COMUS - A MASQUE - AT THE DIVINITY SCHOOL
Dionysian style Comus
At 26 years old ,the John Milton who wrote ‘Comus, a Masque was a student at Christ’s College Cambridge - ‘The Milton Hilton’ . He was well known for his good looks, and brilliant poetics. In the words of the show’s producer/director Patrick Boyde, England’s greatest poet was at that time“a University Wit, sexy, care-free, steeped in the poetry of ‘sweetest Shakespeare, Fancy’s child”
Milton had got the gig with Comus – a lavish party at Ludlow Castle – through contacts at Cambridge . His clients are the Egerton Family and their three teenage children take roles in the action. The plot is simple enough. Out and about in Ludlow Lady Alice is lost in the ‘wild wood’, her two brothers desperate to find her. What follows is an entertainment, shot through with the songs and delicate poetry of a sensual imagination. The Boyde production was simplicity itself. The actors on stage alongside the elegant singers read their parts although ‘read’ is hardly the word for their brilliant dramatic renditions, whilst, Heaven be praised, the words appear for the audience on a generously proportioned screen above the action – itself enhanced by the colour and design of the original sketches of the time. See how soon you start to sound just a little bit more seventeenth century after an evening with Milton’s delightful language.
Mantegna’s image of Parnassus
The Masque opens with the Attendant Spirit’s colourful poetry .He puts us in the picture, ‘the regions of mild and serene air around the castle’. But we also learn of its darker side, the wild wood ‘the smoke and stir of this dim spot.Which men call earth” Just as any dramatist wants his set to represent the world, think of the drawing rooms of Ibsen and Chekhov or the decay of Beckett’s wasted spaces, so this dark forest with its dangers as well as its enchantments is the moral world in which these adolescents wander. And in it the poet - and what a brilliant one – debates his conflicted views of the meaning of life. There’s the Castle from whence the teenagers set off into the alarming but beautiful wood and in it the Palace of Comus, the extraordinary anti- hero of the Masque. He appears only too soon with his entourage , the stage direction reads “They come on in a wilde and antic fashion . .making a riotous and unruly noise”
Sir Edwin Henry Lanseer ‘s idea of the gorgeous Comus
What more can you expect than some serious bad behaviour? When you learn Comus is the son Bacchus, the Roman name for the Greek god Dionysus spirit of wanton abandon, hence his exhortation to
Midnight shout and revelry
Tipsy dance, and jollity.
His mother , the Witch Circe he recalls at one point rather fondly ( in view of her fierce reputation as literally a Hell raiser), singing a song, . Remember her from Homer’s Odyssey ? Her touch turns men into swine, so not a great combination of parents if you seek a virtuous life. It’s a metaphor and it hardly augurs well. In fact from the moment Comus appears, played with wonderfully seductive style by Reuben Thomas , the entire show takes a dramatic and interesting turn. Far from the repellent villain of pantomime, Comus is a lyrical cultivated character with everything going for him. He presides over a kingdom of sensuality and excess, Nature is his guide he says, and Enjoyment his goal. The scene is set for a clash of values when he tries to entrap the chase virginal Lady.
He meets the lost Lady when she is at her lowest ebb, distressed and hopeless stumbling about in the woods ; he poses as a shepherd and invites her to a ‘little cottage’ for the night. The lady, armed only with her virtue, is innocently grateful, her thanks has a republican twist,
“Shepherd I take thee at thy word,
And trust thy honest offered courtesy
Which oft is sooner found in lowly sheds
With smoke rafters, than in tapestry halls
And courts of princes, where it first was named
And yet it is more pretended.”
The Lady, enticed by lies refuses a drink
No surprise then she is furious when she finds herself in his sin Palace, plied with suspect drinks and invited to loosen up with a potent cocktail.
Comus, now in his glamorous guise, presses his argument for the enjoyment of the natural pleasures of life - sex. . He makes a brilliant case. He invites the Lady - and us- to surrender to the enchantments of youthful dalliance and seduction. And although John Milton is many years away from the heroic Puritan propagandist of his middle age - and his historic epic Paradise Lost, isn’t there a distinct smack of Satan here as he tempts Eve to give it a go in the garden of Eden?
The Lady presses on with her argument for Chastity whilst Comus borrows from Spenser’s Bower of Bliss to lure her into the parallel Garden of Adonis - another Spenser concept , where innocence and eroticism can thrive together. For Milton it’s in the Debate that the meaning - and interest - lies. In this production the two views emerge clearly . So date rape drama and 17th century parable, Comus is a great Masque for all ages. It was a lovely evening to hear the argument in Milton’s lovely verse ; the singing was sublime, the voices clear and the staging modest but brilliant.
As Comus himself told me before the evening began, “If you haven’t experienced a production by Professor Patrick Boyde before, you are in for a grand treat.’ Look out for his next brilliant trip into the literature and drama of the past in these pages.
COMUS, A MASQUE, published by John Milton 1634
