Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Professor John Rogers: Milton is typically cited
by literary historians as one of the first major English poets to
praise in verse the institution of marriage.
In this respect, he seems to have followed
Spenser -- Edmund Spenser, whose Faerie Queene is
in large part a tribute to the sacrament of marriage,
although interestingly The Faerie Queene,
the great Spenserian poem, never actually manages to
feature a marriage between two human beings.
The only marriage that actually appears there is a marriage
between two rivers. Nonetheless,
The Faerie Queene can be said, however strangely,
to be the first great poetic celebration in English of the
institution of marriage. This was important to Milton,
and one of the big set-piece speeches in Paradise Lost
-- and you may remember it if you've read that poem -- is the
hymn that begins "Hail, wedded Love."
Milton is adamant throughout the epic in his insistent
imagining Adam and Eve quite specifically as a married couple
and a married couple -- and this is important to Milton -- a
married couple with an active sex life.
They're a couple whose marital blessing had been granted by
none other than God himself. Now the treatises that Milton
wrote on the rights of divorce in the 1640s are also
extravagantly pro-marriage. A happy marriage for Milton was
founded on a couple of like-minded opinions and values,
their ability to converse with one another -- and so this is
why the notion of divorce for reasons of incompatibility is so
important to Milton, because compatibility in
marriage is the very essence of marriage.
I can only imagine though, at this point in the semester,
what will become Milton's eventual championing of marriage
is pretty hard to imagine, in part because we're just
devoting our second class to a literary work given almost
entirely to the virtue of chastity.
And there's every indication that -- and I mentioned before,
of course -- there's every indication that a lot of these
early works bespeak something like a serious interest in the
ideal of a lifelong state of chastity.Chastity is not
only an obsessive topic in the early poems for Milton or in the
published treatise that we looked at last time,
The Apology for Smectymnuus. It's also a subject that we
can find in the reading journal that Milton kept for the better
part of his life. The text into which any early
modern seventeenth-century writer would jot his or her
thoughts into, his reading notes,
was always called a commonplace book.
Milton, like so many of his contemporaries,
kept a commonplace book and, as you can imagine,
he kept it for the most part in Latin.
Actually we have Milton's commonplace book,
his reading notes, and you can find it all in
English translation in volume one of The Complete Prose
Works of John Milton. It's in the CCL
collection.Now one of the entries in Milton's commonplace
book that touches on the subject of chastity strikes me as a
particularly charged one for its terrifying image of violence.
I've never really known what to do with this.
I think that the entry could be seen as in some way helpful for
our understanding of this poem, the Mask.
So this is what we know. Sometime in the year 1639,
Milton read a history book entitled The General
Chronicle of England in which there is a discussion in a
treatise on medieval England -- a discussion of a brutal Danish
invasion in the ninth century of a Catholic convent in the
English city of Coldingham. Milton jots down the historical
detail from this account that seems to have caught his
attention, and this is what he notes as
particularly memorable: The nun Ebba cut off her
nose and lips and urged the other sisters [the other nuns in
the convent] to do the same thing so that
frustrated in this way the Danes would make no attempt against
their virtue. It's the violence of this
horrible act of self-sacrifice, this tragic act of
self-sacrifice -- an act of self-sacrifice intended
obviously to preserve the state of virginity -- that grabs our
attention and presumably grabbed Milton's.
In order to avoid the violation of their virginity at the hands
of the brutal Danish brigands, Ebba leads a convent full of
nuns to disfigure themselves, severing nose and lips.
As you can imagine, there's no historical evidence
that anything like this took place,
and it actually seems to be something of an urban legend
among medieval writers recounting early Christian
convents. This same story about the nuns'
disseveration of their nose and their lips seems to have been
told about just all of the early Christian nunneries -- a strange
cultural fantasy manifesting itself in some way -- but
nonetheless Milton includes this in his commonplace entry with no
commentary, no observation,
and no interpretation of it.I think we could make
some estimation of its significance if we juxtapose it
with Comus since The Mask attempts to tackle,
in a much more expanded form, so many of the same issues.
Comus is an elaborate meditation not simply on
chastity but also on the threat of ***.
And of course, as I mentioned last time,
Comus himself suggests nothing more than wanting to get the
Lady to drink a sip from the charmed cup,
but it's clear from his language that the subtext at
least behind his seduction involves,
in some way at least, an intimation of the Lady's
*** submission. The potential danger besetting
the Lady is certainly a subject of some concern for her dutiful
brothers. You remember they're wandering
around the forest without her picking berries.
The younger brother, the second brother,
is most concerned about his sister's safety -- so I want you
to look at this passage. This is line 398 of Comus,
page ninety-nine in the Hughes.
So the second brother says that the Lady is an open target
out there for an assault: You may as well spread
out the unsunn'd heaps Of Miser's treasure by an
outlaw's den, And tell me it is safe,
as bid me hope Danger will wink on Opportunity
[will not allow itself to see opportunity],
And let a single helpless maiden pass
Uninjured in this wild surrounding waste.
So notice first here that the younger brother compares his
sister's virginity to a miser's treasure.
In this particularly odd image you have something like a veiled
accusation -- and it's not unlike Comus' accusation -- that
the Lady is hoarding her God-given treasure of her
chastity, with all of the resonances of
the parable of the talents that we see in Comus'
similar language. But you also notice the sense
of limitation and the vulnerability associated with
the physical state of virginity here.
As wonderful as the Lady's chastity might be,
it's certainly not going to protect her from the dangers
lurking in this wild surrounding waste.
If anything, her chastity will only attract
such injuries.As we saw in the last lecture,
the elder brother holds an entirely different theory of
chastity, and of course, it's a lot more optimistic.
He believes that a *** like the Lady is secure or safe from
the violent attacks imagined by his younger brother.
So look at line 423 of Comus, where the
elder brother explains that the chaste Lady can actually travel
anywhere she pleases utterly unafraid.
"She may trace huge forests" -- I mean, both of these positions
[laughs] are voiced with such
magnificently hyperbolic rhetoric:
[She] may trace huge Forests and
unharbor'd Heaths, Infamous Hills and sandy
perilous wilds, Where through the sacred rays
of Chastity, No savage fierce,
Bandit or mountaineer Will dare to soil her ***
purity. He dismisses his brother's
entirely practical argument, because for him chastity is a
lot more than a simple exercise of *** abstinence.
It's a positive force, and it exerts an actual and
somehow palpable, discernible force in the world.
The "sacred rays of chastity" are going to be emanating from
the chaste maiden and protecting her like some magical
force-field, and actually will keep her safe
from the physical assaults of a savage bandit or a
mountaineer.Now this is just a thought exercise,
but were the Elder Brother to read The General Chronicle of
England that Milton had read in 1639,
I am assuming he would have found incoherent the story that
had so interested Milton: the story about Saint Ebba,
the nun, who was driven to such terrible lengths to protect
herself and her fellow sisters in the nunnery from attack.
For the Elder Brother, Ebba's bodily purity should
itself exude a sufficiently powerful strength that the
terrible Danes would be repelled by the sacred rays of her
chastity. So you get something like a
conflict developing in Milton's mask.
It's a tension between the extravagant virginal idealism of
the elder brother and what I have to concede is a much more
practical sense of virginity's limitations voiced by the Second
Brother. So Milton is actually staging a
debate between these two positions, enacted on the stage
in 1634 by a nine- and an eleven-year-old boy,
I'll remind you.The very presence in a theatrical piece
of a long and weighty philosophical debate like this
one could easily be seen as having a pretty tedious effect.
Milton is taking a pretty great risk here.
It's worth asking what's at stake because this is such an
odd thing to find; and so I want to consider a way
in which this debate between these two brothers can be seen
as related to other debates and other conflicts between
competing aspects of Milton's own consciousness -- that would
be one perspective -- and maybe more grandly,
between opposing factions in the culture of
seventeenth-century England at large.First,
though, I need to say a couple of words about the word
chastity as I've been using it throughout the discussion so
far of Comus both today and Monday.
Up to this point -- and some of you may have felt this -- I have
been throwing the word chastity around a little
promiscuously. In throwing it around with this
kind of looseness, I've been reproducing what I
take to be a certain sloppiness in Milton's text.
I've been speaking of chastity as if chastity and virginity
were absolute synonyms, or always synonyms -- just
forever interchangeable -- and this simply isn't true in the
seventeenth century. Now it goes without saying that
we all know what virginity is. Virginity is that bodily state
that predates an act of *** intercourse and therefore,
at least for most of Milton's contemporaries,
that is the bodily state that predates marriage.Chastity,
however, was beginning to mean something new in the period.
For a lot of Protestants in the early seventeenth century,
the word chastity could also be used to refer to the
state of what could be called married chastity:
married chastity was a type of bodily purity that could be
extended -- or a spiritual purity as well -- that could be
extended even into marriage. This is sort of the theory.
If a couple practiced temperate, moderate,
and more or less dispassionate acts of *** intercourse,
they could be said to remain chaste -- a married couple,
of course. They could keep for themselves
the prestigious title of "chaste" even though they were
obviously performing an act that almost anyone in an earlier
period would assume disqualified them from being called chaste.
And so there opens up a kind of distinction between virginity,
which is, of course, actual physical ***
abstinence, and chastity, which for some could actually
include the moderate practice of sex within marriage.It's one
of the interesting and curious features of the Protestant
mask, Comus, that this is a
distinction that's never really observed or acknowledged.
Virginity and chastity seem to be used often and kind of
awkwardly, I think, interchangeably.
The confusion between these two words is closely related,
I propose, to some of the confusions and dilemmas
confronted by the work as a whole.
I'll go so far as to say that some of the semantic difficulty
here in our understanding of the word chastity has
something to do with an indisputably awkward element of
Comus' plot: and that's the fact that for so
much of this mask, the Lady is stuck to
her seat.I mentioned at the beginning of the lecture that
Milton would go on to become the English language's premier poet
of marriage, but it's important to note that
the celebration of marriage is not at all an obvious thing for
an English poet in Milton's time to be attempting to strive
toward. And in fact,
it's just at this point in early modern England that
marriage is beginning to assert itself as a cultural ideal -- a
religiously inflected cultural ideal.
Throughout the Renaissance, throughout the sixteenth
century, the popular ideas about marriage and celibacy were still
firmly tied to the values of the Roman Catholic Church well after
the actual Reformation. Roman doctrine,
of course, had prized the state of celibacy, insisting that it
was the superior state over marriage.
Now, it's true that -- and this has always been the case --
that a proper marriage was obviously always one of the
church's sacraments, and marriage obviously had
always received the church's blessing;
but nonetheless the higher ideal would still seem to be
celibacy. It was the ideal embraced by
priests and nuns, and it was the ideal to which
all Christians theoretically at least were in a position to
aspire to. It's in the period in which
Milton is writing that the tide is beginning to turn.
The Protestant Reformation, and especially the rising
energies of Puritanism in the early seventeenth century,
are beginning to do a lot to change this state of affairs.
And so over the course of the century, you can see a gradual
-- as if something like this could actually be charted.
Nonetheless, I think it's safe to say you
see a gradual decline in the cultural idealization of
virginity and a corresponding increase in the valuation of
marriage in this new form of chastity that we can think of as
married chastity. It's a transition,
an evaluation of marriage that is not at all an easy one,
however. There are debates.
There are disagreements even among Puritans about which
state, virginity or married chastity, is the superior one in
the eyes of God. It's in light of this ongoing
cultural tension in the period that, I think,
we can understand some of the strange confusions concerning
chastity that we find in the poem that we're looking
at.Now one of the moments in which this tension between
virginity and chastity seems to be most pronounced is in the
encounter between Comus and the Lady that we looked at in the
last class. Comus attempts to seduce the
Lady, you'll remember, with something like an economic
theory of natural beauty. For Comus, nature has given us
all of her riches and it's our duty, it's our obligation,
to spend them, to consume them,
and to luxuriate in nature's generosity.
You could think of this, and this has actually been
described by critics, as something like an
aristocratic theory of natural expenditure,
because Comus imagines in this fantasy rhetorical world of his
something like an almost endless supply of natural wealth:
nature's wealth can continually and forever be spent and
expended.Now the Lady responds to what we can think of
as his aristocratic debauchery with an economic theory of her
own, and we haven't looked at that
yet. So this is line 768 of
Comus, and in the Hughes edition it's on
page 108. This is the Lady's retort.
She explains that nature, of course, wants us to "live
according to her sober laws / and holy dictate of spare
Temperance." In this description of the
moderate and temperate enjoyment of nature, the Lady is giving us
something like a Puritan economic theory.
This is her argument, line 768: 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 some few with
vast excess, Nature's full blessings would
be well dispens't In unsuperfluous even
proportion… I think it's sometimes hard to
remember in reading a speech like this that the Lady is
actually talking about chastity. Her argument sounds -- and some
of you may recognize this argument -- it sounds so
distinctly like a political argument,
an argument from political economy.
It actually, it's been shown,
seems to foreshadow the political philosophy of Milton's
much younger contemporary, John Locke -- the notion that
nature demands that every human individual has just enough,
is given just enough to be self-sufficient.
But when you remember that the subject at hand is actually in
some way sex, then you can begin to associate
the Lady's image of this moderate consumption of natural
wealth with some version of -- if this makes sense -- some
version of an act of *** consummation.
The Lady's call for a tempered, moderate distribution and
consumption of natural goods seems to point us toward
something like a particular attitude toward sex;
and if this is sex she's seeming to refer to,
it's clearly not virginity that's at stake.
This isn't *** abstinence that the Lady's pointing to.
With her vision of the moderate and temperate enjoyment of
nature's beauty, the Lady is sketching this new
seventeenth-century ideal of married chastity:
the ideal of the temperate, moderate indulgence in ***
pleasure, of course, within the sanctified confines
of marriage.This makes sense.
We have to assume that the Lady is resisting Comus' advances
because she has before her the higher ideal of married
chastity. One day she will become a wife
herself, and it's in her husband that she will eventually invest
the talent of her bodily wealth, to use the metaphor that we get
from Matthew 25. It's a perfectly reasonable
sentiment to include in an example of the particular genre
that Milton is writing his mask in.
The form of this mask is that of the romance.
It's a literary genre that dates back to late classical
Greece and which typically charts the trials and
tribulations of a hero, in many cases the trials and
tribulations of a virginal heroine.
The romance heroine is often threatened with ***,
but by her cleverness or by good luck or a concatenation of
forces she can always invariably avert that tragedy;
and by the end of the work she can present herself to her
future husband as a ***. This last twist is without
question the central element of the conventional romance plot,
and this remains a central element in the Harlequin
romances, for example, that are still,
I think, consumed so voraciously even today:
after her brush with danger, after her brush with ***
peril, the romance heroine always gets
married in the end. The story has to end that way.
And her marriage is invariably seen as her reward for all the
trouble she's been through.Now given this,
the romance frame of Milton's Comus, we're not
surprised actually to see -- even though we don't see at the
end her actually getting married,
we're not surprised to see the Lady in this speech embracing
the form of chastity that promises something like an
eventual turn to marriage. This makes sense.
And it's with this hint at the state of married chastity --
this seems like a healthy perspective -- it's with this
hint that the Lady ended her speech at the only
seventeenth-century performance of Comus,
which, as you know,
took place at Ludlow Castle in 1634 on Michelmas night.
At this original performance of the mask,
the Lady's speech read by the Lady Alice Egerton,
age fifteen, ended at line 779 in your text.
I think after hearing the Lady end her speech at line 779 that
the audience could reasonably expect that the Lady would
someday get married. But you can see from the text
that you have in your Hughes editions -- or any edition,
any printed edition now -- the speech continues in the version
of the mask that we have. While Milton wrote most of the
mask in 1634, he published it in 1637,
and it's at this point three years later that he seems to
have inserted into the Lady's speech,
and also elsewhere in the poem, certain lines for the published
version. So the Lady's speech in the
printed version continues at line 779 and this is what the
Lady asked. How can you not love this?
"Shall I go on? / Or have I said enough?"
Clearly, Milton is in some way [laughs]
wonderfully speaking through the Lady here.
Then we get the Lady again: Shall I go on?
Or have I said enough? To him that dares
Arm his profane tongue with contemptuous words
Against the Sun-clad power of Chastity
Fain would I something say, yet to what end?
Thou hast nor Ear nor Soul to apprehend
The sublime notion and high mystery
That must be utter'd to unfold the sage
And serious doctrine of virginity.
She's speaking reluctantly here. She'd love to tell Comus
something about chastity, but he has neither ear nor soul
to apprehend the sublime notion and high mystery.
The speech is proceeding rather smoothly and,
I think, kind of explicably as the Lady defends the sun-clad
power of chastity.But look at the end of the passage that
I've just read, a few lines down.
The doctrine that the Lady wishes to advance suddenly seems
so absolutely not to be a doctrine of married chastity.
It's the sage and serious doctrine of virginity that
concludes the speech. It's clear that something's
happened between 1634 and 1637. Milton's Lady doesn't proceed
as we expect her to, to marshal further arguments
for the moderate fulfillment of one's conjugal obligations.
There's no more talk of temperate sex or the virtuous
and the virtuous moderation that's so important to the ideal
of married chastity. The Lady begins to speak
instead of the unyielding virtue of *** abstinence that's
absolutely central to an entirely different kind of
doctrine: the doctrine of virginity.So we have to ask
this question: What's happened?
The Lady has claimed that she's hesitant to say anything at this
point to Comus. How could such a debauched
character possibly understand the mysterious truths about
chastity? Interestingly,
she refuses to unfold for her audience the sage and serious
doctrine of virginity, but she does anticipate what
that doctrine of virginity would look like if she were to unfold
it. She explains to Comus what
would happen should she actually choose to break her silence,
should she actually choose to unleash all of the rhetorical
powers that she has pent up inside of her.
In some important way, I think, the Lady can be seen
as being in the same position that Milton had been
representing himself in so many of the early poems.
He was continually imagining himself to be someone on the
verge of saying something spectacular, but he wasn't quite
there yet.The lady continues.
Look at line 792: Thou art not fit to hear
thyself convinc't; Yet should I try [and she
means, "should I try to voice the doctrine of virginity"],
the uncontrolled worth Of this pure cause would
kindle my raptspirits 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 magic structures
rear'd so high, Were shatter'd into heaps o'er
thy false head. She's making a strong a claim
as is possible to make for her potential for rhetorical power.
She implies that she's the equal to any of the great poetic
heroes that Milton so admires. As a virginal orator,
should she choose to unleash her powers, she would have the
power of an Orpheus moving dumb things to sympathize -- Orpheus
being one of Milton's most prized mythological figures of
the powerful poet. She'd have the strength of a
Samson, the biblical hero, who could shatter huge
structures over the heads of his enemies.
She has way more power than she needs, it would seem,
to destroy a petty little mages like Comus.The power that
the Lady claims for herself as a *** is titanic,
and it allows us to understand, I think, why she has slipped
from her discussion of married chastity to this new discussion
of what seems to be -- or what she claims is -- virginity.
The lapse makes a certain kind of sense, I think,
because it's virginity and not married chastity that the Lady
imagines will allow her to demonstrate such a remarkable
show of rhetorical strength. It's almost apocalyptic in its
force. It promises something like the
power of God as he brings the shattering close of the entire
Christian narrative to an end at the Last Judgment and beyond.
One of the cultural phenomena fueling, I think,
this rhetorical burst of the Lady's is the prevalent
seventeenth-century anticipation of the end of the world,
the millennium -- all of these apocalyptic beliefs that were
swirling around almost all of the sectarian religious figures
in the seventeenth century.Given all of these
cultural resonances, there's a lot riding on the
Lady's claim for her rhetorical powers here.
You can understand that initial hesitation when she asks,
"Shall I go on? / Or have I said enough?"
She's probably said way more than enough in her testimony to
the potentially apocalyptic power of her virginal speech.
She's making extraordinary claims for virginal oratory.
It has all of the power of prophecy that Milton had been
associating with the biblical prophets;
but, as I mentioned before, she doesn't deliver this
anticipated speech and so virginity's power remains
untested. We can't know just what force
virginity would exude, and so the speech leaves us
where we began, in a state of uncertainty
concerning the ultimate strength of this virtue of ***
abstinence. It leaves us where we began:
asking what, finally, what is virginity good
for? We're reproducing the problem
that the two brothers were rehearsing in their
debate.So the Lady in the 1637 version of this poem,
of this mask, is at an impasse.
She's stuck between competing ideals of bodily purity just as
surely and as firmly as she is stuck to her seat.
This is a kind of meta-literary allegorization that I'll be
performing here: you could also think of Milton
the poet as being stuck at this same juncture.
He's stuck between two meanings of chastity -- chastity as
absolute virginity, and chastity as the moderate
and beseeming sexuality sanctioned within marriage.
He's also stuck between two models of speech with which we
have become quite familiar by this point.
On the one hand, he wants to wait before he
talks. He wants to keep anticipating
producing the great speech, which is exactly what the Lady
has been doing; but on the other hand Milton's
possessed of a competing desire to speak and to speak now -- to
publish, to succeed, to consummate his talents.
It's as if Milton were paralyzed, almost,
at this moment in his choice between these various
alternatives.Now we know that the Lady doesn't end the
mask happily. Imagine [laughs]
what it would be like if this were the case.
She doesn't end the mask stuck to Comus' chair.
It's important to figure out exactly how the Lady gets
unstuck, and so that's what we're going to look at now.
You'll remember there's first the bungled attempt by the two
brothers to release her. They forget to reverse Comus'
wand when they rush in to his lair.
That didn't pan out. They had even obtained,
with the help of the attendant spirit, the magical herb Haemony
with all of its Homeric associations,
but this, too, seemed inadequate to the task
of rescuing their sister. The Lady is only rescued once
the attendant spirit calls on the nymph Sabrina,
the genius loci --the natural spirit of the Severn
stream, which is the river that separates England from Wales.
Milton uses for his source for the character Sabrina another
character named Sabrina from Spenser's The Faerie
Queene.There's a wonderful work of literary
criticism -- I mentioned it last time -- on Milton's indebtedness
to Spenser in the book by John Guillory called Poetic
Authority. I urge you to look at it if
you're interested. The fact that Sabrina,
this little character here, has her origin in Spenser is
important. Spenser is the great early
Christian poet in English of holy matrimony,
and according to Guillory's brilliant argument,
he has the power to counteract -- Spenser does -- the magical
effect that Shakespeare wields through the character of Comus.
The Lady had claimed for herself a remarkable set of
powers, but she wasn't yet ready to use them.
She was paralyzed in speech just as she was prevented from
even moving. It was almost as if Sabrina's
assent from the Severn stream to assist the Lady in her time of
need suggests Spenser's arrival from the realm of English
literature to assist the young poet,
John Milton. Edmund Spenser arrives,
arises to help Milton overcome the paralyzing effect of the
Comus-like power of Shakespeare.Let's see if
this makes any sense. Look at line 852 of Comus.
This is page 110 in the Hughes. The attendant
spirit explains that Sabrina is in possession of precious vialed
liquors that have the capacity to heal.
So line 852; Sabrina can unlock:
The clasping charm and thaw the numbing spell
If she be right invok't in warbled Song,
For maid'nhood she loves, and will be swift
To aid a ***, such as was herself,
In hard-besetting need. This will I try
And add the power of some adjuring verse.
The power of verse has everything to do with the power
wielded by Sabrina to save the Lady from her paralysis.
If "right invok't in warbled Song," Sabrina can actually be
called down for assistance -- or called up for
assistance.It's just this interest in the right,
the proper form of warbled song that's so important here.
She represents a power that might enable Milton to warble a
right or proper song. She represents a power that
might enable Milton perhaps someday actually to fulfill,
to consummate his much-anticipated poetic promise.
But how does she do that? Look at line 910.
This is page 111 in the Hughes. Sabrina says to
the Lady as she rises from the water:
Brightest Lady look on me, Thus I sprinkle on thy breast
Drops that from my fountain pure I have kept of precious cure,
Thrice upon my finger's tip, Thrice upon my rubied lip;
Next this marble venom'd seat Smear'd with gums of glutinous
heat I touch with chaste palms moist
and cold. Now, if this a scene,
as it's been argued, of Sabrina's baptism of the
Lady, it's a curious baptism indeed.
We might think that Sabrina's "chaste palms moist and cold"
would only make more frigid and more frozen the body of the
Lady, but in fact it's just the
opposite that happens. Think of the delicate,
really beautiful sensuality here in Sabrina's speech.
I don't think we were expecting this.
She evokes the beauty of the Lady's rubied lip.
How inappropriate! The eroticization of the Lady's
beauty has up to this point come exclusively from Comus.
In touching the Lady's fingertip, it's as if Sabrina
were awakening for the first time the Lady's sense of
touch.Now the Lady, we know, has an exquisite and
powerful sense of hearing. She's a poet and she has an
impeccable ear, but this fiercely virginal Lady
has not up to this point even begun to develop her other
sensory realms. When Sabrina touches the
surprisingly sensual rubied lip of the Lady, she's in essence
baptizing, I think, and sanctioning the
*** drives that the Lady has been so fiercely repressing.
She baptizes the entire domain of non-auditory sensual
experience that the Lady so forcefully avoids.
And you can think of Sabrina as she touches so gently the Lady
-- this is [laughs] to use the wonderful phrase
that John Guillory used actually in this very room when I took
the Milton lecture as an undergraduate -- that what
Sabrina is doing is (and this dates John Guillory -- this is a
very ‘70s phrase) is activating the Lady's "erogenous
zones." There's something to that.
With this magical touching of the Lady with her precious
liquor, Sabrina saves the Lady from her paralysis.
Milton's stage direction should say it all, it's very simple:
the lady just "rises out of her seat."I don't want to
suggest that Sabrina's work is purely *** here.
There's a lot more than sex implied in this redemptive
touching. In touching the Lady's rubied
lip, she's also, I think, releasing the lady's
hesitation to speak. After Comus' masterful
seduction, replete with all its allusions to the parable of the
talents from Matthew 25, the Lady, you'll remember,
had been so hesitant to speak ("I had not thought to have
unlocked my lips / in this unhallowed air").
When she does unlock her lips ever so slightly [laughs]
-- when she does unlock her lips,
she does so only to anticipate the effect that her speeches
would have if she were to unlock them even more.
Everything is entirely conditional and future-oriented.
Sabrina's touching of the Lady's lip seems to unlock,
perhaps permanently, the rhetorical hesitation that
has paralyzed the Lady, and the Lady is liberated.
Of course, we have no evidence of the Lady's rhetorical
liberation. There's no further speech on
her part, but it's an important action, I think,
nonetheless.The touching of the Lady's lip touches us in
other ways as well though, at least in this lecture,
because we remember that unfortunate, that horrifying
image of the lip that Milton had noted in the commonplace book.
Saint Ebba had not only severed her nose, she had also severed
her lip. I think it's worth thinking
about, at least for a moment, of the oddity of this terrible
act of self-mutilation. The superfluous action suggests
that there was something more at stake, perhaps,
than Saint Ebba's attempt to ward off *** assault.
To disfigure the mouth -- this is how I would interpret it --
to disfigure the mouth has a primary effect in rendering one
at least temporarily speechless. I think there's a connection
here between the image from the commonplace book and the
treatment in Milton's mask of this strangely conjoint
phenomenon of virginity and speechlessness.
In a little scene from the early English history that
Milton had selected from his reading,
you have an image of silencing, of a horrifying and
unredeemable speechlessness that is so closely connected to
virginity. It would seem to be the
terrible fate of Saint Ebba to die both speechless and virginal
that Milton is struggling to avoid here.So yeah,
Comus is a celebration of virginity,
and it might even be a celebration of Milton's
endlessly anticipatory -- the mood of imaging himself as a
great poet. But these virtues,
however great, I think, are also associated in
the mask with the Lady's petrifaction,
her fixation on the seat that Comus has fashioned for her.
It's one of the duties of the mask's plot to get the
Lady out of her seat. And you can see in the song
that Sabrina sings something of the mechanism,
perhaps, by which this transition is effected.
Look at line 897. We're almost done here.
Sabrina rises from the water and appears gradually on the
land, making a transition a lot like the one the Lady will
eventually have to make. She sings -- Sabrina sings:
Whilst from off the waters fleet
Thus I set my printless feet O'er the Cowslip's Velvet head,
That bends not as I tread…
Now her feet are, of course, printless because
she's airy and ethereal, and she leaves no tread on the
cowslips or the flowers -- but this is an odd phrase,
you'll concede: "printless feet."
Its oddness is important. Feet,
of course, has a lot of meanings, and Milton's poetic
feet, the material of the verse written in six and eight and ten
syllables in this poem, are also in 1634 printless --
they're unpublished. When Comus is first performed,
Milton's poetry hasn't yet been printed, but it's almost as if
Sabrina seems to have died printless or unpublished so that
Milton wouldn't have to. It's a sacrifice on our poet's
behalf. That would be one literarily
allegorical way to think of it.Now as I noted earlier,
there's a difference between the two existing texts of
Milton's Comus. There's the performance
version of 1634 and the printed version of 1637,
and the additions to the text that Milton is making for the
published version reflect, I think, his sense that he,
like the Lady, is in the process of making an
important transition. He is no longer -- or no longer
wants to be -- an infans, a poetic ***,
a speechless poet. There's also another transition
that he's making, and this involves the subject
of virginity: not a speechlessness,
but his actual abstinence. I'll just point you quickly to
this passage. Look at line 1003;
it's on page 113 in the Hughes. After we have the
Lady wandering through the forest, she joins her father
with her brothers and we get this:
But far above in spangled sheen
Celestial Cupid, her fam'd son advanc't,
Holds his dear Psyche sweet entranc't
After her wand'ring labors long, Till free consent the gods among
Make her his eternal bride...
You can see an image here of Cupid's eventual marriage to
Psyche as a pointed reference to the likelihood that the Lady,
too, will become someone's eternal bride.
In 1634, in the first version, we didn't have this
anticipation of the Lady's future marriage.
This passage didn't exist. The Lady remained much more
fixed in her idealization of virginity and a lot more silent
in her responses to Comus, but it's almost as if the
prospect of publishing this mask seems to have induced in Milton
an interest in trying to move beyond the idealization of
virginity, beyond simply the anticipation
of future power. And you're getting to see
something like an intimation of John Milton the published poet,
a poet whose energies are going to be directed toward making his
poems public. The poet of anticipation is
beginning to think of himself as the poet of achievement,
and the poet of the radical power of virginity is beginning
to redirect a lot of his interests to the radical power
of married sexuality.Now it won't be until another four or
five years after the publication of Comus that Milton will
himself actually be married, but the transition from
virginity to married chastity charted in this poem that we've
been looking at nonetheless reflects a marked interest in
the nature not only of Milton's personal life but in the nature
of his literary interests. He's beginning to put aside all
of those literary anxieties induced by his reading of
Shakespeare, and it's as if he's more and
more willing to use as a kind of literary assistant,
or helper, Spenser: the great poet of holy
matrimony and married *** bliss.
In the works that Milton is going to be publishing now with
greater and greater frequency, it's this Spenserian ideal of
marriage that will be the new and, believe me,
the endlessly complex Miltonic subject.Now for next time
we'll be reading Lycidas, which is about the death of
a friend -- and the death of a friend, in fact,
who died a ***, we have to assume.
It's not about marriage, and marriage will still seem
quite a ways off, I fear,
when you read Lycidas, but we will be marking the
transition to the poetry of marriage soon enough.
This is probably the most difficult poem linguistically
that we'll be reading all semester.
It repays innumerable readings and re-readings,
so I urge you to read it seventy-five times,
let's say, before you come to class on Monday.
Thank you.