1. Comus is a masque in which a young lady's chastity is tried and not vanquished.

2. It's about eight years after Comus.

3. When Comus is first performed, Milton's poetry hasn't yet been printed, but it's almost as if Sabrina seems to have died printless or unpublished so that Milton wouldn't have to.

4. For Comus, nature is just like the harsh master who had given each of his servants a portion of money and who expects those coins, who expects those talents, to be put to use.

5. Comus attempts to seduce the Lady, you'll remember, with something like an economic theory of natural beauty.

6. She explains to Comus what would happen should she actually choose to break her silence, should she actually choose to unleash all of the rhetorical powers that she has pent up inside of her.

7. For Comus, nature has given us all of her riches and it's our duty, it's our obligation, to spend them, to consume them, and to luxuriate in nature's generosity.

8. In Comus, the Lady had identified with Orpheus as she described to Comus what her speech about virginity would do if she were actually to deliver it.

9. I know we haven't gotten to Comus yet, but I'm trying to put this in to context.

10. One is the chapter on Comus in a book by John Guillory called Poetic Authority, and the other is the entire book by Angus Fletcher on Milton's Comus, titled The Transcendental Mask.

11. She'd love to tell Comus something about chastity, but he has neither ear nor soul to apprehend the sublime notion and high mystery.

12. As excited -- as aroused -- as we might find ourselves by this imagining of Milton actually playing Comus, of course his performance in that role can't be asserted in any way definitively.

13. And so it's an understandable ploy on Milton's part that he needs to vilify Shakespeare by identifying that great poet, his older contemporary, with Comus.

14. Now one of the moments in which this tension between virginity and chastity seems to be most pronounced is in the encounter between Comus and the Lady that we looked at in the last class.

15. We have already encountered on some level the importance of the figure of eating to John Milton. Think of Comus.

16. So I want to propose that the literary traditions' renaming of this piece from A Mask to Comus is more than just a slip, or more than just a random shift of terms or of names.

16. try its best to gather and create good sentences.

17. At times when we read Paradise Lost it seems almost as if Satan were quoting or alluding to Comus.

18. So yet once more -- and I promise this will be one of the last times that we look back at Milton's mask - but yet once more, let's look at Comus.

19. I think we could make some estimation of its significance if we juxtapose it with Comus since The Mask attempts to tackle, in a much more expanded form, so many of the same issues.

20. I'm using the word "stuck," of course, because the Lady had been stuck so famously and so prominently in Comus.