SOURCE: Frost, Elizabeth A. “The Didactic Comus: Henry Lawes and the Trial of Virtue.” Comitatus: A Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 22 (1991): 87-103.

In the following essay, Frost elucidates the moral lessons provided in Milton's Comus, maintaining that in the didactic masque Lawes takes on the role of instructor.

The Jacobean and Caroline court masque traditionally incorporated some moral message into the grandeur of its spectacle, but only as part of its elaborately conceived compliment. Both Jonson's Vision of Delight and Carew's Coelum Britannicum describe the restoration of order over disorder, virtue over intemperance, and a fixed hierarchy over the anarchic forces of nature. Like these masques, Milton's Comus was written for a specific historical occasion—the gathering of the Egerton family at Ludlow Castle, where the earl of Bridgewater had in 1633 become president of the council in the Marches of Wales.¹ Comus's traditional evocation of the...