He cannot be a perfect man
Not being tried and tutored in the world.
When a Shakespearean father says of his son that he cannot achieve manhood without worldly tutoring,1 that father endorses a post-classroom education for his child. Such a graduate finishing school, outside the nursery, the tutorial, and the classroom, is where we find the young Egerton brothers in Milton’s Ludlow Masque, being tutored into a particular form of perfect aristocratic manhood. While Milton’s masque has usually been read as either a celebration of chastity, a critique of sexual violence, or a study of the Lady’s initiation into some form of adult sexuality,2 the Lady’s two brothers and their tutor-guides play an equally significant role in the masque. The schoolboy learning in which they engage, a training endorsed by Milton’s own Of Education, is central to the masque’s pedagogical politics. Formal education for middling and upper-class families in early modern England was often seen as a process of increasing masculinization, taking children from maternal teachers to paternal ones, from a mother tongue to Latin as the proper language of learning,3 and from boy or girl to entirely male scholar. Borrowing from classical traditions in which educational “perfection could be achieved only by adult males,”4 schooling was seen to facilitate a social transition from a woman-dominated domestic sphere to a boys-only professionalized community of learning, through grammar schools, universities, and the Inns at Court.5 The final stage of turning gentle boys into gentlemen, making educators the “arbiters of masculine deportment,”6 is this “charming, if dangerous, world”7 outside the classroom in which their learning is tested. This last extracurricular classroom is the world of Milton’s masque.
This postsecondary education, in which these boys and younger men learn how to be “perfect” in the world, necessarily involves several complicating factors. First, if schooling in this period is largely imagined as a long shift away from the tutelage of mothers and nurses to an entirely masculine collegium, what happens to those first maternal lessons for boys and young men? Are they integrated, repudiated, or reformulated along masculine lines? Second, if the final stage of tutoring young men in the ways of the world involves no formal schoolmaster, who teaches whom, and how? And lastly, how does this move out of the homosocial schoolroom to a heterosocial world deal with learning between young men and young women? If, for humanist educators, there is a problem of “what to do about traditions of education, new and old, that emphasized getting boys out of the classroom and into the world,”8 Milton’s Ludlow Masque encounters all of these complex returns, transitions, and uncertainties.
Milton’s Ludlow Masque is clearly an educative text, with boys being guided by a teacherly figure on their way to adult responsibilities. The language of lessons and schooling, advice and correction, permeates the masque, while the masque’s youthful protagonists invite a reading of their formative learning. Perhaps not surprisingly, then, Milton’s masque builds on this narrative of boys being schooled into courtly manhood, repeating the ideology of Milton’s educational tract. Milton also, like Shakespeare in his early forest comedies, recreates from the romance tradition that same homosocial classroom outside the schoolhouse to tutor his young male students in the world. With this fieldtrip into nature school, Milton’s masque both invokes and then contains almost all of the heterosocial energies which lurk as potential disruptions to the Boys’ Own World version of education so prominent in his time and in Milton’s own writings on education. What these interruptions of or supplements to learned masculinity signify, and how (or whether) they are managed by the masculine students of the work, is the focus of this chapter. For Milton’s masque, with its youthful cast of characters, imagines a particularly complex path through the teaching of manhood. Milton emerges from and speaks into this culture of educating boys to be men by placing them in a male-only school system, sidelining the mothers who raised them, and anticipating the heterosocial education they need to complete. What is most interesting in Milton’s Ludlow Masque is how both of these extracurricular influences reemerge and are again constrained in the boys’ improvised classroom, their adult education. The Attendant Spirit’s pedagogical role and his temporary deference to a maternal Sabrina; the boys’ learned schoolboy debates alongside their sister’s instructorly voice; and the ways in which those same schoolboys remaster their sister’s learning power: these elements of the masque all speak to the gendered cultural narratives of learning to be a gentleman in Milton’s England.9
Early Modern Pedagogies
The First Teachers
If English humanism is fundamentally a pedagogy rather than a philosophy, it focuses its energies almost entirely on making young men.10 One of the key signals of this pressure to masculinize English children is these educators’ ambivalence about a child’s first teacher, the mother or nurse. In his own tract on teaching, Of Education, Milton is careful to sidestep the question of young boys and how they might be trained at home, “not beginning,” he says of his curriculum, “as some have done from the cradle” (2.414).11 Milton is likewise casually dismissive of the kind of unlettered man who is “competently wise in his mother dialect only” (2.370).12 In this concern, Milton’s rhetoric and focus is of a piece with his fellow early modern pedagogues, who see their role as schoolmasters as training boys of a certain class out of their earliest lessons from those “nurses” of their infancy.13
Tudor and Stuart educators and theorists were certainly proprietarily ambivalent about the role of the mother as the child’s first teacher.14 Juan Luis Vives in the sixteenth century and Jeremy Taylor, mid-seventeenth century, both fear that mothers are not good teachers of their children because they are so very imitable: “for you mothers,” says Vives, “be the cause of mooste parte of ylnes among folkes: wherby you maye se, how moche your children are beholdyng unto you, whiche induce noughty opinions in to them with your folye.”15 Mothers, because they are the most influential of a child’s teachers, are therefore to blame for “ylnes” (and sins of all sorts as well). The mothers, like the children, become “noughty.” Taylor makes a more specific claim:
[Thus] do mothers handle their children: [they] soften them with kisses and imperfect noises, with the pap and breast milk of soft endearments, they rescue them from Tutors, and snatch them from discipline, they desire to keep them fat and warm, and their feet dry and their bellies full; and then the children govern, and cry, and prove fools, and troublesome, so long as the feminine republike does endure.16
In Taylor’s argument, mothers keep children infantilized, preverbal, unready to digest intellectual food, softened with “imperfect noises, with the pap and breast milk of soft endearments” rather than fortified with “discipline” and strengthened by “Tutors.”17 Taylor suggests that the teacher is her own leaky body, a lesson limited to “imperfect noises … the pap and breast milk of soft endearments,” not real teaching at all (“they rescue them from Tutors”), and destructive of the masculine “republike” for which young boys should be trained.18
This fear that the future Englishman will be unhealthily softened by his first maternal teacher is sometimes reframed by these pedagogues, though; these educators do in other cases describe the maternal classroom as a necessary stage and even an opportunity to enforce imitation, that key educational tool of the humanists.19 While the schoolmaster often “became a substitute father”20 to his students, a mother’s peculiarly literal and specific ability to provide nourishing lessons and to build up her children was also often emphasized by pedagogical theorists because of its very physical processes.21 The “naturalness” of the “female teaching of the mother tongue” was a commonplace in language textbooks.22 As Andrew Wallace suggests, this maternal education could be reimagined: “knowledge … constructed as ‘masculine’ is envisioned as the product of maternal solicitude.”23 Since the schoolmaster was to teach through nurture and imitation, the maternal teacher provided an early (if disposable) version of this “instructional model in which emotional investment governs the relationship between teacher and student.”24 Further, since the pedagogical project assumed that “students needed to be trained in virtue”25 most of all, maternal education was sometimes figured as an appropriate version of an education in ethics.
Vives’ Instruction of a Christen Woman argues, for instance:
[I]f the mother can skyll of lernyng, let her teache her litle children her selfe, that they maye have all one, bothe for theyr mother, theyr nouryse, and theyr teacher. And that they may love her also the more, and lerne with better corage, and more spede, by the meanes of the love, that theyr teacher hath towards them … for the babe fyrste hereth her mother, and fyrste begynneth to enforme her speche after hers.26
Here the unique transference of nourishment and speech is precisely what Vives also values in maternal instruction – it is explicitly the mother’s role as physical lesson to be imitated, and source of cultural as well as physical nourishment, which Vives argues makes her the best first teacher. Her young pupils, he argues, will “lerne with better corage, and more spede” because they are imbibing their teacher’s fluid language. Exempla and imitatio, not to mention the obvious political importance of a nationalist mother tongue (“being nursed into Englishness”),27 made the maternal teacher hard to ignore.28 This maternal teaching is ultimately overshadowed and displaced in the educational literature by the all-male schoolroom and its efforts to make adult citizens out of English boys, but it clearly lingers around the edges of this cultural narrative of learning to be a man, as a necessary early distinction between the child and the man, an essential first stage of physical and imitative learning, and a preliminary ethical authority.
The Boys’ School: Of Education
The broader narrative from which this specific debate over early childhood education springs is clearly leading toward the maturation of boys.29 Education is intended to generate increasingly homosocial masculinization in early modern humanist pedagogies; this is evident, for instance, in Milton’s own foray into the genre. Milton’s short tract Of Education, originally published in the 1645 volume with the Ludlow Masque, attempts to define in a few short pages how exactly to make English men out of English boys.
Milton frames this treatise on education as a personal missive to Samuel Hartlib, the educator and public intellectual who was also his friend, first known to him perhaps through Milton’s own tutor.30 Milton makes a point of describing Hartlib as “learned” (363), approved of by “men of most … wisdom, and … authority” (363).31 Milton likewise names himself as someone who has spent “many studious and contemplative years altogether … in the search of religious and civil knowledge” (366) to develop a method for “discreet teaching” (369), the “orderly conning over” (369) of pedagogical methods. The whole of the tract is thus framed as a kind of proposal from one schoolmaster to another, a formal version of what Milton describes to Hartlib as the “incidentall discourses which we have wander’d into” (363). Male teachers talk to each other about how best to teach boys: That is the point of Milton’s dedicatory rhetoric.32
This homosocial framing of education as the work of men for boys is assumed in the precepts and curricula which Milton describes as well.33 Milton defines education as “that which fits a man to perform justly, skilfully and magnanimously all the offices both private and publike of peace and war” (378–9), making clear that these students are imagined in masculine subject-positions with masculine roles. Milton describes his students as “striplings” (373), the “youth” of England (374) being trained to be “brave men” (385), “renowned and matchlesse men” (385) with the “healthy and stout bodies of young men” (393) as well as minds to match. Milton’s descriptions suggest, as in classical models of rhetorical education, “a masculine or virile style linked to a metaphorics of the male body in its prime.”34 Milton doubles down on these gendered identities of his students by repeatedly also emphasizing their military training, their exercise in “the exact use of their weapon” (409) and in the healthful practices that could “save an Army” (393) and provide “discipline” (393) to support their future “commander” (393).35 Milton wants his schoolboys trained in “military motions” (411) and “the rudiments of the Souldiership in all the skill of embattailing, marching, encamping, fortifying, beseiging and battering” (411). This is all to create the “best and most eminent” (414) Englishmen for the good of the nation.36 Like other educators, Milton’s school aims to “produce a disciplined masculinity.”37
It is clear in Milton’s and other educators’ models of the perfect boys’ school that the schoolmaster is assumed to outweigh even the collective of students in imagined influence. English guides to education like Milton’s assert a collective nationalist purpose for education, do concern themselves with collective student activities, and do ask some questions about peer influence, but they mostly avoid the direct question of how boys are learning together in the schoolroom and how they might in fact be influencing each other just as their mothers previously did. Milton’s Of Education, though it speaks into a network of his own intellectual mentors and collaborators, is largely indifferent to the group nature of education, even while it imagines the collective training of warfare and other collaborative arts. Milton notes that friends can ““sway” young men “either to an ambitious or mercenary, or ignorantly zealous Divinity,” but as to positive influences it is the master on whom he focuses, noting the importance of “effectuall perswasions, and … chiefly … his own example” (385).38 Milton thinks that wrestling and dueling practice are useful, but primarily because they will, for each individual boy, “prove and heat their single strength” (409). He imagines his project for “the good of this nation” (413), to make “worthy patriots” (385) “of great good to this Iland” (363), but the collective gathering of boys and young men together is very much for Milton, as for other pedagogical theorists, aimed at creating replaceably equipped Englishmen, not individuals or even edifying friends. The focus on imitation appears to have been applied to the schoolmaster and to the works being studied, but as Diane Purkiss argues, “humanist educators sought to alter” the “rough-hewn masculinity linked with the pleasures of the male group.”39 The other peer influencers in the classroom, boys themselves, appear only in the shadow of the schoolmaster and the lesson being taught.
Richard Mulcaster and many of Milton’s educational colleagues and forebears share Milton’s teacher-centered learning focus. They do suggest collective student actions: debates and contests; dramatic performances; games and sports.40 Thomas Elyot’s The Boke Named the Governor notes the importance of very young children having “companions and playfelowes, as shal nat do in theyr presence any reprochable acte, or speke any uncleane worde or other, ne to advaunt theym with flatery” (31).41 Elyot also acknowledges the influence of peers: “there be some also whiche by their frendes be coarted to applye the studie of the lawe onely” (67). Elyot is otherwise and primarily, however, focused on the teacher’s curriculum and the teacher’s influence. Johann Amos Comenius, in his plans for a universal education on all subjects, considers it worth mentioning that girls as well as boys should learn in schools, though even he barely mentions the effects of learners on each other.42 His interest, like most pedagogical theorists of this era, is mostly in how to make “a Commonwealth to be well ordered” (16), to “restore peace to the Christian world” (26) through “an universall Treasurie of Wisedome for the common interest, and behoofe of mankind” (31). This vertical model of instruction as a “narrative of masculinity” in which young men emerge enabled by their own subordination and empowered individually through a collective instruction is the paradox of early modern schooling into manhood.43 As Thomas Habinek argues for classical schooling, “the more they work to train students in ideal masculine performance, the more they expose the very performative nature of ideal masculinity,”44 especially through this “system of elite male competition,”45 which is deliberately never named. As Purkiss argues, the “grammar school colloquia imply that masculinity had to be coaxed into formation”46 by paternal schoolmaster and not by peer pressure, even while those groups of boys are necessarily making each other.
This emphasis on the schoolmaster’s power to mold his students into adult masculinity, over and against those early maternal teachers and the complex relations among boyish classmates themselves, leaves open the question of what schoolboys do outside of the formal classroom, how they continue to learn, and under what competitive or collaborative influences and pressures that learning might occur. Milton’s Ludlow Masque, like Shakespeare’s early comedy The Two Gentlemen of Verona, provides models of and insights into the next stage of schooling for these English boys.
Ludlow’s Instructors
Who is the influential teacher outside the classroom? If Amy Greenstadt is right that in the masque “the form of male relationship that is most clearly at issue is that between teacher and student,”47 a part of the “issue” is the variant forms of teacher present in the text. This question of competing forms of pedagogy is tested in Milton’s masque first through its adult instructors: the music tutor and the mother figure of Sabrina. The young Egerton boys of Milton’s Ludlow Masque are imagined returning home from school, “nurs’d in Princely lore” (34), and they have in attendance a male tutor in the figure of the Attendant Spirit Thyrsis.48 These two younger brothers appear to be both schoolchildren and emerging into young adulthood in the masque’s narrative, as if they are simultaneously under masculine tutelage and practicing the humanist principles of self-instruction at the same time. And yet, since the boys themselves were still preadolescent at the time of the masque’s first performance, the question of their shift from a maternal to a masculine learning context could still be imagined to be present. The Ludlow Masque fascinatingly addresses this idea of the early nurse-teacher by its juxtaposition of the Egerton boys’ tutor with the water-nymph Sabrina. One a clear example of the masculine schoolmaster and the other a maternal magician, Thyrsis and Sabrina exert their different influence in the masque to reflect just this tension between motherly and fatherly teachers, now reenacted outside either nursery or schoolhouse.
Thyrsis, played in the performance by Henry Lawes, the Egerton family’s music tutor, defines and confirms his own spiritual and pedagogical authority.49 He asserts that he is of a higher realm, a spirit with special powers deigning to descend to this “Sin-worn mold” (17). “Listen,” he instructs the audience, “for I will tell ye now /What never yet was heard” (43–4). Even when disguised as a shepherd, in professorial style he derides “shallow ignorance” (515) and “blind … unbelief” (519). Like a good music instructor he assesses Lady Alice’s song as “a soft and solemn-breathing sound” (555). Like a wise preceptor, he has also done his research to procure the herb haemony as a cure for the Lady’s predicament.50 When the two brothers forget his lesson on how to defeat Comus, Thyrsis even more intelligently has a Lesson Plan B, summoning up Sabrina to provide the next solution.
In the water-nymph Sabrina, Milton’s masque imagines a return of the original mother-tongue teacher, the ghostly past of the brothers’ masculine education emerging from the boys’-school shadow, as, with her, “the instructing power is taken out of the masquers’ hands.”51 Milton amplifies the correcting power of Sabrina, the “quasi-maternal figure … mother of her own former shape”52 who saves the Lady from Comus’ spell. Like the teaching mothers imagined by Vives and Taylor, though, Sabrina uses not fact or logic but a magical softening influence embodied in her ethical influence and her transformed female body. She is not, in Milton’s masque, a dominating intellect or a philosophical mind but a sensual and material essence of softness and liquidity, a kind of nostalgic avatar of that nursing teacher. Sabrina with a “moist curb sways the smooth Severn stream” (825), as both her power and her element are fluid. She is associated with “Ambrosial Oils” (840), “molten crystal” (930), “precious vial’d liquors” (847), “nectar’d lavers” (838), “beryl and the golden ore” (932): rare liquids and cordials, milks and alchemical stones of permeating sensuality. As Mary Loeffelholz says, “the ‘cure’ is part and parcel of her fluid, metamorphosed body.”53 Sabrina employs not the power of logic or pedagogical authority but the ability to break “the charmed band” (904) when she is “right invok’t” (854) through magical incantation and song; she “baptizes the lady,” as William Shullenberger felicitously suggests.54 The healing balm which Sabrina brings and with which she is so evocatively associated is the specifically physical and kinetic kind of ethical nourishment to which Vives and Taylor allude when they speak of the power of the first nurse as first teacher.
Sabrina’s role, standing in for the maternal teacher who works by natural and not rational example, is reinforced by her extensive genealogy. The Attendant Spirit provides another history lesson when he situates Sabrina in a family lineage stretching back to Brutus and Anchises, Tethys, Neptune and Proteus, naming in fairly profligate fashion a network of daughters, sons, grandparents, stepmothers, great-grandchildren, and spouses both human and divine. Sabrina is figured as part of an extended community which focuses on divine influence and inherited powers, transformative parenting and kinship systems. She is not explicitly a mother-teacher herself, but she represents just that same kind of generational influence.55
Emerging only at the end of the masque, Sabrina represents this extracurricular teaching, a more heterosocial and maternally influenced past to the boys’ recent learning. As herself a reinvented spirit, a metamorphosed woman turned into a powerful idea, and a “ghostly ephemerality,”56 Sabrina evinces the physical metamorphosis attributed to the first alma mater of English schoolboys. Sabrina suggests not only the extent to which that first maternal influencer cannot be erased from the boys-only classroom but also the ways in which her teacherly power is managed and gendered, physical rather than philosophical, magical rather than knowledgeable, temporarily powerful but outside the system, saving the Lady “in a lyric mode”57 but not directly instructing the boys.
Student-Led Learning: Shakespeare and Milton
Though the Attendant Spirit is the boys’ schoolmaster and Sabrina the influential nourish-mother, to a large extent Milton’s masque also focuses on self-taught tutoring in the world. If the point of good teaching is for the teacher to become internalized by the pupil, the Egerton brothers are apparently ready for the next, more heterosocial, stage in their worldly instruction. In Milton’s masque, the boys’ collaborative teaching and this heterosocial education are both combined, with young women as the fulcrums upon which this learning is activated.
Though Milton’s masque is most often compared in this regard to The Tempest (perhaps Shakespeare’s most teacherly play), the outdoor school of the masque is even more clearly presaged in Shakespeare’s early comedy The Two Gentlemen of Verona.58 Setting aside the question of whether or not Milton’s masque explicitly borrows from Shakespeare’s Two Gentlemen, we can certainly see that the forest comedy/romances of the early modern stage frame or anticipate the forest-romance elements of Milton’s masque. Shakespeare’s Two Gentlemen of Verona concludes in a wild woodland, where the aptly named Proteus and a band of outlaws capture Silvia and alternately woo and threaten her. Milton’s Ludlow Masque likewise takes place in a forest, with the literally protean Comus and his band of revelers trapping the Lady and threatening her with violence, both verbal and physical. The most striking connection between these two romance-like narratives, though, is that in both, brotherly and sisterly characters attempt to correct and influence each other. Perhaps both borrowing from that broader tradition of forest romances, Shakespeare’s Silvia and Milton’s Lady both use language to instruct their captors in constancy and chastity; both Milton’s elder brother and Shakespeare’s Valentine try to teach their male companions the true meaning of those same virtues. As Blaine Greteman and, in a different paradigm, Shullenberger argue, Milton’s masque is about the development of young people;59 Greteman suggests that, for Milton, “youth’s peculiar poetic receptivity” is part of what prepares them for the final exam that the forest represents.60 Both sets of emergent adults in the two texts develop those voices as neophyte pedagogues and substitute teachers, however, not just as able students. The chastising and chastening offered by Silvia and the Lady, by Valentine and the Lady’s two brothers, suggest a new kind of peer-led instructive schooling. The lawless woods are thus reinhabited in both texts by a youthful band of competitive code-keepers vying for the professor’s lectern.
This dynamic of peer teaching significantly extends but also complicates the homosocial schooling operating in these two works, even while it reconstructs itself through the deliberately dampening effects of boys and young men trafficking in young women in each of Shakespeare’s and Milton’s outdoor classrooms. Both Milton and Shakespeare imagine a woodland schoolroom of young male students who teach each other. Both also include young women as instructors, even as both reinvest boys and young men with not just collaborative pedagogical powers but also professorial rights to silence their (feminized) underlings. If it is the goal of English schooling to install youthful men as masculine authorities in their culture, Milton’s work and Shakespeare’s certainly reveal this pressure. That these boys and young men collaborate in managing both each other and the women newly added to their extracurricular tutorials illuminates the ideological functions of the early modern Englishman’s education. When the schoolmaster departs, the boys are left to teach each other. As the young women emerge into view, it becomes clear that these young male scholars seem also to have learned lessons about masculinist power which they are all too eager to crib and share.
Two Gentlemen of Verona
Shakespeare’s Two Gentlemen of Verona in its final two acts displaces its characters from the city to a forest haunted by outlaws described as “gentlemen” whose “ungoverned youth” has “thrust [them] from the company of lawful men” (4.1.45–7). Valentine, banished by the local duke, encounters these young rebels in the woods. The outlaws are beguiled by Valentine’s linguistic talents and “goodly shape” and make him “the King for [their] wild faction” (4.1.37). Valentine chooses this space in which to speak his mind, and the outlaws choose him because he has control of his words and can (though with considerable effort) “keep them from uncivil outrages” (5.1.17). Valentine acts in this woodland environment as a disciplinarian of other alienated young men like himself. The woods they inhabit become for Valentine both a lawless zone and a place of instruction.
In Shakespeare’s play, women characters also enter this outdoor school. When Silvia flees her home to follow Valentine into the forest, she is captured there by Proteus, Valentine’s erstwhile friend, now a traitorous rival for Silvia’s affection. Proteus threatens Silvia with sexual violence when she refuses his advances. Silvia is rescued at this point by Valentine himself, who lectures Proteus on his treachery: “Thou common friend, that’s without faith or love,/For such is a friend now. Treacherous man” (5.4.62–3). Proteus is “common” in Valentine’s accusation because he is willing to abandon his erstwhile allegiances; he is a “traitor” in the same way. Valentine thus instructs and corrects Proteus just as he does his outlaw band, educating him in the ethics of friendship.
Silvia too schools Proteus in round terms, even before Valentine arrives to save her:
Silvia not only rejects Proteus’ advances, she also particularly chastises him for being “false perjured Proteus” and refutes his excuses. Proteus says glibly, “in love/who respects friend?” and Silvia replies tartly, “All men but Proteus” (5.4.53–4).
Silvia in fact continues here, in far more precarious circumstances, the critiques with which she has previously resisted Proteus’ courtship. As Proteus himself admits, some scenes earlier, “when I protest true loyalty to her,/she twits me with my falsehood to my friend./When to her beauty I commend my vows,/she bids me think how I have been foresworn/In breaking faith with Julia whom I loved” (4.2.7–11). Silvia makes these accusations directly earlier in the play: “thou subtle, perjured, false, disloyal man!/Think’st thou I am so shallow, so conceitless,/To be seduced by thy flattery/That has deceived so many with thy vows?/Return, return, and make thy love amends” (4.2.96ff.). Like a good teacher, she derides his errors, names his faults, and bids him correct himself. Erica Sheen ascribes to Shakespeare’s play “an approach to female characterization that refuses to be dutiful.”61 Silvia uses the pedagogical tools of the classroom: logic, disputation, authorities – but she also quite explicitly exemplifies and embodies her pedagogical instruction. Shakespeare’s play definitely shows young people not only imitating each other but engaging in the more authoritative forms of pedagogical instruction which Jeff Dolven notes in the schoolbooks of the time: catechizing, drilling, and disputation. These peer tutors in fact concentrate not on the cooperative education which Dolven sees in Milton’s masque but rather on challenging each other.
Silvia as a womanly instructor in Shakespeare’s play is also managed and constrained, however, pushed back to the fringes again, by the masculinist narrative about women’s bodies in which her male peers engage and which seems to be fundamental to their ideology of learning to be Englishmen. Valentine and Proteus engage in schoolmate trades, lessons, and arrangements which commodify feminine bodies and therefore limit the identities permitted to this young woman learner. The young men attempt to school the young woman out of the classroom and into the marketplace, back to where, they imply, she rightly belongs, as adjuncts to these men teaching each other how to be men.
Even the noble Valentine betrays this homosocial and masculinist curriculum. He seems to school Proteus at least as much for betraying himself as for threatening Silvia; Valentine appears unable to distinguish between what Proteus needs to learn about treating women and what he needs to learn about male friendship:
The “rude uncivil touch” to which Valentine refers is Proteus’ threat to rape Silvia: Its incivility is central to Valentine’s correction, but its violation of their masculine friendship is what ultimately distresses him the most (“thou friend of an ill fashion”). The “lesson” Valentine teaches Proteus is that he must be right with Valentine; Silvia becomes simply a marker of that reconciliation. The “private wound” to which Valentine refers is not Proteus’ threatened violent penetration of Silvia’s body but his own loss of a faithful friend.
Further evidence of Valentine’s homosocial marking system is his response when Proteus expresses regret. “That my love may appear plain and free,/All that was mine in Silvia I give thee,” Valentine declares instantly when Proteus appears repentant (5.4.82–3). Silvia has no say, apparently, in this arrangement between two young men to use her as a token of their friendship. She has no right to comment, they think, on whether she would like to be “given” to a man who has just threatened to assault her. Silvia becomes in fact silent as the play concludes, despite her former verbal assertiveness; she seems to be being turned back into an object of exchange between men.62 If we recall that Silvia is here a boy actor dressed as a young woman, it becomes even more apparent that this boys-only classroom reverts to its homosocial roots while it constructs an ideological exchange function for imaginary women.
Ludlow’s Student-Teachers
Whether or not Milton’s masque is deliberately referencing Shakespeare’s early comedy, it is certainly the case that the Ludlow Masque repeats many of these same peer-review sessions of Shakespeare’s earlier play. Jeffrey Theis argues for a master-plot connection, as “the Miltonic sylvan pastoral deftly reincorporates the … performative green plot that Shakespeare exploits in his forest comedies.”63 Theis suggests that the woods throw into high relief the ethical discipline required of these young people: “the murky wood initiates an epistemological challenge for the children and their values.”64 These are alternate versions of the “wilderness displacement of the scene of instruction” which Dolven charts in his study of romances, “stories of younger people with something to learn … narratives of education in a polemically extracurricular sense … and hence rivals of the schoolroom’s own account of how to grow up and grow wise.”65 Milton’s woods in the Ludlow Masque are certainly, like Shakespeare’s play, populated with young people teaching each other amidst the threat of outlawry.66 The Ludlow Masque’s “drear Wood” (37) and “advent’rous glade” (79) contain figures similarly split between outlaws like Comus and young, beautiful, and linguistically gifted aristocrats. Comus’ crew are “ill-managed rioters,”67 and it is up to the Lady and her brothers, led in part by their Tutor/Attendant Spirit, to manage Comus and his dissolute fellowship. As in Shakespeare’s play, the Ludlow Masque shows us young men and women taken out of the schoolroom and forced not only to learn in Dolven’s sense, but also to educate, edify, and discipline each other along specifically gendered lines. While in the forest they may receive “an education in the virtues”68 to supplement their classroom instruction, they also reveal how they have been taught into English adulthood in “an environment … traditionally formulated as a site of moral discipline.”69 Dolven argues that when we find “the oblong box of the Tudor classroom superimposed on the labyrinth of romance … the fit is never easy,”70 but it is certainly revelatory.
The boys of the Ludlow Masque clearly correct, lecture, and educate each other in what Dolven describes as “collaborative … learning.”71 When the two brothers realize that they have lost their sister, the elder brother, in what Greteman calls a “schoolboy debate,”72 chastises the second brother and his fears:73
The elder brother “lectures, with precocious, didactive bravado,”74 concentrating first on correcting his younger sibling: “be not over-exquisite.” He then continues not by offering a plan or practical advice but rather by declaiming a lesson on the principles of fear management, a series of hypothetical scenarios and logical syllogisms designed to amend his brother’s incorrect understanding. Frequently cribbing from his classroom textbooks,75 the elder brother assembles his memorized reading into an expositio on the meaning of trust.76
The elder brother further elaborates his lesson:
The older brother concentrates on philosophical terms here like Wisdom, Solitude, Meditation, and Chastity. He speaks not of his sister directly but of “Virtue” with “her own radiant light” and Wisdom’s “best nurse Contemplation.” The “divine Philosophy” which the second brother praises thus involves a pedagogical retreat to divine principles, principles which are feminized while his actual sister is abstracted and forgotten.
The elder brother completes this metaphysical applicatio by reverting to masculine pronouns:
The elder brother makes this situation into a lecture on internal fortitude and freedom and how “he” (undoubtedly his younger brother) should rightly understand the nature of confidence. Clearly, he prefers to instruct his brother rather than to worry about his lost sister.
The second brother is likewise in a disputatious mood, however:
Like the older brother, the younger brother engages in a generalized rhetoric: His use of “you” and “me” here is both specific and impersonal. Like his sibling, he resorts to abstract concepts of “Danger” and “Opportunity”; he is also willing to expand the terms of the argument to dispute by analogy about women and “treasure,” doubled by his pun on “waste” to win his point. He forces his older brother to narrow his definitions of “security” and define the basis of his confidence with repeated interrogations of his older brother’s terms and concepts: “What hidden strength,/Unless the strength of Heav’n, if you mean that?” (417–18).
With their debate, including its challenges, concessions, and argument from principle and by metaphor, the two brothers seek to teach each other how to think about their sister’s circumstances as if the issue at hand were a learned maxim, not a situational crisis. The brothers become somewhat more open to authoritative advice and practical solutions when Thyrsis/the Attendant Spirit comes to instruct them, but when they are alone, they spend much of their energy testing and correcting each other’s philosophical understanding, moral conceptualizations, and ethical thinking.
Like Shakespeare with Silvia, Milton interestingly allows a female character, here Lady Alice Egerton, to have a similarly confident didactic and chastising voice; the Lady can easily be read, as Anne-Julia Zwierlein argues, as “an example of Milton’s utopian commitment to the power of learning and educated reason.”77 As Deanne Williams notes, “the girl masquer is closely linked with both private learning and the evolving institutional structures for girls’ education”;78 the Lady embodies the schooling she has received. In her opening lines she critiques “Riot, and ill-manag’d Merriment,/Such as the jocund Flute, or gamesom Pipe/Stirs up among the loose unletter’d Hinds” (172–4), clearly comparing Comus’ troops to those who are “unletter’d,” uneducated, and therefore “loose” and “ill-manag’d,”79 in contrast to her own “education in virtue.”80 Her song, like her judgments, is rated by Comus as “sober certainty” (263), uttered in the confidence of someone in the know, and this tone of hers, despite her doubts and fears, persists when Comus tries disputation to win her consent:
The Lady here is just as disputatious as her brothers, challenging Comus’ terms, his jurisdiction, and his ethical status with her rhetoric of contra-distinction. She is, as Will Stockton argues, “a theologically and rhetorically adept young adult.”81 She claims for herself the authority of “judgment,” “virtue,” and “reason,” and she feels permission to use her “tongue” to “check” his “arguments.” Not only that, but she chooses to “unlock” her speech to explain how wrong he is; she does not need to disprove him, but she wishes to ensure that the lesson he is teaching gets untaught. She evinces a disinterested concern for truth in the world at large in her “very capable verbal command”82 of her subject. She seems, as Zwierlein argues, “to have all but reversed the fall through her education.”83
Her defense of Nature, for instance, like the elder brother’s of chastity, depends upon an argument by definition, correcting and specifying Comus’ categorizations:
The Lady offers a positive definition of Nature which both contradicts Comus’ portrayal and includes the principles, causes, and effects of Nature’s operations in her ethical paradigm. The Lady is, like a teacher, focusing on how “children” should “live according to sober laws and holy dictate.”
Her magisterial voice grows over the course of their debate:
The Lady declares herself the holder of secret knowledge which Comus does not deserve to hear, repudiating his “dear Wit and gay Rhetoric” that he “hath so well been taught” in favor of her own truths which she declares to be instantly persuasive to all who would hear them. She proclaims herself the perfect teacher with total influence and Comus the badly taught and unready student. Greteman proposes that “while the debate between the brothers locates them within the same educational process as their sister, her developing ability to speak truth to power provides the masque’s real excitement. The brothers show potential, but the Lady most obviously realizes this potential.”84
In rhetorical terms, then, the Lady is an even more forceful teacher of her masculine companions than the young men are of each other. Like Shakespeare’s Silvia, the Lady uses mocking and satirical terms even when she is in physical peril; she presumes to teach her captors significant lessons by catechizing them and disputing with them. In this sense, the Lady becomes an informed influencer, leading by example as male schoolmasters were imagined best to do. She models, guides, and directs her pupils to a better ethical understanding, and she is fearlessly confident that she has these lessons to teach. Outside the classroom, Milton’s young woman has her own teacherly voice and uses it to instruct others as her brothers do.
However, against this possible deconstruction of the schooling into manhood of Milton’s masque, the same two schoolboys, the elder and younger brother, have clearly learned another worldly lesson about their own education into young manhood. The two brothers in particular generate in the Ludlow Masque’s elective curriculum a counternarrative of masculinist control very much like that of Two Gentlemen. Kathryn Schwarz suggests that “A Mask presents a crisis of possession, balancing the fantasy of a female virtue that owns itself against that other fantasy, of traffic or exchange.”85 If the Lady is her own best teacher, her brothers do not allow her that subject-position. And if education is “a project of reproduction, making each student from the same mold,”86 it may also be about reproduction in a more masculinist form.87
When the Lady, like Silvia in Shakespeare’s play, is put in physical peril, her two brothers debate their sister’s danger almost exclusively in terms of her sexual value, a sexual value apparently understood even by these two young lads:
The second brother commodifies and sexualizes his older, wise, and fearless sister as Hesperian “gold,” “Miser’s treasure,” and unguarded “fruit.” She is, he emphasizes, “unowned,” and he does not mean by this that she is strong and independent of will. He imagines her primarily as an object for consumption and procreation, “laden” with “blossoms” and “fruit” for the enjoyment of others (i.e., other men). Most of the brothers’ debating is constructed through the body of their sister: its impermeability, its vulnerability, its purity, and its use-value. As Catherine Thomas argues, “the Lady’s body … becomes a crucial signifier in systems of exchange between men,”88 a sexualized commodity and not a subject.89
This politics is even more obvious when the two brothers school each other on their sister’s potential suffering under an attack. The older brother makes the breathtaking claim that the Lady will repel attackers through the mysterious power of her own virtue, and he produces an extempore essay on this subject, complete with classical citations, to support his premise that women are only sexually assaulted when they are already impure:
The elder brother even goes on to explain that this virtue will only protect her as long as she does not proceed “in pride or in presumption” (431).90 This elegantly framed lesson in rape culture in which he argues that women have only their own “degenerate and degraded state” to blame if they are assaulted is perceived by the younger brother as in fact a lesson in “divine Philosophy” (475).91 The import of the elder brother’s discourse is clear: His sister (like all women) can only be safe if she is virtuous, and her virtue is explicitly sexual purity, just as the imagined threat is implicitly sexual. In these teaching moments, the two brothers, even as young as they are, form ambiguous alliances and engage in critical testing of each other against and through the body of their absent sister, constructing their own pedagogical agency through a debate over her sexual agency.92
The ways in which the Lady is silenced in the final rescue scene of the masque,93 while the boys and men around her (brothers and tutor) discuss her imprisonment, would seem to support the reestablished homosocial world of the masque’s educational story, its function to enforce her “containment of sexuality and maintenance of virtue.”94 And while Sabrina, the masque’s revived maternal instructor, softens and frees the Lady, she does so by physical touch, not “divine philosophy,” and by naming the Lady’s sensual body (lips, breast, fingers, lap) and not her pedagogical authority.95 The Lady thus “needs a woman’s touch to release her from her bondage,”96 and it is noticeably a touch and not a lesson. Thyrsis, the boys’ tutor-figure, resumes his role as schoolmaster at the end of the masque and hastens the children back to the law of the father (almost literally).97 These three young people may have escaped the confines of the classroom, and they may have learned to teach each other, but one of the lessons they have learned, a core message about masculinist authority, is reestablished in the plotting resolution of Milton’s masque, at least in part by the two schoolboys themselves and then again by Milton their instructor.
Conclusion
In both The Two Gentlemen of Verona and the Ludlow Masque, then, pairs of young men seem to be teaching each other about and through the bodies of women, even while those women have some opportunity to be teachers themselves. The forgotten maternal teacher reappears in Milton’s masque in the figure of Sabrina, valuable but constrained to a certain kind of physical and magical rescuing. These boys and young men similarly constrain the young women whose instructorly voices they encounter, even while they engage with each other in a similar form of peer review. It could easily seem, then, that both Shakespeare and Milton feel compelled to reconstrain the womanly tutors whom they imagine, as the masque figures the Lady, even for her schoolboy brothers, as “a commodity among men.”98 Julie Kim argues perceptively that the Lady’s sexuality in the masque appears finally to be an asset “to be hoarded, borrowed, exchanged, stolen, or spent by men.”99 It could even be that Milton portrays the speaking woman in order to doubly affirm the power of masculine peer pressure to manage and control the young woman in his narrative. It is no challenge to objectify a woman who has no potential to instruct, claim authority, or provide an ethical education. But a woman teacher brought back into her vulnerable body: now that is a triumph for the boy learning to be a man among men. The silenced women-figures at the end of Milton’s masque (and Shakespeare’s play) are as much ghosts of themselves as Sabrina is of contemplation’s “best nurse” (377).100 As Kim suggests, Milton, in these ways in the masque, “reinscribes … patriarchal limits.”101
In Milton’s masque in particular, this learning to be men through the constraint of women is intensified because Milton takes a step that Shakespeare could not have: He casts an actual young woman in a major speaking role in a dramatic performance.102 Though even in private or court masques girls in particular were given speaking parts, the young Lady Alice is given not just a token speech but a major role.103 On this one occasion, then, Milton raises the stakes on his ideology of learning. If he is willing to trust in the education of Alice Egerton and give voice to a woman teacher at her hortatory best, he is providing a counter-example to his own pedagogical theories about who should be taught into Englishness. However, if he silences not a boy actor but an aristocratic young woman, if his masque manages her actual and not her imagined body, perhaps an even more intensely masculinized form of teaching into manhood is being enacted. If, as Cedric Brown suggests, in the Ludlow Masque Milton builds “a vision of … the strength of an ideally educated governing class,” that class could easily be read as entirely populated by masculine subjects.104 Perhaps, though the Lady wins her classroom debates, the peer reviews in Ludlow Masque are all necessarily enacted by Milton’s masculine figures to prove that they are learning noble manhood.
