Early Writing
After graduating from Cambridge, Milton returned to live with his parents in Hammersmith, for a long "studious retirement". During this period, extending from 1630 to 1638, Milton hesitated over a career and composed his Arcades, A Mask (better known as Comus, a title it acquired only in 1738 at the hands of John Dalton), and Lycidas.
Both Arcades and A Mask Presented at Ludlow Castle, 1634 were masques commissioned by the family of John Egerton, 1st Earl of Bridgewater through the influence of Lawes, the Earl's music tutor for his children. Arcades was written to honor Alice Spencer, Countess Dowager of Derby, and performed on her estate at Harefield west of London; the date is debated, perhaps in October 1632 as the family tried to put behind it the scandal of the execution of her son-in-law Mervyn Tuchet, 2nd Earl of Castlehaven for sexual offences, or on her 75th birthday, 4 May 1634. A Mask was performed for Michaelmas eve, 29 September 1634, at Ludlow Castle, the Earl of Bridgewater's residence. This masque differed in some ways from other masques of the time, in that it was longer and did not rely as much on music. The text was revised and published in 1638. Milton was a theatre-goer in his youth, as he mentions in Elegy I, and his dramatic work on masques, though the genre was closely associated with court entertainments, has been seen as suggestive of a reforming rather than a negative attitude to drama, in contrast to militant critics such as William Prynne from the Puritan side.
Milton's family moved out west from Hammersmith to Horton during 1636, further into the English countryside. In November 1638, Milton wrote Lycidas and the work was published in a collection of other memorial works for Edward King, who had attended Christ's College with Milton, published that year. While Milton knew King, who had been a elected to a fellowship, it is not clear they were close friends. Lycidas is a thoughtful elegy in the pastoral style, and it appeared over the initials J.M.
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