments of ease and luxury, living out their daies in feast and jollity.”Footnote ¹³⁹ And even this, Milton claims, isn't the worst fate imaginable: they could become lawyers.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Comus has decayed into late-stage libertinism, but he perhaps once produced visions of greater things.

In contrast, the Lady continues to echo his earlier view of natural harmony, but with an inspired sense of its connection to divine justice. “Imposter,” she snaps, and utterly demolishes his idea that nature's “children should be riotous / With her abundance.”Footnote ¹⁴¹ There is no better way to capture the newfound authority in her voice than to quote at length:

• If every just 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,

• And she no whit encomber'd with her store,

• And then the giver would be better thank'd,

• His praise due paid, for swinish gluttony

• Ne're looks to Heav'n amidst his gorgeous feast,

• But with besotted base ingratitude

• Cramms, and blasphemes his feeder.Footnote ¹⁴²

This vehemence comes with the best authority: Plato, Aristotle, the Gospels, Calvin, and any number of other Protestant writers urge moderation in the desire for wealth. But, as Cedric Brown notes, the directness of the Lady's critique of riches remains “unique in the masque of the period.”Footnote ¹⁴³ No wonder, since masques including this one were paid for and commissioned by rich people, were made possible by their vast excess. This doesn't imply anything indecorous in the passage. As far as the lines imply that the girl's father is part of the solution rather than the problem, one of the benevolent elites who facilitates the meet dispensation of wealth, they offer a fine compliment. All the same, this is obviously a place where the sacred vehemence of the young Lady's words transcends her situation, where she is not just a powerless captive speaking to her captor but a voice of righteousness in the wider world. This is a critique, not just of unregulated consumption, but of the vastly different power relations that deprive everyone, at some point in their lives, of the ability to do anything but pine, like Echo, with want.

Milton clearly wanted to cultivate this effect of the voice unleashed, as he added a full twenty-eight powerful new lines to the Lady's speech between the performance and the 1637 printing. These lines, 779–806, make the Lady's claim to Orphic speech overt. “Enjoy your deer Wit, and gay Rhetorick / That hath so well been taught her dazling fence,” she says, because she now has something better than the probationary fencing exercises of wit and rhetoric: she has inspiration.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ She then rhymes that “Thou are not fit to hear thyself convinced,” but gives him a taste of her powers anyway:

• Yet should I try, the uncontrouled worth

• Of this pure cause would kindle my rap't spirits

• To such a flame of sacred vehemence,

• That dumb things would be mov'd to sympathize,

• And the brute Earth would lend her nerves and shake,

• Till all thy magick structures rear'd so high,

• Were shatter'd into heaps o're thy false head.Footnote ¹⁴⁵

In the first performance the audience could presumably tell that the Lady spoke with a new zeal and persuasive force, but she did not identify this as the “flame of sacred vehemence” as such. Nor did she imply that she had tapped into hermetic networks of sympathy, a kind of magic that hermeticists claimed offered limitless power to those who cracked the natural world's codes and learned how to speak the pure, Adamic language.Footnote ¹⁴⁶

Perhaps most importantly, in the first performance Comus did not confirm these impressions by noting that “she fables not, I feel that I do fear / Her words set off by som superior power.”Footnote ¹⁴⁷ Instead, he responded only by noting the childishness of her speech: “Come, noe more / this is meere morrall babble.”Footnote ¹⁴⁸ By the time Milton finished revising, Comus was still trying to dismiss her words as babble, the incessant, unwilled, parroting talk of children, but this attempt was more clearly demarcated not only as wrongheaded but craven and duplicitous. He doesn't just fear her words, he feels that he fears them. He doesn't just push the crystal glass to her lips because he is tired of arguing or because it's his only option, but because he's desperate to shut her up. Over time, Milton's revisions consistently enhanced this effect of childish simplicity giving way to authoritative speech. For example, in an earlier draft the Lady gasps “O my simplicity,” when Comus tempts her, where she would later command “Hence with thy brew'd inchantments.”Footnote ¹⁴⁹ In the first version her first defense is doli incapax, as the law would call it, the child's standard defense of incapability; in the later version her defense stems from her very capable verbal command.

In the end, to speak of authority or agency as if the Lady achieved these things absolutely is to miss the point. Milton never lets us know for certain that the Lady has achieved the Orphic voice: she threatens to move dumb things to sympathize, but it could be a bluff or the kind of childish sentiment her Elder Brother attached to chastity. Comus feels something, but attempts to force her anyway. And there is really no way of knowing whether he could have succeeded, because “the Brothers rush in with Swords drawn, wrest his Glass out of his hand, and break it against the ground.”Footnote ¹⁵⁰ This, of course, is as much a failure as a success, since the Attendant Spirit immediately points out that they let the enchanter escape with his potent wand and left their sister captive. So the boys' education, too, leaves their capability a little wanting. They receive the magic herb Haemony, which, despite its endlessly disputed meaning, certainly offers an antidote to Circean enchantments through the transfer of knowledge, just like Ascham's description of education-as-moly. But ultimately it doesn't work “'Gainst all inchantments,” as their tutor has claimed.Footnote ¹⁵¹

Just as he cultivated the sense that the Lady gained an efficacious voice in his revision of her debate with Comus, Milton carefully retained the ambiguity surrounding the children's accomplishment in the final scenes. In the performance, at least, the brothers appear to have participated in Sabrina's invocation, but in his printed and manuscript versions Milton definitively gave this job to the Attendant Spirit alone: in performance the Elder Brother joined his sister and suggested continuing their journey, but in his final versions Milton has the Attendant Spirit make this suggestion, which, coming from an adult, really is a command. As noted earlier, the theological upshot is that human action can only do so much, and that heaven must ultimately lend us grace to complete the equation. What it means in practical, dramatic terms is that in the final scenes supernatural adults free the captive while the children watch silently.

In the final scene the Lady assumes neither the role of a prophet nor of an Orpheus, but of a marriageable daughter in her father's house, and this happens not just because she is a girl but for the same reason her brothers fail to liberate her: they have to fail because they are children. It is a frustrating conclusion in some ways, but a very true one. To achieve adult will, in art as in law, is a halting, tortuous process, one that requires making impossible decisions, stepping outside the paradigm only to fall back within it. Although heaven has “timely tri'd their youth, / Their faith, their patience, and their truth,” the children are in the end still negotiating exercises set by someone else, still dancing a measured round under the watchful eye of their powerful father.Footnote ¹⁵² If this final dance reveals the limits of childhood, it also shows the potential of art. It is, as Blair Hoxby argues, “a triumph of personal conscience” expressed by the “well-tutored movements of the continent body.”Footnote ¹⁵³ Retracing in “victorious dance” the ground that had, only moments before, represented the tangled paths of error, the children demonstrate the possibility of achieving virtuosity within bounds, of mastering the self in a process of growing up that is never quite complete.Footnote ¹⁵⁴

In a sense, then, the Mask finds a way to admit childhood's limitations without embracing the quiescence normally associated with this state by John Boys and others. Perhaps, after all, the Orphic voice must always be prevenient, existing prior to the will, enabling the will like the prevenient grace that enables salvation. This possibility, as much as the theological idea that evil is always with us, is why Comus needs to be left loose at A Mask's conclusion. For those who wish to speak with a voice that can shake the earth, the wandering in his woods, the entanglement in his charms, never really ends.