To somthing like prophetic strain. 175 These pleasures, Melancholy, give, And I with thee will choose to live. 174. Prophetic. Milton's use of the word was undoubtedly that of his generation; the prophet was to be a seer, rather than a foreteller of events. COMUS: A MASK. INTRODUCTORY NOTE. WHAT is a mask? To find the best illustration we must go to the great period of the English drama. While Shakespeare's plays were being given with very little scenery and with nothing of that gorgeousness of apparatus which now makes a great spectacle, when for instance Henry Irving puts Henry the Eighth on the stage, Ben Jonson was producing masks which brought into requisition the genius of a great architect like Inigo Jones, who built splendid palaces and arches of pasteboard for the representation of these pageants. Moreover, though plays were given sometimes at court, they were then as now popular entertainments to which one could go on paying the price of admission; whereas masks were more in the nature of private theatricals; they were entertainments of a social nature, produced with much elaborateness of scenery, dress, music, and dancing, in honor of some high event, as a marriage, a birthday, or the visit of a royal personage. The mask was in its composition more akin to the opera than to the play, and perhaps still more like the modern spectacle than either. It was less a representation of life on a small scale than an allegorical picture. In Bacon's Essays there is one entitled Of Masques and Triumphs, which lets one into something of the secret of the attraction which these pageants had for men of learning and imagination. When one considers what a great poem Edmund Spenser built on an allegorical basis in the Faerie Queene, it is not difficult to see how heartily nobles and scholars and poets and artists would enter into the production of one of these masks where poetic representations could make use of supernatural figures, and tableaux could be devised which would give opportunity for rich dresses and beautiful faces to stand for some poetic conceit. It was an exuberant age, and the wealth of the new discoveries in Grecian and Roman civilization was eagerly made use of by poets and dramatists, who appealed by means of it to the eye and the ear as well as to the mind. The simple meaning of the word "mask" readily suggests the chief element; disguise played a very important part, and when we are reading one of Ben Jonson's masks we are at a great disadvantage, for it was not so much what was spoken as the appearance of the figures speaking which interested the original attendants on the mask. The pale page of the book, with the most elaborate description, is a poor equivalent for that gorgeous pageant, swelling with pomp and poetic splendor, where poet and architect blended their labor and laid under contribution the ancient world and the world of myth for the building of their vast pasteboard palace of beauty. We catch a glimpse of the brilliant display as we read, and we see that Jonson's learning and poetic fancy made him easily chief in this temporary kingdom of art and letters, as Shakespeare was chief in the dramatic kingdom. Fortunately for us, Shakespeare was building with permanent materials of art; unfortunately for us and for Jonson's fame, we are able only to drag forth from the débris of those spectacles which delighted London, the court, and the great country. seats, snatches of song and graceful addresses, independent of the setting in which they were placed. By and by the mask declined in popularity. The decline was due in part to the gradual indifference of the titled classes to what may be termed poetic splendor, as the great period of national romance subsided, in part to the rise of the Puritan party which beginning in a protest against ecclesiastical authority, raised its head against the state which was allied with the church and broadened its scope to take in all forms of literature and art which seemed to conflict with a severe ideal of life. The theatre, falling under the ban of the Puritans, became for awhile a reflection of a loose society, and as the court became more profligate it cared less for the somewhat fantastic graces of the mask. It is interesting to observe therefore the sudden glow of the dying mask under the touch of the young poet who was to be the great Puritan scholar and poet. Comus was written to accompany a musical composition by Henry Lawes, and was performed outof-doors by amateurs at an entertainment given by the Earl of Bridgewater to celebrate his entrance into his office as Lord President of Wales. The story runs that Lord Brackley, Mr. Thomas Egerton, and their sister Lady Alice once were benighted in Haywood Forest when making a journey to some relatives, and that Milton based his mask on the incident, but it is quite possible that the poem, whose plot could easily have been invented, gave rise to the story. Milton never gave the name of Comus to the piece, but called it simply A Masque presented at Ludlow Castle. COMUS. THE PERSONS. The attendant SPIRIT, afterwards in the habit of THYRSIS, COMUS, with his crew. The LADY. First BROTHER. Second BROTHER. SABRINA, the Nymph. The chief persons which presented were The Lord BRACKLY. Mr. THOMAS EGERTON, his brother. The Lady ALICE EGERTON. THE FIRST SCENE DISCOVERS A WILD WOOD. The attendant SPIRIT descends or enters. BEFORE the starry threshold of Jove's Court 4. Serene. To be read sĕr'ene. According to the usage of Milton's time many words were accented upon the first syllable which are now accented upon the second. See, for example, énthron'd (line 11), pérplex't (37), cómplete (421), cóngeal'd (449). 7. Although pester'd had for its common meaning in Milton's time the sense "crowded," the use of pinfold suggests the possibility that Milton had in his mind the original force of "pester," as applied to the hobbling of animals. |