The Circe of Milton’s Comus
The Circe of Milton’s Comus
Drew Nathaniel Keane
The Circean figure of Milton’s Comus does not come to us straight from the lips of Homer. Between her appearance in Book of 10 of the Odyssey and that in line 50 of Comus lies not only 2300 years but a world of commentary, altered assumptions, and other literature, in which Milton was steeped. Most significantly for Milton, Circe passes through a Platonic filter. As Hughes explains, “Among the English humanists of the early sixteenth century there was no doubt or regret of Homer’s ‘Platonism” (387). After the Platonic, Milton’s depiction of Circe’s son Comus reveals the effects of the filter of general Medieval-Renaissance assumptions (which are inseparably tied to the Platonism already mentioned). By Milton’s time, Circe had become an image of incontinence and, particularly of concupiscence.
Like Christian scholars commenting on their Scriptures, scholars of ancient Greece and Rome wrote countless commentaries on Homer. By the fall of the Western Empire, the Neo-Platonic readings of Homer had won the day. Neo-Platonic commentators always managed to find a hidden description of their own ascetic philosophy in the works of the ancient poets, especially Homer. Platonism remained a vital force throughout the Medieval Age even the Aristotelian High Middle Ages (While our age emphasizes their disagreements, the Medievalists saw Plato and Aristotle as essentially harmonious authorities). Neo-Platonism, in particular, received new life in the Renaissance, of which its literature certainly shows the effects.
The thinkers of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, as C. S. Lewis put it, “are bookish. They are indeed very credulous of books. They find it hard to believe that anything an old auctour has said is simply untrue” (11). They insisted on possibility of fitting perfectly together the varied collection of authorities they had received from Classical times—and they often prove quite ingenious in their combinations. And, as Lewis also explains, although they understood in theory the differences between sundry sorts of literature, in practice they tended to ignore it. Homer’s Circe shows the marks of this tendency. Renaissance authors take Homer and the long line of Platonizing commentators together, without distinction. Roger Ascham merely related the common assumption when he wrote, “Homer and Plato have both the one meaning, looke both to one end” (Hughes, 387). And what meaning could Homer have intended other than the essential lesson that Reason (which Ulysses represents), guided by Divine Aid (depicted as Mercury) must overcome the de-humanizing force of concupiscence (symbolized by Circe), to which his fellows fell prey?
Before noting three specific predecessor’s to Milton’s Comus, let’s consider two more assumptions that shape the allegorizing of Circe:
The Great Chain of Being and Man as a Microcosm.
Medieval and Renaissance thinkers learned from Aristotle that all life falls on a great chain, from the highest, God, to the very lowest living organisms. Man is situated in the middle of the vast chain, and, because so situated, he contains elements from both ends of the continuum, in short, he is a microcosm of the whole chain. He posses the flesh of beasts, but the divine faculties of spiritual life, such as Reason. Thus, as Hughes put it, “Man could hope to be human only by achieving balance… among all his opposed brutal inclinations with the help of his peculiarly human reason.”
Reason and Sensuality.
Neo-Platonism’s asceticism is constantly reflected in the ethical discourse of Medieval and Renaissance writers. The Spirit and Reason must rule over the bodily and sensual. Reason and Sensuality constitute the divine and animal parts of humanity, respectively. Thus, Renaissance people believed it reasonable to expect a correspondence between certain animals and certain virtues and vices.
Examples:
Middle Platonist writer Plutarch (pg. 509), Bruta Animalia Ratione Uti, The Hog Gryllus, in dialogue with subtle Ulysses says: “To sum up, if you think that you are better in courage than beasts, why do your poets call the doughtiest fighters “wolf-minded” and “lion-hearted” and “like a boar in valour,” though no poet ever called a lion “man-hearted” or a boar “like a man in valour”? But, I imagine, just as when those who are swift are called “wind-footed” and those who are handsome are called “godlike,” there is exaggeration in the imagery; just so the poets bring in a higher ideal when they compare mighty warriors to something else.”
Sir Thomas More’s translation of della Mirandola’s letter: “If … the soul leave the noble use of his reason and incline unto sensuality and affections of the body: then the flesh changeth us from the figure of reasonable men into the likeness of unreasonable beasts, and that diversely: after the convenience and similitude between our sensual affections and the brutish properties of sundry beasts” (Hughes 388).
The Medieval and Renaissance readers, as Hughes observes, read Homer with this in mind, assuming, “The charms of Circe had simply made [the soldiers’] moral nature express itself in their physical bodies” (394).
This allegory of Reasonable Temperance overcoming Sensual Excess manifests itself in an array of Renaissance Circes. Ariosto’s fantastical Orlando Furioso, completed in 1532 includes the sorceress Alcina, modeled after Circe. Tasso’s 1581 Jerusalem Delivered, a Romantic Epic of the First Crusade, recasts Circe as the Saracen enchantress Armida, who is defeated by the crusader Rinaldo. The Story of Armida and Rinaldo became a popular subject of opera, taken up by such composers as Lully, Gluck, Handel (who also wrote an opera for Alcina), Haydn, and Rossini (the latter of which plays at the Met later this semester). Most importantly for Milton, Spenser concludes Book II of The Faerie Queene with the conquest of Acrasia, modeled after Tasso’s Armida, Ariosto’s Alcina, and Homer’s Circe.
“There, whence the Musick seemed heard to bee,
Was the faire Witch her selfe now solacing,
With a new Louer, whom through sorceree
And witchcraft, she from farre did thither bring:
There she had him now layd a slombering,
In secret shade, after long wanton ioyes:
Whilst round about them pleasauntly did sing
Many faire Ladies, and lasciuious boyes,
That euer mixt their song with light licentious toyes.” (Book II, Canto XII, 72)
When Spencer’s Temperate Knight Guyon restores Acrasia’s pets to their true human form, one of the beasts, a hog called Grill, refuses, probably with a nod to Plutarch’s Gryllus.
“Said Guyon, See the mind of beastly man,
That hath so soone forgot the excellence
Of his creation, when he life began,
That now he chooseth, with vile difference,
To be a beast, and lacke intelligence.
To whom the Palmer thus, The donghill kind
Delights in filth and foule incontinence:
Let Grill be Grill, and haue his hoggish mind,
But let vs hence depart, whilest wether serues and wind.” (II, XII, 87)
Like his poetic forebears, Milton does not portray Circe herself, but a Circean character. His Comus is the son of Circe, and plays the role in Milton’s Mask that Acrasia plays in Spencer’s Epic.