Comus 에 대한 고찰 = A Study on Comus

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

A masque was first acted on Sep. 29, 1934, at Ludlow Castle on Michaelmasse night in Shropshire. The Performance was a part of the inaugural festivities for the Earl of Bridgewater, the New Lord President of Wales.
There are some controversy on genre; however, we can get the clean idea of it as a masque, from the traditional convention of masque.
Comus has a descending-and-ascending structure, consists of three surface scenes. It starts from the descent of the soul from heaven into the prison of the flesh, which is a symbol of the world in which good and evil has grown up together. And then it moves to the struggle of the soul against the demands of the flesh. Temptation and testing is occurring during the struggle. But vices are banished by the help of philosophical knowledge. In the final scene, the Lady arrives to the goal of the journey, symbolically heaven.
The theme of this work represent the Christian idea. Milton showed an allegory of the Christian doctrine of Grace, in which the human souls fail to escape sensuality when they depend upon reason in the realm of nature, but succeed when they are assisted by God's Grace.
Milton is using four main imageries; such as imagery of water, imagery of light, imagery of pilgrimage and imagery of wedding, to enforce the theme and structure.
In short, Milton's Masque argues a puritan vision of how to live virtuously in a corrupt world, through the masque, which was a form of recreation or entertainment that served as a symbol of the Royalist world view, in the 17th century.