Comus Essay Questions

How does Milton both uphold and depart from the conventions of the masque genre?

Popular forms of entertainment in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe, masques were short plays that used masked players to depict a typically straightforward conflict and resolution. In England, masques typically took place at court and even featured royals as players. Comus subscribes, in part, to the courtly conventions of the masque by celebrating the advancement of John Egerton, 1st Earl of Bridgewater, to the position of Lord President of Wales. The original performance also featured Egerton's children—including his daughter, Alice, as the Lady—in the cast. However, while many masques tended to represent the whims and revelry of the court, Comus uses allegory to advance Milton's own Christian ideology. In this way, the framework surrounding the production of Comus aligns well with the conventions of the genre, but Milton intervenes in the content of the poem by adopting the masque for a decidedly Christian context.

How does Milton use poetic form to generate meaning in the poem?

In general, Comus features characters speaking in blank verse, a common and popular poetic meter in early modern English literature. However, variations to this structure are significant because they underscore some of the qualities attributed to individual characters. Comus, for example, speaks originally in iambic and trochaic tetrameter, a notably lighthearted meter that showcases his penchant for mirth in the form of debauchery. The masque also frequently features Comus and the Lady completing one another's blank verse lines as they argue back and forth, a variation that suggests they are equally matched opponents. Finally, that Comus can switch between poetic forms so seamlessly advances his characterization as a rhetorician and therefore an increasingly dangerous threat to the Lady and her brothers.

Why is the hero of the masque a woman?

One of the unique aspects of Comus is not only that the protagonist is a woman, but that Milton actually criticizes the masculine reliance on violence and force in the form of the two brothers. That Comus features powerful female characters like the Lady and Sabrina showcases the masque's interest in shifting its audience's perspective on what it means to hold power. By endowing his female characters with unassailable strength, Milton underscores the importance of Christian virtue—embodied by the women through their chastity—against sin and corruption. In this way, the masque uses female characters to challenge traditional notions of strength, power, and utliity.

In what ways is Comus comparable to the figure of Satan?

Many have remarked that Comus bears striking resemblance to the character of Satan in Milton's Paradise Lost, which explodes the Book of Genesis to describe the elaborate story of the fall of man. Both Comus and Satan are skilled rhetoricians, able to manipulate language accordingly in order to seduce their audience. They are also similarly obsessed with power and individualism, rejecting outright the notion of serving God. Feminist critics have also pointed out that both Comus and Milton's Satan maintain misogynistic views of women, assuming weakness and vulnerability in the Lady and Eve that leads them to use women as targets for temptation to sin.

Both the Attendant Spirit and Comus disguise themselves as shepherds for different reasons. What role do shepherds play in the masque?

The presence of shepherds in literature is a precedent often attributed to the Roman poet Virgil in his Eclogues. These short poems were known for their development of the pastoral mode, or poems set in a rural landscape that celebrate the simplicity of the bucolic lifestyle. They featured groups of shepherds singing, presumably about their work tending their flocks. However, one of the conventions of the pastoral mode is that it frequently smuggles larger political, social, and meta-poetic critiques into songs about shepherds' work. In fact, shepherds themselves are often assumed to be synonymous with poets in the pastoral tradition. Milton famously relies on the pastoral mode in his poem "Lycidas," which features a shepherd-poet on one hand mourning the death of a friend, and on the other hand providing a scathing review of corrupt members of the English clergy. That shepherds appear once more in Comus as forms of disguise for both the Attendant Spirit and Comus suggests that the pastoral mode is still in effect in the masque and that there is another layer of interpretation lurking beneath the events on the surface.