SEVEN
Therefore, if wise men will needs send their sons into Italy, let them do it wisely, under the keep and guard of him who, by his wisdom and honesty, by his example and authority, may be able to keep them safe and sound in the fear of God, in Christ’s true religion, in good order and honesty of living; except they will have them run headlong into over-many jeopardies, as Ulysses had done many times, if Pallas had not always governed him; if he had not used to stop his ears with wax, to bind himself to the mast of his ship, to feed daily upon that sweet herb Moly, with the black root and the white flower, given unto him by Mercury to avoid all the enchantments of Circes.
—Roger Ascham, The Scholemaster
BORROWING from J.G.A. Pocock’s description of Machiavelli’s The Prince as “an analytic study of innovation and its consequences” (MM, 156), we can describe Comus as an analytic study of virtue and its consequences or, to rephrase this in the humanist vocabulary of the time, of virtue and power (virtus and vis). In Comus the problems of agency we observed in Areopagitica are signaled in two ways. On the one hand, the conflict between the Lady and Comus can be read as the allegorical opposition of Virtue to Force and Virtuosity, with the result that virtue comes to seem “unexercised and unbreathed.” On the other hand, as in Areopagitica, the “indifferent” rhetoric of the text suggests Milton’s effort to reunite—without conflating—virtue and power, intention and effect, in a single faculty analogous to Machiavellian virtù. Thus, as Angus Fletcher has noted, in Comus the genre of the masque is in conflict with itself: while invoking the allegorical conventions of its Stuart predecessors, Milton’s work also resists its own allegorical impulse.1 In this resistance Milton dramatizes both the strengths and the dilemmas of his own Machiavellian interpretation of virtue.
In the following pages I rehearse the topics of Machiavellism with an eye to the issues that will concern us in the discussion of Comus. In particular, the topics of intention and effect, virtue and success, will be recast in terms of the dilemmas of epideictic poetry. For, as many readers have noted, the problem of agency we observed in Areopagitica appears in Comus not only as a theological issue but also as a poetic one: the issue of the poet’s agency, his poetic virtuosity. I then turn to the Machiavellism of the two Stuart masques most often cited as precursors of Comus: Jonson’s Pleasure Reconcil’d to Virtue and Carew’s Coelum Britannicum. As Stephen Orgel has argued, the Stuart masque is ideologically both Platonic and Machiavellian: Platonic because it presents an ideal, hierarchical world and an image of the good to which the audience is supposed to aspire; Machiavellian “because its idealizations are designed to justify the power they celebrate.”2 In these masques, the poet’s aim is to justify the ways of the king to men by arguing that royal power is a sign of royal virtue. But, if these masques are stereotypically Machiavellian in the way Orgel suggests, they also engage the topics of Machiavellism more generally by asking us to reflect on the complicated relationship of virtue to success, intention to effect, both at court and in the writing of epideictic poetry. The Machiavellism of these masques can then help us understand Milton’s innovations in Comus.
Of particular importance in this context is that Jonson’s Pleasure Reconcil’d to Virtue served as an ideological justification of James’s “Declaration of Sports,” the proclamation that Sabbath entertainment is a thing indifferent and thus a matter of royal and ecclesiastical jurisdiction; also of note is that Comus was performed shortly after the reissue of the declaration by Charles I in 1633. Although Milton certainly recognized the self-serving (and in this sense Machiavellian) motives of the royal masque, Comus also dramatizes a different sort of Machiavellism, one that is manifest in his own rhetoric of things indifferent and his attempt to link virtue to virtù. While from one perspective this might be construed as Milton’s justification of the power he celebrates (ostensibly Bridgewater’s, finally God’s), from another equally important perspective Comus provides a rhetorical justification of dissent. For, in contrast to the intended equation of royal power with virtue, Milton tries to make individual virtue itself the locus of power, without thereby sacrificing a Machiavellian interest in effects. Comus thus provides an important link to Milton’s subsequent meditation on republican virtue in Paradise Lost for it allows us to see more clearly than Areopagitica the poetic implications of contemporary debates concerning the agency of the individual believer and the political dissenter. It also shows us that well before Areopagitica Milton was exploring the question of indifference—and its rhetorical implications—in his poetry.
Virtù and Virtuosity
We can begin to address the issue of poetic virtuosity by noting that the Renaissance poet and courtier shared a concern with the conspicuous display of virtù or virtuosity.3 As I briefly suggested in part 2 of this book, in presupposing a flexible faculty of judgment, virtù is in some respects like the sprezzatura of Castiglione’s courtier. Neither is intrinsically related to the conventional virtues though—or precisely because—in each case the virtues may be assumed for the sake of appearances. Just as the Machiavel was characterized in terms of his amoral or, in Christian terms, immoral manipulation of appearances, so a similar anxiety attended the social upstart, specifically the low-born individual who assumed the manners and appearance of a noble or courtier and who, as a result, was often described as Machiavellian. The fear was that a supposedly innate condition such as social status could be achieved or feigned. Here we have a stereotypically Machiavellian version of the trope of virtue and success, according to which “virtue” is the rhetorical effect of success rather than vice versa.
An apparently benign, poetic version of this trope appears in Renaissance discussions of epideictic rhetoric, that form of rhetoric in which the poet praises or blames in order to incite to ethical action. While pretending to mirror the virtues of his addressee, the poet aspires to produce the effect of virtue as the result of his successful (persuasive) representation. As Jonson writes in his poetic epistle to Selden:
Though I confess (as every muse hath erred,
And mine not least) I have too oft preferred
Men past their terms, and praised some names too much,
But ’twas with purpose to have made them such.
(ll. 19–22)
Hyperbole—here, the representation of virtue as already achieved—is the means of ethical persuasion.
But epideictic rhetoric may also raise the specter of Machiavellian selfinterest. The social insubordination of the Machiavel, who manipulates appearances to his own ends, finds a poetic equivalent in the insubordination of the poet, who uses rhetoric not to persuade to the good but rather to seduce or simply to display his own poetic virtuosity. In the traditional tripartite division of rhetoric, it is epideictic discourse that is most prominently associated with this self-reflexive capability of rhetoric and poetics. According to contemporary treatises, the epideictic poem does not merely praise or instruct; it is also the genre of self-display, the genre that allows the poet to give a virtuoso performance. The traditional anxiety about the orator’s ability to defend evil as well as good here finds an analogue in the anxiety about—and the love of—appearances for their own sake or, more accurately, for the sake of poetic self-aggrandizement. Poetic virtuosity thus becomes a trope for virtuosity at court or in politics more generally.4 As with the ambivalence attending the figure of the courtier, here too the fear is that the relationships of virtue to success, and means to ends, will be inverted: rather than subordinating aesthetic display to ethical ends, the ethical instruction of the text is the occasion of poetic virtuosity and self-aggrandizement.
As we will see, this anxiety about appearances and virtuosity—about “works”—was complicated for some poets writing in the 1630s by the conflict between Archbishop Laud’s perceived emphasis on ritual or ceremony and his puritan critics. Those puritans who believed in strict predestination tended to see Laudian innovation as Arminian, as stressing the achievement of salvation through ritual rather than seeing salvation or damnation as a fixed condition. Conversely, those puritans who were sympathetic to Arminianism, with its belief in free will and individual effort, condemned Laudian ritual as a kind of institutionalized inertia or theological defense of the social and political status quo.5
As the previous chapters have suggested, there are a variety of responses to the ambivalence about virtuosity or the power of appearances in the Renaissance. One prominent one is to moralize rhetoric by appealing to some extrarhetorical standard, such as natural law, innate virtue, or divine grace. Another response is to rhetoricize virtue, to make of it a practice rather than a thing—in short, to dereify it. In the first case, the praise of virtue may take the form of grounding it in, for example, natural law or divine right; in the second, virtue is inseparable from the play of rhetoric or figuration. In its revision of the Stuart masque, Comus dramatizes both responses, and thus registers an ambivalence about virtuosity in a particularly salient way. A look at Jonson’s Pleasure Reconcil’d to Virtue and Carew’s Coelum Britannicum can help us understand Milton’s own Machiavellian virtuosity, his attempt to reappropriate virtù for his own poetic and political ends.
Jonson and Carew
The problems faced by the author of a masque are the problems of epideictic rhetoric, whether he aims to justify or to instruct: in the first case, the poet must make the activity of praise seem like inactivity, like the mere reflection of reality; in the second, the poet’s praise must encourage the activity of imitation on the part of the viewer. These problems reappear in the rhetoric of the masque which, in anatomizing royal virtue, also comments on the conditions of representing it. Insofar as it is already achieved, such virtue is best represented by the spectacular, hieratic, and symbolic elements of the masque. But insofar as the goal is also to dramatize the power or efficaciousness of royal virtue, the masque requires some action. The danger here is that an active virtue will suggest the mutability of royal virtue, the instability of royal power. In form and theme the Stuart masque thus registers those anxieties about the vulnerability of ritual and status to innovation and individual effort, which contemporaries associated with Machiavellism.
Orgel comments on the problem of representing royal virtue in his analysis of Pleasure Reconcil’d to Virtue: although the explicit argument of the masque is that virtue must be active, the main character, Hercules, is conspicuously inactive.6 As the figure of Hercules illustrates, one way both to represent virtue as active and to contain the threatened association of activity with mutability and indeterminacy is to relegate such activity to the past (Hercules’s choice has already been made, his labors already achieved). Another way is to represent activity as “wholly mental”: “The two antimasque episodes tell us that a virtuous and constant mind will triumph over the forces of evil.” But, as Orgel notes, activity as mutability resurfaces in the conclusion of the masque, suggesting a possible critique of virtue at court. Pleasure Reconcil’d to Virtue deliberately registers “the strains of idealization” and in so doing criticizes the status quo.7
Carew’s Coelum Britannicum displays a similar conflict in its representation of royal virtue. Jennifer Chibnall has argued that the masque tries to negotiate between two conflicting ideologies, an older “aristocratic code of hospitality and paternalism in a stable society with ‘clear class distinctions’” and “the new ‘capitalist/Protestant ethic’ of self-improvement, thrift, hard work and competition.”8 One need not accept Chibnall’s equation of an ethic of self-improvement and competition with emergent capitalism to agree that Coelum Britannicum registers a conflict between virtue as an innate, already achieved condition, and virtue as the product of effort or labor.9 Thus the figure of Plutus refers to “the daily sacrifice / Brought to my Temple by the toyling rout” (ll. 298–99), but this effort on behalf of “gainfull trade” (l. 508) is rejected as incompatible with true virtue. Yet, true virtue requires an effort of its own:
we advance
Such vertues onely as admit excesse,
Brave bounteous Acts, Regall Magnificence,
All-seeing Prudence, Magnanimity
That knowes no bound, and that Heroicke vertue
For which Antiquity hath left no name,
But patternes only, such as Hercules. . . .
(ll. 559–65)
Commenting on Mercury’s rejection of “Falsly exalted passive Fortitude” in favor of aristocratic “Heroicke vertue,” Chibnall defines the paradoxical position of the Stuart aristocrat in the following way: “A virtue that could know a ‘bound’ cannot satisfy the aspiration of the aristocrat who must define his place as above all servility. This place cannot be static yet must be stable” (87; see also 82–83). The contrast between two kinds of effort is summed up in Mercury’s address to Charles:
The growing Titles of your Ancestors,
These Nations glorious Acts, joyn’d to the stocke
Of your owne Royall vertues, and the cleare
Reflexe they take from th’ imitation
Of your fam’d Court, make Honors storie full,
And have to that secure fix’d state advanc’d
Both you and them, to which the labouring world,
Wading through streames of blood, sweats to aspire.
(ll. 848–55)
Although “glorious Acts” are a part of royal virtue, the appearance of effortful imitation is mitigated by the rhetoric of reflection: such acts are “the cleare reflexe” of the court, which is why the effort of advancing does not threaten the “fix’d state” of royal virtue. In contrast, “the labouring world” seems to expend all its effort merely aspiring to the condition of action.
The paradox of advancing to fixity is further illustrated in the conclusion to the masque when Genius asserts that the fame of Charles and Henrietta-Maria “shall flye / From hence above, and in the Spheare / Kindle new Starres, whilst they rest here” (ll. 993–95). Chibnall comments, “The resolution of the contradiction between ideal stability and real action is thus achieved by creating a separation between the real and ideal self that can yet be united in mutual influence” (90). Here virtue is ideally reconciled to meritorious effort while being distinguished from mere aspiration: Charles’s reign is one “Where faire Desert, and Honour meet” (l. 1117).
If Coelum Britannicum illustrates the conflict between Neoplatonic virtue and individual virtù, fixity and advancement, Pleasure Reconcil’d to Virtue stages this conflict with specific reference to the doctrine of things indifferent. As a number of critics have remarked, Pleasure Reconcil’d to Virtue provides a kind of metacommentary on the ideological function of the court masque: in this work, Jonson defends James’s policy regarding the indifference of recreation on the Sabbath, including the recreation of the masque. Yet, in taking as his subject royal jurisdiction over things indifferent, Jonson also comments on the Machiavellian instability of equating royal virtue with “faire Desert.”
In the view of James and his bishops, recreation on the Sabbath was to be allowed to those who attended the Anglican church services and forbidden to those who did not. The declaration also served as an implicit defense of Anglican ritual and court ceremony for, at the time it was issued, James was trying to bring the Scottish church into conformity with the Church of England.10 In his proclamation James singled out for special rebuke those “Papists and Puritans” who opposed his policy and whose opposition was creating unrest in the countryside. Speaking of his travels through Lancashire, James wrote:
We heard the general complaint of our people, that they were barred from all lawful recreations and exercise upon the Sunday’s afternoon, after the ending of all divine service, which cannot but produce two evils: the one the hindering of the conversion of many, whom their priests will take occasion hereby to vex, persuading them that no honest mirth or recreation is lawful or tolerable in our religion, which cannot but breed a great discontentment in our people’s hearts, especially of such as are peradventure upon the point of turning; the other inconvenience is, that this prohibition barreth the common and meaner sort of people from using such exercises as may make their bodies more able for war, when His Majesty or his successors shall have occasion to use them.11
Jonson’s masque provided a justification of James’s proclamation, arguing that “though [Virtue’s] sports be soft, / her life is hard” (ll. 300–301). Here, too, recreation is a thing indifferent which, while it may be abused, may also be used to consolidate the authority of church and state. This point was forcefully dramatized by the masquers who, according to the report of the Venetian ambassador, wore the red robes and mitres of Anglican bishops. At a time when James’s innovations in Scotland were accused of being “idolatrous,” Jonson praises James’s pleasures as a sign of labor and of virtue.12
This dual justification of pleasure is registered in a dual rhetoric: a Neoplatonic rhetoric of vision and a rhetoric of labor and virtù. On the one hand, the threatening indifference of pleasure is controlled by the oversight of royal virtue; on the other, pleasure is not only the “crowned reward” of “godlike travail” (ll. 90, 116) but is itself a kind of labor. Thus, in Mercury’s speech, which echoes the passage just quoted from the “Declaration of Sports,” pleasure itself becomes a kind of labor: “Since in [Virtue’s] sight and by her charge all’s done, / Pleasure the servant, Virtue looking on” (ll. 191–92). Just as the “common and meaner sort of people” will become more serviceable or useful to the king through sport, so here pleasure remains virtue’s—that is, James’s—servant. As Milton clearly saw, however, the justification of royal virtue and the royal policy regarding things indifferent by an appeal to right usage and “labor hard” (l. 91) is unstable: it introduces the indeterminacy and contingency of choice into the Neoplatonic allegory of virtue (l. 274), and so exposes the Neoplatonic rhetoric of vision as a verbal and interpretive effect.
In the beginning of the masque, Jonson implies that sight or vision is itself a form of action, thus reconciling the conflicting claims of action and inaction. After Hercules awakes, the choir sings:
Wake, Hercules, awake: but heave up thy black eye
’Tis only asked from thee to look and those [pygmies] will die,
Or fly.
Already they are fled,
Whom scorn had else left dead.
(ll. 140–44; see also ll. 170, 191, 202)
Mercury drives the point home doubly in the next line: “Rest still, thou active friend of Virtue” (my emphasis). Rest is here a sign of activity, and this oxymoron is contained as well in “still,” meaning “without motion” and “continually.” Even when Daedalus’s songs make it clear that vision does not produce meaning unless an activity of reading or interpretation intervenes (ll. 195–201), the threat of such activity is contained by presenting the labor of choice and interpretation as already having taken place in the past. Jonson thus builds into the representation of choice an invulnerability to risk or danger; legibility becomes a figure for the security of morality in the present. The quibble on figure in the following lines illustrates this nicely:
Come on, come on; and where you go,
So interweave the curious knot,
As ev’n th’ observer scarce may know
Which lines are Pleasure’s and which not.
First, figure out the doubtful way
At which awhile all youth should stay,
Where she and Virtue did contend
Which should have Hercules to friend.
(ll. 224–31)
“Figure out” is a command to the dancers to trace out or represent the scene of Hercules at the crossroads and only secondarily an injunction to reenact Hercules’s choice—precisely because the choice is represented as already having occurred. At the same time, this displacement of the labor of choice makes the dancers’ motions (the “lines” of line 227) legible, like lines of poetry, in the present:
So let your dances be entwined,
Yet not perplex men unto gaze;
But measured, and so numerous too,
As men may read each act you do.
(ll. 234–37)
Yet, as with the earlier demonstration that pleasure may be abused, so here the poet acknowledges that vision may be as well. Seeing may perplex, as well as inform, the gaze: it may not be possible to tell “which lines are Pleasure’s and which not.” Accordingly, the final lines of the song declare that vision is not enough: the beholder must also have the “power” to rise to the occasion. By the time we have reached the third song, choice and interpretation are located in the present rather than the past—“Go choose” Daedalus urges—and while “what is noble should be sweet,” “wantonness” is still a possibility (ll. 282–83). This emphasis on power and choice looks forward to the last song of the masque, which comments on the earlier displacement of effort by reintegrating labor into the present. Although the argument of the masque up to this point has been that one need not choose between pleasure and virtue (they are reconciled in James’s reign), in these final lines pleasure is forcefully placed in a subordinate position:
But she [virtue] will have you know
That though
Her sports be soft, her life is hard.
You must return unto the hill,
And there advance
With labor, and inhabit still
That height and crown
From whence you ever may look down
Upon triumphèd Chance.
(ll. 299–307)
These concluding lines are far more ambivalent than the body of the masque regarding the possibility of reconciling pleasure and virtue. The emphasis instead is on labor and, to make matters worse, a labor that does not necessarily or usually find its reward on earth. “Place” is not a guarantee of merit; virtue must be its own reward. Once the necessity of effort is acknowledged in the present rather than narrated in the past tense, the ambiguities of virtù come to the fore. Thus, although these lines can be read as Jonson the stoic criticizing the facile virtue of some courtiers and reminding us that true virtue means sovereignty over oneself (“inhabit still / That height and crown”), they also articulate something like a Machiavellian sense of the relation of virtue to virtù: virtù is the faculty of innovation that allows one to respond to fortuna, ideally “to advance / With labor, and inhabit still,” that is, to create “stillness” out of motion, stability out of instability, order out of disorder. But virtù can also take the form of assuming a virtue if one has it not. Here the labor of virtù may allow one to achieve a higher place in—thereby threatening the fixity of—the social and political order. In such a world, virtue is its own reward (1.298) or will find its reward in heaven precisely because on earth labor is not correlated in any direct way with moral results or intentions (cf. Jonsonian Masque, 184–85). The final lines of the song comment, “only she [virtue] can make you great, / Though place here make you known” (ll. 316–17). The ultimate threat in such a world is that virtue itself will be displaced to heaven, that, in the Neoplatonic rhetoric of vision, one can only “look down” on “triumphèd chance” from a position of exile or impotence.
The problem of justifying power as virtue in the Stuart masque might now be summarized as the problem of how to make inaction look like action (and vice versa), and how to make status look like (or even claim that it should involve) achievement without threatening the status quo. Yet, from our brief analysis of Pleasure Reconcil’d to Virtue and Coelum Britannicum, it appears that the rhetoric of virtue is inseparable from that of virtù, and that the latter may serve either to uphold or undermine royal authority. In Milton’s masque the tension between status and activity is also manifest in two conflicting notions of virtue: virtue as innate and virtue as created in the activity of choice, deliberation, action, or works. As we will see, Comus rings its own changes on the relation of virtue to effects and of innovation to authority.
Comus
Just as Pleasure Reconcil’d to Virtue was produced shortly after James’s “Declaration of Sports,” so Comus followed on Charles I’s reissue of the declaration in 1633. Unlike the “Papists and Puritans” who rejected the royal policy regarding sports altogether, Milton turns such policy on its head: as he would in Areopagitica, in Comus Milton appropriates the royal and ecclesiastical rhetoric of things indifferent in order both to expose the Machiavellism of the Anglican establishment and to anatomize and justify the virtù of the individual Christian and poet. My aim in the following pages is to enlist the masque as further evidence of Milton’s pervasive Machiavellism.
We can begin to characterize the Machiavellism of Comus in a preliminary way by noting that the Attendant Spirit’s description of Comus’s genealogy (ll. 46ff.) recalls Ascham’s warning against Italianate courtiers in The Scholemaster.13 Comus is a virtuoso rhetorician (the Lady refers to his “dear Wit and gay Rhetoric,” l. 790), just as he is the Machiavel or Vice conspiring to undermine the Lady’s virtue. And Comus’s own rhetoric suggests both the magical force and the fraud of rhetoric, alternating as it does between the cadences of Shakespeare’s Puck and Ariel (e.g., ll. 94–144), and the deceptiveness of the courtly figure of Puttenham’s allegoria:
I under fair pretense of friendly ends
And well-plac’t words of glozing courtesy,
Baited with reasons not unplausible,
Wind me into the easy-hearted man,
And hug him into snares. When once her eye
Hath met the virtue of this Magic dust,
I shall appear some harmless Villager
Whom thrift keeps up about his Country gear.
(ll. 160–67)
Like Archimago in book 1 of The Faerie Queene, who “well could file his tongue as smooth as glass” (FQ, 1.1.35, 1.7), or Despaire whose alliterative style anticipates Comus’s “well-plac’t words” (FQ, 1.9.38–47), Comus’s courtliness or courtesy is fraudulent (“glozing”). Comus thus combines the indirect power of fraud with the direct rhetorical force Milton associated with Shakespeare, who affects the reader in the same way Comus affects the Lady. Just as Comus makes the Lady “a statue” (l. 660), in “stony fetters fixt and motionless” (l. 819), so Milton had earlier described Shakespeare’s power to “make us Marble with too much conceiving” (“On Shakespeare,” Hughes, 64).
Comus’s Machiavellism is also brought home by his association with “revelry” (l. 103). Like Jonson’s Comus in Pleasure Reconcil’d to Virtue, Milton’s Comus is a figure of court entertainment or sport (ll. 103, 128), and thus the embodiment of royal and ecclesiastical policy concerning things indifferent. Just as William Bradshaw saw indifference as the rhetorical cover for political Machiavellism, so Comus’s Machiavellian rhetoric has obvious political connotations: like the bishops who, in Greville’s words, bind “up the Peoples Liberty” “with the chaines [of] Indifferency,” Comus has used “baits and guileful spells” (l. 537) to chain up unwary forest travelers.14 In Eikonoklastes Milton would make Charles himself a Comus figure, one who uses “glozing words” and “deceavable Doctrines” to “captivate and make useless that natural freedom of will in all other men but himself,” whereas his idolatrous subjects are described as “men inchanted with the Circaean cup of servitude.”15
In its allusions both to Milton’s predecessors and to royal and ecclesiastical policy, Comus’s language directs us once again to the analogy between the right use of things indifferent and rhetorical activity. On the one hand, Comus dramatizes the problem of how to engage in “sports”—including masques—without seconding royal and ecclesiastical policy.16 On the other, it points to the related problem of Milton’s own poetic agency or virtuosity: how to make room for poetic innovation while still refuting the association of rhetorical power with demonic—or royal—force and fraud. Although part of the analytical task of the masque would seem to be to distinguish the chaste virtuosity of the Christian poet from the seductive virtù of the Machiavel, that generations of readers have referred to Milton’s masque by the name of its Machiavellian protagonist suggests that the poet and the Machiavel may simply be two sides of the same indifferent coin. Comus is the obvious embodiment of virtù and rhetorical virtuosity in the masque; in his resemblance to the courtly Machiavel and his anticipation of Satan in Paradise Lost, Comus raises the question of whether all virtuosity is not in some way Machiavellian or demonic in a world ruled by God.
Both the occasion of Comus and the rhetoric of the Attendant Spirit’s opening speech raise questions of right government, obedience, and authority, which are associated with the masques at court. Comus was performed for the Earl of Bridgewater in honor of his appointment as head of the Council of the Marches in Wales. The performance took place on Michaelmas, a liturgical holiday associated with the investiture of magistrates and governors.17 Yet, although the Attendant Spirit in his opening speech equates virtue and virtù in the figure of Bridgewater—“A noble Peer of mickle trust and power,” who is also “mindful of the Crown that Virtue gives”—once we descend to earth, the relation of virtue to virtù is no longer celebrated but rather open to question. The virtuous “fair offspring” of the Earl require the external aid and protection of the Spirit. From this point on, the focus of the masque appears to narrow considerably. We are no longer dealing with obvious questions of political sovereignty but, as with the end of Pleasure Reconcil’d to Virtue, with sovereignty over the self. Or rather, the question of political sovereignty is relocated to the self. Furthermore, compared to the initial celebration of magistracy, the problem is now analogous but reversed. The question is no longer how to present (and justify) the magistrate’s power as virtuous but how to present individual virtue itself as a source of power.18 That the Lady is eventually arrested by Comus’s spell then emerges as the interpretive crux of the masque: is the Lady’s stasis a form of action or inaction, willed obedience or the inability to will (to go forward)? Is the Lady tempted and, if not, has her virtue been tested? And if not, is it virtue? In Machiavellian terms, what is the relation of virtue to virtù, that is, what is the relation of virtue to power and to the skillful manipulation of the realm of indifference?
In posing such questions, Comus comments on and revises the Neoplatonic and Machiavellian rhetoric of the Stuart masque. As we will see, Milton criticizes a Neoplatonic rhetoric of vision, associated, according to some critics, not only with divine right but also with a Laudian emphasis on ritual and spectacle. But, in offering a puritan critique of such visibilia, Milton does not decisively reject justification by works.19 He does not divorce ethics from effects—as would, for different reasons, a simple ethics of intention or a stereotypically Machiavellian emphasis on effects. Rather, Comus dramatizes the conflict between faith and works, between an antinomian emphasis on grace and an Arminian belief in human agency; and it does so by staging a conflict between what I will call the allegorical and rhetorical plots of the masque. If the allegorical plot, concerning the Lady’s triumph over Comus, locates the virtù of virtue in divine grace, the rhetorical plot shows that for a genuine trial of virtue to take place there can be no simple correspondence between virtù and grace, means and ends, intention and effect. In recovering a sense of the contingency of human action, this plot restores virtù to the poet (and thus, indirectly, to the individual Christian), but at the price of admitting its indifference: its vulnerability and moral ambiguity. As in Areopagitica, here too rhetorical indifference gives rise to the dilemmas of Machiavellism that it is designed to control. The stereotypical Machiavellism of illegitimate force and fraud proves to be inextricable from Machiavellism conceived as the effort to join, without conflating, intention and effect, virtù and success. In the tension between the allegorical and rhetorical plots, Milton gives us an anatomy of the possible relationships of virtue to virtù, and dramatizes the conflict we saw in Areopagitica between absolute truth and “knowledge in the making” (Hughes, 743). As in Areopagitica, so in Comus rhetoric proves to be the locus of agency and of resistance to external authority, even the authority of Truth or God.20
The initial opposition of Comus and the Lady provides us with the lineaments of the allegorical plot. As we have seen, Comus is associated with sport, revelry, dazzling spells and rites—all of which suggest episcopacy and the royal interpretation of the doctrine of things indifferent. He also speaks of “the virtue of this Magic dust” that will deceive the Lady into thinking he is “some harmless Villager” (ll. 165–66), thereby reducing virtue to virtù or power in the fashion of the stereoytypical Machiavel. In contrast, the Lady appears as a figure of virtue, whose virtù is not her own but the result of divine intervention. In her very first speech, she summarizes the allegorical conflict of the masque:
A thousand fantasies
Begin to throng into my memory,
Of calling shapes and beck’ning shadows dire,
And airy tongues that syllable men’s names
On Sands and Shores and desert Wildernesses.
These thoughts may startle well, but not astound
The virtuous mind, that ever walks attended
By a strong siding champion Conscience.——
O welcome pure-ey’d Faith, white-handed Hope,
Thou hov’ring Angel girt with golden wings,
And thou unblemish’t form of Chastity,
I see ye visibly, and now believe
That he, the Supreme good, t’ whom all things ill
Are but as slavish officers of vengeance,
Would send a glist’ring Guardian, if need were,
To keep my life and honor unassail’d.
(ll. 205–20)
In the allegorical plot, evil is associated with the “thousand fantasies” that call to mind Comus’s “dazzling Spells . . . / Of power to cheat the eye with blear illusion” (l. 155). In contrast to the virtù of the evil Machiavel, which yields powerful—if deceptive—effects, virtue is represented as a matter of intention, of faith and conscience, whose virtù is the result of divine aid. In the Lady’s anticipation of her trial, the moral of the allegory is that the virtuous mind will be rewarded in times of trouble with the assistance of divine virtù. Yet, both the representation of this crisis later in the masque and the intervening dialogue register some discomfort with the allegorical plot.
The exchange between the Lady’s two brothers provides a commentary on the allegorical plot, for the questions they debate are precisely those that the reader confronts: what kind of trial could the Lady, as an allegorical figure of virtue, possibly undergo, and what would such a trial reveal about the relationship of virtue to virtù? In the Second Brother’s eyes, the ethic of intention that the Lady expresses leaves her entirely vulnerable to the dangers of the forest. In the eyes of the Elder Brother, the Lady is completely protected by her own innate virtue. In the first case, the exclusive focus on inner light means that experience is merely contingent and potentially harmful; in the second case, the emphasis on inner virtue means that there is no contingency of experience at all. This debate then receives its own ironic comment, as the Elder Brother is gradually forced to admit that the “virtuous mind” does need external aid in the form of divine protection. If we now retrace this exchange in detail, we will see that it prepares the reader to be skeptical not only of the brothers’ theoretical approach to the meaning of virtue but also of the Lady’s own abstract and theoretical virtue—a virtue that in the language of Areopagitica we might call “blank” (Hughes, 728).
In response to the Second Brother’s fears for the Lady’s safety, the Elder Brother first argues that there is no need to anticipate (“forestall”) or seek out evil, especially if such anticipation is due to the illusions of the imagination:
Peace brother, be not over-exquisite
To cast the fashion of uncertain evils;
For grant they be so, while they rest unknown,
What need a man forestall his date of grief,
And run to meet what he would most avoid?
Or if they be but false alarms of Fear,
How bitter is such self-delusion?
(ll. 359–65)
Yet, while the Elder Brother advises restraint, he also insists, like Spenser’s Redcrosse, on the self-sufficiency of virtue:
I do not think my sister so to seek,
Or so unprincipl’d in virtue’s book
And the sweet peace that goodness bosoms ever,
As that the single want of light and noise
(Not being in danger, as I trust she is not)
Could stir the constant mood of her calm thoughts,
And put them into misbecoming plight.
Virtue could see to do what virtue would
By her own radiant light. . . .
(ll. 366–71; cf. Faerie Queene, 1.1.12, 9)
These arguments are two sides of the same coin: if virtue is innate and self-sufficient, there is no need to test or strengthen it in active confrontation with evil. But here, as in Eve’s argument for tending the garden alone in Paradise Lost (PL, 9.322–41), the wording is strangely vexed. How self-sufficient is virtue if it must put off (“forestall”) its “date of grief” or its recognition of self-delusion?
A similar question emerges with the Elder Brother’s characterization of wisdom, which follows on the assertion of the self-sufficiency of virtue:
And Wisdom’s self
Oft seeks to sweet retired Solitude,
Where with her best nurse Contemplation
She plumes her feathers, and lets grow her wings
That in the various bustle of resort
Were all to-ruffl’d, and somtimes impair’d.
He that has light within his own clear breast
May sit i’th’ center, and enjoy bright day,
But he that hides a dark soul and foul thoughts
Benighted walks under the midday Sun;
Himself is his own dungeon.
(ll. 375–84)
In the last five lines of this speech the Elder Brother equates Wisdom with the “inner light,” the assurance of faith or the knowledge of one’s right intention, rather than with the activity or trial of “knowledge in the making.” In this equation, genuine trial or danger is forestalled—both anticipated and precluded—since the external world is simply a reflection of one’s ethical predisposition. Yet, the description of Wisdom as impervious to experience is undermined by the prior characterization of Wisdom as vulnerable to the challenges of the active life. Although the Elder Brother asserts that his sister is not “so to seek” (so at a loss) that she would be disturbed by her experience in the woods, Wisdom is described as “seek[ing] . . . sweet retired Solitude” (l. 375) in order to recover from “the various bustle of resort” (l. 379). The Elder Brother’s rhetoric thus contradicts his assertion of the self-sufficiency of virtue by suggesting that the contemplative life is not a self-sufficient condition but rather a momentary withdrawal from the exertions of the active life.
The Second Brother seems to have anticipated the problems with equating Virtue and Wisdom with an ethic of intention or the inner light when, to the Elder Brother’s argument that there is no real danger, he replies that there is no defense. As with Spenser’s analysis of pride and despair in book 1 of The Faerie Queene, the two views dialectically imply each other; neither allows for the genuine interaction of virtue and experience. This eclipse of experience is represented here by the Second Brother’s use of the concept of opportunity:
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,
And let a single helpless maiden pass
Uninjured in this wild surrounding waste.
(ll. 398–403)
In these lines opportunity is not equivalent to the rhetorical notion of occasion as that which can be used well or badly, but is instead described simply as an occasion for danger. The rhetorical effect is a kind of inversion or parody of Machiavelli’s description of fortune as a woman who may be mastered by the prince’s virtù : in the shifting analogy between the miser’s treasure, opportunity, and “a single helpless maiden,” the Machiavellian prince is reduced to a virgin who is certain to be raped by occasion.
In response to this concern, the Elder Brother gives us a slightly revised account of the relationship of virtue to virtù. While agreeing with the younger brother that the Lady may rely on the “strength of Heav’n” (l. 417), he also gives her a power of her own. In words that echo the Lady’s first speech about her imperviousness to the “airy tongues that syllable men’s names / On Sands and Shores and desert Wildernesses,” he remarks:
’Tis chastity, my brother, chastity;
She that has that, is clad in complete steel,
And like a quiver’d Nymph with Arrows keen
May trace huge Forests and unharbor’d Heaths,
Infamous Hills and sandy perilous wilds.
And he goes on to compare the power of chastity to the Gorgon:
What was that snaky-headed Gorgon shield
That wise Minerva wore, unconquer’d Virgin,
Wherewith she freez’d her foes to congeal’d stone,
But rigid looks of Chaste austerity
And noble grace that dash’t brute violence
With sudden adoration and blank awe?
(ll. 420–24, 447–52)
This speech concerning the tremendous power of chastity then receives an ironic comment in the Elder Brother’s offer to use his sword to defend his sister—something that would not be necessary if she were really capable of freezing her foes to stone—and in the Spirit’s rebuff that something of more “divine effect” (l. 630) is needed. It also ironically anticipates the very next scene, in which the Lady appears “chain’d up in Alabaster” by Comus’s spell. What the Elder Brother’s speech suggests is that chastity’s most powerful Gorgon effect may be to freeze the Lady herself into a position of vulnerability rather than strength.21
The culmination of the allegorical plot, in which Virtue is rescued by divine virtù, is also a turning point in which divine intervention is revealed to be disturbingly like the “force . . . and wile” of Comus. To begin with, in rebuffing the Elder Brother, the Spirit proposes remedies that recall Comus’s “virtue of some Magic dust”:
Care and utmost shifts
How to secure the Lady from surprisal,
Brought to my mind a certain Shepherd Lad
Of small regard to see to, yet well skill’d
In every virtuous plant and healing herb.
(ll. 617–21)
Like Comus, the Spirit resorts to “shifts” and “virtuous” plants to work his magic. Furthermore, in asking Sabrina to save the Lady from her Machiavellian opponent, the Spirit calls attention to the similarities between divine grace and Machiavellian force:
Goddess dear
We implore thy powerful hand
To undo the charmed band
Of true Virgin here distrest,
Through the force and through the wile
Of unblest enchanter vile.
(ll. 902–907)
As in the passages from Dell, Saltmarsh, and others, which were examined in chapter 5, here, too, force can be a sign of faith or of fraud: it may take the form of Sabrina’s “powerful hand” or Comus’s force and wile. The indifference of force is only further accentuated by the Spirit’s speaking in the same cadences and with the same Shakespearean rhetoric as Comus. The question this passage raises is, what are we to make of this indifference of rhetoric and force?
This passage is exemplary because it dramatizes the conflict between the allegorical and rhetorical plots of the masque. The culmination of the allegorical plot is also the moment of greatest resistance to it, since the indifference of rhetoric and force points to the similarity between Comus’s spells and the action of grace. This similarity can be interpreted in one of two ways. On the one hand, the rhetoric of power suggests that, like Comus’s spells, grace may be coercive and preclude the genuine exercise of virtue. In this construction, while Milton allegorizes divine intervention, he also resists the explicit moral of the masque by calling attention to the coerciveness of grace. On the other hand, that Sabrina and Comus are both creatures of virtù and speak the same iambic quadrimeter verse directs our attention to the rhetorical plot of the masque, in which the same means and same rhetoric can be used to different ends and different effects. In doing so, it helps us recapture a sense of Christian liberty as active rather than passive, and of a virtù that is the expression of individual virtue.
The conclusion of the masque dramatizes a similar conflict between the allegorical and rhetorical plots, and between the force of grace and the force of individual virtue:
Mortals that would follow me,
Love virtue, she alone is free,
She can teach ye how to climb
Higher than the Sphery chime;
Or if Virtue feeble were,
Heav’n itself would stoop to her.
(ll. 1019–24)
These lines present the Lady’s and the Elder Brother’s conviction that the virtuous mind is self-sufficient, and that when virtue is feeble, she will be aided by divine grace. As we have seen, these two views are dialectically related: the Lady’s absolute belief in her virtuous mind leads to her absolute dependence on divine intervention: internal strength is simply supplanted by external strength. While this reliance on divine grace is theologically sound from one perspective, from another it concedes too much. It denies the Lady the acquisition of virtue, as well as its active exercise. It is for this reason, I suggest, that the concluding lines are phrased in the subjunctive: although Sabrina has freed the Lady, the poet’s language preserves our sense that the relationship of virtù to virtue and Christian liberty is still unresolved or is itself conditional.
It is the conditional nature of this connection between virtue and virtù that informs what I have called the rhetorical plot of Comus. In this plot the deus ex machina intervention of Sabrina is precisely what the poet wants to avoid. Here a different relation between virtue and virtù is proposed: rather than assuming the freedom of virtue from moral danger or securing virtue by external power, virtue is exemplified in the appropriation of that power for one’s own use. Thus, if we return to the opening of the masque, we can see that, although Comus begins with an image of the heavenly sphere, we quickly find ourselves in a Spenserian wood of Error, a world in which there is no simple ascent by analogical reasoning to a Neoplatonic realm of forms or to heaven, no necessary descent of grace, and no necessary correspondence between aesthetic appearance or literary allusion and ethical import. In each case, the guaranteed correspondence of virtue and success would amount to an eclipse of individual agency, including that of the poet. To this forcible equation of virtue and effects, Milton opposes an uncertain equation, one that preserves the possibility of effective action in time. Like Areopagitica, Comus dramatizes the doctrine of things indifferent in its rhetoric and, in doing so, stages a counterplot to its own explicit moral. Whereas in the latter, virtue is weak unless aided by grace, in the former the emphasis is on works, specifically the work of reading. Poetic virtuosity thus becomes a trope for political and religious virtù.
The Attendant Spirit’s description of “perplex’t paths of this drear Wood” initially suggests the Wood of Error in The Faerie Queene. Yet, when the Lady first appears she reads the woods (like Una and Redcrosse) in two contradictory ways. They seem both “kind, hospitable” and threatening and “thievish.”22 Thus from the outset, there is no obvious, legible correspondence between appearances and ethics. Virtue is not simply a matter of vision but of right judgment, here represented by the sense of hearing; the Lady’s first words are “This way the noise was, if mine ear be true, / My best guide now” (ll. 170–71).23 Yet, the Lady’s conviction that the virtuous mind is unassailable creates a dilemma. If the woods cannot be misread or misused, then there is no possibility of error or seduction; but neither is it possible to tell the story of redemption. If this story is to be told, not only must the woods’ appearance be subject to interpretation, it must be possible to err. Like the Elder Brother, the Lady compromises by asserting both that the woods are the occasion of startling “fantasies” and that virtue can be seen in the present as though it were an allegorical emblem (“And thou unblemish’t form of Chastity / I see thee visibly”). However, her subsequent lines once again provide an ironic comment on this rhetoric of vision:
Was I deceiv’d, or did a sable cloud
Turn forth her silver lining on the night?
I did not err, there does a sable cloud
Turn forth her silver lining on the night,
And casts a gleam over this tufted Grove.
(ll. 221–24)
The internal echo of these lines is dramatized and, possibly, ironized in the Song to Echo that immediately follows, for it is hard to imagine how one could receive a genuine response from Echo. The Lady inquires of “Sweet Echo, sweetest Nymph that liv’st unseen”:
Canst thou not tell me of a gentle Pair
That likest thy Narcissus are?
O if thou have
Hid them in some flow’ry Cave,
Tell me where,
Sweet Queen of Parley, Daughter of the Sphere.
(ll. 236–41)
It may be that the reference to Echo’s Narcissus is intended as a further gloss on the Lady’s speech, as though to comment on the barren narcissism of a virtue that can never be astounded, that cannot in principle err. From this ironic perspective, her “I did not err” articulates a different view of virtue: it shows that virtue must be achieved in time and that only a specific encounter with temptation can be narrated in the past tense.24 The state of “having chosen” must be continually earned. The fact that the woods can be read in two ways and that deception is always possible (“Was I deceived . . .?” [l. 220]) then determines the figurative logic of the masque. Comus is not structured by simple dichotomies, according to which Comus is Shakespeare, song, rhetoric, and magic, the Lady Spenser, reason, and logic. The aim is not to cast out fantasies, rhetoric, or Shakespeare but to appropriate and use them correctly.
This point is dramatized in the appearance of the same disguises and rhetorical powers on both sides of the debate. Thus to Comus’s disguise we can counterpoint the Attendant Spirit’s, and to Comus’s association with Bacchus we can oppose the Spirit’s with Orpheus. (As Fletcher has noted, the name of the Attendant Spirit, “Thyrsis,” is also the name of Bacchus’s staff.) Comus’s song is answered by Sabrina’s, as are his implied powers of transformation. He changes himself into a shepherd and his captives into beasts, and Sabrina is described as having undergone “a quick immortal change” into “Goddess of the River” (ll. 841–42). Finally, the Lady, who rejects Comus’s rhetoric and fantasy for the inviolability of the virtuous mind, is depicted as a powerful rhetorician almost in spite of herself. Her first song has a ravishing effect on both Comus and the Attendant Spirit (ll. 245–70, 555–67), both of whom describe it in language that suggests A Midsummer Night’s Dream. And, although the Lady’s initial rejection of Comus’s flattering response—“ill is lost that praise / That is addrest to unattending Ears; / Not any boast of skill, but extreme shift / How to regain my sever’d company, / Compell’d me to awake the courteous Echo” (ll. 271–75)—suggests that she is unwilling to recognize the power of her own rhetoric, in her final exchange with Comus she demonstrates her understanding that there is a right use of rhetoric, in particular of epideictic.
Like the dialogue between the two brothers, the debate between Comus and the Lady provides a metacommentary on the masque. As we have seen, the genre of the masque was intrinsically bound up with praise of the sovereign or of the noble family that had commissioned it. This epideictic task in turn generated a series of anxieties and dilemmas: the poet must subordinate the aesthetic display of the masque to the ethical end of representing and teaching virtue. To this point in the masque, Comus has been the figure most prominently associated both with rhetorical display and with the courtly milieu of the masque, whereas the Lady has symbolized a rejection of masquing and revelry. In this final exchange, however, the Lady explicitly appropriates the power of rhetoric as her own. Comus begins the debate by introducing the question of the use of nature’s gifts:
Why should you be so cruel to yourself,
And to those dainty limbs which nature lent
For gentle usage and soft delicacy?
But you invert the cov’nants of her trust,
And harshly deal like an ill borrower
With that you receiv’d on other terms,
Scorning the unexempt condition
By which all mortal frailty must subsist,
Refreshment after toil, ease after pain,
That have been tir’d all day without repast,
And timely rest have wanted; but, fair Virgin,
This will restore all soon.
(ll. 679–90)
For Comus, the Lady’s chaste refusal of “all the pleasures / That fancy can beget on youthful thoughts” (ll. 668–69) amounts to ingratitude, a refusal of the obligation of praise: “If all the world / Should in a pet of temperance feed on Pulse, / Drink the clear stream, and nothing wear but Frieze, / Th’ all-giver would be unthank’t, would be unprais’d” (ll. 720–23). In a rhetoric that looks forward to the serpent’s in Paradise Lost, Comus urges both the self-display that is characteristic of epideictic discourse—“beauty is nature’s brag, and must be shown / In courts, at feasts, and high solemnities / Where most may wonder at the workmanship” (ll. 745–47)—and the “mutual and partak’n bliss” associated with the carpe diem poem (l. 741). At the same time, Comus’s language—which echoes that of Despaire in The Faerie Queene (1.9.38–47)—alerts the reader to the deadly narcissism of his own vision of epideictic rhetoric. In response, the Lady redefines the problem as one not simply of use but of right use:
I hate when vice can bolt her arguments,
And virtue has no tongue to check her pride:
Impostor, do not charge most innocent nature,
As if she would her children should be riotous
With her abundance; she, good cateress,
Means her provision only to the good
That live according to her sober laws
And holy dictate of spare Temperance.
(ll. 760–67)
Only when nature’s blessings are evenly dispensed is the giver “better thank’t, / His praise due paid” (ll. 775–76). In this speech, the Lady redefines nature as a realm of things indifferent. At the same time she shows that epideictic rhetoric is also a thing indifferent, a means that need not be identified with the self-aggrandizing ends of Comus or of the court. In contrast to her first speech, in which she imagined virtue being rescued by the intervention of divine virtù, here the Lady exercises her virtue by defending it and thus recovers what Comus calls “a superior power” (l. 801). It is significant in this context that, although the Lady imagines drawing on a “sacred vehemence” to counter Comus’s “dearWit and gay Rhetoric” (ll. 790, 795), the invocation of divine aid remains a mere possibility:
Thou art not fit to hear thyself convinc’t;
Yet should I try, the uncontrolled worth
Of this pure cause would kindle my rapt 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 magic structures rear’d so high,
Were shattered into heaps o’er thy false head.
(ll. 792–99)
What is striking about the Lady’s lines is that sacred vehemence—which alludes to the advent of the Spirit at Pentecost (the “sonus tanquam advenientis spiritus vehementis” of Acts 2:2)—is not employed but simply imagined.25 The conditional “Yet should I try” functions in much the same way as the Attendant Spirit’s concluding “Or if Virtue feeble were”: in both cases the intervention of superhuman power and the consequent eclipse of human agency are delayed by the conditional or subjunctive phrasing.26
While the next scene allegorizes divine intervention in the figure of Sabrina, it also preserves human agency on the level of its rhetoric. Here, as in the exchange between Comus and the Lady, rhetoric is a thing indifferent that can be used well or badly. Thus Sabrina speaks the language of Puck and Ariel earlier associated with Comus, and the Spirit’s final vision of nature’s bounty appropriates and revises Comus’s carpe diem through its allusion to Spenser’s erotically charged Garden of Adonis (FQ, 3.6.44–52).27 If we now read the epilogue in terms of the second rhetorical plot of the masque we can also see that right use (of Spenser and Shakespeare, of eros) is connected not simply with intention but also with effects. Fixity and innovation, intention and action, are united rather than being ascetically divorced. As William Kerrigan has remarked, the epilogue “tries to achieve what the children and their spiritual guardians could not: the capture of the magician in the navel of the woods and the appropriation of his power. Imagination finds what vigilance lost” (61).28 It is this emphasis on use as the appropriation of power that destabilizes virtue and makes of it an activity that is concerned with effects as well as intentions. In the poet’s rhetoric, the pleasures of the imagination and of epideictic poetry are reconciled not only to virtue but also to virtù.
Milton could thus be said to rewrite the conclusions of Pleasure Reconcil’d to Virtue and Coelum Britannicum. If, in the former, Jonson registers doubts about the reconciliation of virtue and pleasure on earth, he also proposes the stoic consolation that virtue can take pleasure in itself. If efficacious action is not possible and heavenly aid is not forthcoming, at least the man of virtue can look down on earth and scorn those who claim “place” as the sign of their virtue and their reward. In Coelum Britannicum, place and merit, status and activity, are reconciled on earth in the examples of Charles and Henrietta-Maria, who then become a pattern for the reformation of heaven. In Milton’s masque, the Spirit’s initial equation of virtue and virtù, stasis and action, is part of the Neoplatonic allegory of the masque, according to which the Lady is the embodiment of virtue, which can be “assailed but never hurt.” Such virtue would from the outset be free from moral danger, secure in the knowledge of “having chosen” the right path.29 However, Milton does not simply represent but also analyzes the moral implications of the past participle “having chosen”: he criticizes the rhetoric of the Stuart masque by insisting on the temporal dimension—the Machiavellian contingency—of this drama of the will, a drama that is incompatible with the belief that one has already chosen, once and for all. To this end, Milton ironizes the conflict between activity and passivity that we saw in the masques of Jonson and Carew: in fixing the Lady to Comus’s chair, he literalizes the stasis of allegorical virtue in order to suggest that the Lady’s and Elder Brother’s sense of freedom from moral danger is the real threat, whereas the “force and . . . wile” (l. 906) of Comus’s virtuosity, demonic flexibility, and aesthetic play are a potential source of strength. Thus, while the Lady’s fixity serves as an ironic comment on the claims of “place” or “status” as a guarantee of virtue, the possibility of efficacious action is not only preserved by the conditional tense of the concluding lines but exemplified in the rhetoric of the masque as a whole. While the masque allegorizes divine intervention the rhetoric defers it, in order to make room for the poet’s own virtuoso performance. To the Lady’s power of passive resistance the poet opposes his own active appropriation and use of Comus’s power. In contrast to Jonson, who presents the doctrine of things indifferent as an argument not only for the subservience of pleasure to virtue but also for the obedience of subject to king, indifference here becomes the locus of resistance to external authority. And this includes the resistance of the individual Christian not only to royal and ecclesiastical policy but also the resistance to—or in the language of the Nativity Ode, the “prevention” of—divine intervention.
The question the masque poses but does not answer is what is the relationship between this resistance and the usual modes of legitimating such resistance by reference to positive principles of authority: God, right reason, or natural law? What is the relation of virtù and rhetorical virtuosity to providence? According to Milton’s rhetoric of indifference, this question has no single answer, and it is precisely in this indifference that the threat of Machiavellism resides. Once the criterion of right use becomes a matter of individual conscience and discretion—of individual virtù—it may be impossible to tell the difference between Comus and Sabrina, between a satanic and divine rhetorical power.