Page:The Complete Poetical Works of John Milton.djvu/75

 ARCADES AND COMUS

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��wonderful career, and a crowd of play- wrights stood ready to seize upon any outlet for their talents. It was not long, therefore, before the somewhat crude spec- tacular displays which marked, for exam- ple, the famous visit of Queen Elizabeth to Kenilworth, developed in the hands of such dramatic poets as Dekker, Marston, Heywood, and Chapman into more chas- tened and coherent forms, with a substantial warp of poetry to hold the structure to- gether. Ben Jousoii, who as laureate to King James was expected to furnish one or two masques a year for the court, lifted the form out of the realm of the ephemeral, and made it a vehicle for literature. Some- where in his burly make-up Ben Jonson hid a deposit of delicate fancy and exquisite song, and he fashioned the airy substance of his masques with love, lavishing upon them vast learning and invention. He was fortunate in having as his coadjutors two men of exceptional gifts, Ferrabosco, the King's musician, and Inigo Jones, the King's architect ; but Jonson refused stoutly to subordinate his text to the music of the one or to the stage devices of the other. Jonson's example led other poets to give the masque a much more con- scientious treatment than it had hitherto received. His work had only to be sup- plemented by the exquisite lyrical sense of John Fletcher, in his Faithful Shepherdess, and by the magic fancy of Shakespeare, in such masque-like creations as Midsummer Night's Dream and the Tempest, to prepare the instrument wholly for Milton's hand.

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��The Arcades is only a fragment, and if it had not been followed by Comus, would be of little interest except for the two or three lovely lyric touches which it contains. But as regards the circumstances of their production, the two poems are intimately connected, and any Consideration of the one

��necessarily includes the other. What those circumstances were has already been briefly stated in the introductory biography. It is there assumed, in accordance with the general belief, that we owe the Arcades to Henry Lawes, the young musician whose name is otherwise imperishably bound up with the lyric poetry of the seventeenth century, since it was he who set to music the songs of Carew, Lovelace, Herrick, and other poets of his day. Biographers have attempted to prove, with partial success, that Milton was personally known to the Bridgewater family, and received the invitation to contribute to the Hare- field masque directly from them. The matter is of small importance ; certainly, from whatever source it came, the invita- tion cannot but have been welcome to the young poet, for several reasons. In the first place, the Countess Dowager of Derby, in whose honor the masque was performed, had been, in her youth, the friend of Mil- ton's darling poet, Spenser, who indeed claimed kinship with her family, the Spen- cers of Althorpe. To her elder sisters Spenser had dedicated his Muiopotmos and his Mother Hubberd's Tale, and to herself his Tears of the Muses. Such a connection would have been enough to throw about the venerable lady to Milton's eyes a halo of romantic interest, even had not her subse- quent relations with literary men made it possible for Warton to say that " the peer- age-book of this lady is the literature of her age." At the fine old estate of Hare- field, she and her second husband, Sir Thomas Egerton, had been visited by Queen Elizabeth, and the stately avenue of elms in which the Arcades was after- wards presented derived its name of the " Queen's Walk " from a masque of wel- come which was presented there on that occasion. A widow since 1617, the Coun- tess Dowager lived in stately retirement at Harefield, engaged in works of charity. Three groups of grandchildren surrounded

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