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An unusually rich source text for adaptation during the eighteenth century, John Milton's A Mask presented at Ludlow Castle, 1634: On Michaelmasse night, before the Right Honorable John Earle of Bridgewater, Viscount Brackly, Lord Præsident of Wales, And one of His Majesties most honorable Privie Counsell was adapted into an opera, a play and a novel between 1737 and 1783. The success of Milton’s masque in various formats came in spite of the fact that the masque genre presented singular problems for adaptors. As A Mask’s lengthy title highlights, it was designed for a single performance in which the presence of the

audience was as important as that of the actors, and where the former would have risen and mingled with the latter during the closing dances. The unique features of the masque as a genre have been well described by Stephen Orgel.

It attempted from the beginning to breach the barrier between spectators and actors, so that in effect the viewer became part of the spectacle. The end toward which the masque moved was to destroy any sense of theatre and to include the whole court in the mimesis—in a sense, what the spectator watched he ultimately became.¹

Hence Milton's only masque is essentially unstageable as he would have envisaged it.

Specifically designed to be performed on one occasion only, to an audience that would have included John Egerton and other members of the Bridgewater family, as well as many local dignitaries, any subsequent performance of A Mask must work around or eliminate features tailored to this single unique performance. The intimate casting of the Earl of Bridgewater’s three children as the Lady and her Elder and Younger brothers is one such irreplaceable element, along with the masque’s conclusion, where the Earl and Lady Bridgewater would have risen to join their children onstage and perform in the masque’s closing dances. More

1 Stephen Orgel, The Jonsonian Masque (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), p. 6.

than any performance of Shakespeare's works, every staging of A Mask since the original has been, in the words of Linda Hutcheon, 'its own palimpsestic thing' – the end product of a process of adaptation and a transposition of genre from masque to play.² An awareness of how the context of A Mask’s performance affected its theatrical presentation was particularly evident in the 2016 RSC production at the Sam Wanamaker playhouse, where the masque was presented within a framing narrative that envisaged a version of the original Ludlow Castle performance.

It is no longer possible to say, as John Creaser did in 1984, that A Mask ‘has long been celebrated as a text and patronised as an event.’³ Barbara Breasted’s article “Comus and the Castlehaven Affair” first sparked interest in the context of A Mask by uncovering a sexual scandal in the Egerton family and speculating that the masque may have functioned in part as a rite of purification.⁴ Leah Marcus’s work on the Bridgewater archives has uncovered much of the Earl of Bridgewater’s political sympathies, as well as proposing a rape case as an alternative real-world inspiration for the plot.⁵ Critics such as Philip Schwyzer and Michael Wilding have identified the significance of borders in A Mask, the action of which is set on the contested ground between the Severn and the Wye, between the modern Welsh border and the ancient border described by Geoffrey of Monmouth.⁶ This notoriously lawless border territory adds an extra dimension to the threat with which the sons and daughter of John

2 Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation (New York; London: Routledge, 2006), p.9

3 John Creaser, ‘“The Present Aid of This Occasion”: The Setting of Comus’, in The Court Masque, ed. by David Lindley (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), p. 111.

4 Barbara Breasted, ‘Comus and the Castlehaven Scandal’, Milton Studies, 3 (1971), 201–24.

5 Leah Marcus, The Politics of Mirth: Jonson, Herrick, Milton, Marvell, and the Defense of Old Holiday Pastimes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986); Leah Marcus, ‘The Milieu of Milton’s “Comus”: Judicial Reform at Ludlow and the Problem of Sexual Assault’, Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts, 25.4 (1983), 293-327.

6 See Philip Schwyzer, ‘Purity and Danger on the West Bank of the Severn: The Cultural Geography of A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle, 1634’, Representations, 60 (1997), 22–48; and Michael Wilding, ‘Milton’s A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle, 1634: Theatre and Politics on the Border’, Milton Quarterly, 21.4 (1987), 1–12.

Egerton, Earl of Bridgewater, must contend. Yet, although much critical effort has been expended upon regaining all the social, geographical and historical nuances of A Mask’s original context, much less interest has been shown in how the new context of eighteenth-century adaptation altered and reinterpreted the original Miltonic text.

In this chapter, I wish to argue that adaptations of A Mask in the eighteenth century transgress the liminal border placement Milton established for his masque, changing the meaning of the masque as it was transposed into new settings. Paolo Rolli's operatic

adaptation of A Mask can be viewed as a part of his larger effort to restore Milton's early links with Italy and his wider continental reputation by bestowing a neoclassical gloss and a veneer of European culture on Milton's original materials. John Dalton's theatrical adaptation, later truncated into an afterpiece by George Colman, draws the play towards London, replacing Comus’s original half-bestial followers with a crowd of fashionable men and women, and associating the Wild Wood of the masque with the delights offered by Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens. In an opposing movement, William Godwin's early novel Imogen: A Pastoral Romance (1784) projects the plot of A Mask outwards and backwards, setting the plot in the wilder terrain of North Wales where an idealised vision of ancient Celtic society is under threat by a proto-aristocratic magician. While all three adaptations mention the masque’s original performance at Ludlow Castle in their introductory material, each departs, in different ways, from the masque’s original setting.⁷

Paolo Rolli's Sabrina.

7 Beyond these adaptations, the influence of Comus on eighteenth-century poetry is well documented in Havens, Influence of Milton, pp.555-8; and John T Shawcross, ‘The Deleterious and the Exalted:

Milton’s Poetry in the Eighteenth Century’, in Milton and the Grounds of Contention, ed. by Mark R Kelley, Michael Lieb, and John T Shawcross (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2003), pp. 11–

36.

True to the spirit of border crossings, the first adaptation of A Mask to reach the English stage was an operatic adaptation by Paolo Antionio Rolli, an Italian musician, poet, critic, translator and Fellow of the Royal Society who had been living in London since 1716. Rolli’s interest in music and literature made him a kind of cultural bridge between England and Italy. During his time in England, where he lived until 1744, he wrote original works in both languages, defended Milton and Ariosto against the criticism of Voltaire, and was responsible for the publication in London of several editions of classic Italian writers such as Ariosto and Boccaccio. He also produced the first Italian translation of Paradise Lost, as Del Paradiso perduto, of which the first six books were published in 1730, and the last six in 1735.⁸

Rolli’s Sabrina first appeared at the King's Theatre in Haymarket on April 26^th 1737, where it managed a respectable eleven-day run but apparently garnered remarkably poor box office returns. ⁹ It was performed entirely in Italian. The music, unfortunately, does not appear to have survived, but the libretto was published in a parallel Italian-English text. It was one of the last works performed by Rolli’s employer, the Opera of the Nobility, an opera company set up in 1733 as a rival to Handel’s Royal Opera company. It was common in the twentieth century to read the two opera companies along political lines, identifying Handel with King George II and the government of Sir Robert Walpole, and the Nobility Opera with Frederick, Prince of Wales and the Patriot opposition. Recent research by Thomas McGeary has cast doubt on whether such a political polarisation ever existed.¹⁰ It would be tempting to link

8 For these details and much of what follows below, I am indebted to George Dorris, Paolo Rolli and the Italian Circle in London (The Hague: Mouton., 1967), which remains the fullest biography of Rolli, as well as a helpful alternative to more Handel-centric histories of English opera.

9 Colley Cibber gives a figure of thirty-five pounds for a single performance in An Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber: With an Historical View of the Stage during His Own Time, ed. by B R S Fone (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1968), p.226

10 The most thoroughgoing rejection of opera as political allegory is Thomas McGeary, The Politics of Opera in Handel’s Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). A thoughtful article that acknowledges the difficulties of interpretation but presents a well-developed case for reading opera as political allegory is Suzanne Aspden, ‘Ariadne’s Clew: Politics, Allegory, and Opera in London (1734)’, Musical Quarterly, 85.4 (2001), 735–70.

Sabrina to the Whig rehabilitation of Milton, especially since Rolli has links to James Thomson through their shared patroness, the Countess of Hertford, but the opera appears to offer little scope for an allegorical reading. Indeed, the preface, which recounts the original performance of A Mask, includes an elaborate compliment on Scroop Egerton, first Duke of Bridgewater: a courtier to George II who was not at all identified with the Patriot Opposition.

The most one can say is that perhaps it sought to profit from the renewed attention that the political contestation over Milton’s reputation was generating.

Sabrina stands out amongst the Nobility opera productions as unusual: most Nobility operas retold classical or biblical stories. Sabrina is the only opera with a British setting and the only one to be based on a literary work by a British author.¹¹ As with Rolli’s translation project, it serves as an opportunity to strengthen the links between Milton and Italy, where the young poet spent much of his Grand Tour; in a recent essay, Roberta Klimt calls the opera a

‘creative and generous interpretation of Milton’s Italianism’.¹² Unlike Del Paradiso perduto, however, Sabrina is very much an adaptation rather than a translation, including almost no language that can be identified as Milton’s, and changing significant details of the plot. For a work that had the potential to please its audience by uniting Italian music and artistry with the work of a British literary hero, Rolli’s opera seems surprisingly uncomfortable with using Milton’s own text.

An examination of the reputation of Italian opera in England at this period may help explain the severity of these changes, but in order to envisage the difficulties Rolli faced in adapting A Mask into operatic form, it is first necessary to give a brief summary of the original. A Mask was constructed of three scenes. In the first, the Attendant Spirit descends

11 For a complete list of Nobility operas, see the Appendix to McGeary, The Politics of Opera in the Age of Walpole.

12 Roberta Klimt, ‘“Il Drama Di Giovanni Milton”: An Eighteenth-Century Italian Musical Adaptation of Milton’s A Maske’, Milton Quarterly, 51.1 (2017), 23–37 (p. 24).

and explains his mission to assist endangered chastity, describing the Lady and her two brothers as well as the threat posed to them by Comus. Comus then enters with his followers for the lawless revelry of the anti-masque, which is interrupted by the entrance of the Lady.

Disguised as a simple shepherd, Comus succeeds in tempting the Lady back to his ‘low / But loyal cottage’ (320). In the second scene, the two brothers enter and discuss their missing sister. The younger is concerned that she will fall into danger, while the elder is adamant that the power of her chastity will protect her from harm. The Attendant Spirit enters, disguised as a local shepherd, and reveals that the Lady has fallen into the clutches of Comus. The three make plans to rescue her.

The third scene opens in Comus’s palace, where the Lady refuses to drink from Comus’s enchanted glass and is frozen to her chair by his magic for a long scene of

temptation and rebuttal, wherein Comus urges libertinism and luxury and the Lady defends the cause of temperance and chastity. Just as Comus is about to force her to drink, the

brothers and the Attendant Spirit enter and drive Comus from the stage. However, since they did not capture Comus, they have no way to free the Lady from her chair until the Attendant Spirit summons Sabrina, goddess of the Severn river, who is able to release her. The

Attendant Spirit then leads the siblings home to Ludlow Castle and their parents, who arise from the audience to join in the closing dances before the Spirit reascends to Heaven.

Rolli kept the essential details of the three-act structure intact, but in accordance with operatic practice, broke each act into several different scenes to allow each singer an aria followed by a dramatic exit. Thematically, the masque presented more of a problem. In the original context of the masque, Comus was a richly symbolic figure, as Barbara Lewalski lays out.

With his bestial rout Comus is made to figure on one level Cavalier licentiousness, Laudian ritual, the depravities of court masques and feasts, as well as the unruly holiday pastimes—maypoles, morris dances, Whitsunales—promoted by the Book

of Sports Charles I had reissued the previous year. Comus embodies as well the seductive power of false rhetoric and the threat of rape.¹³

A century later, much of that contemporary context was lost. The battle of wills between Comus and the Lady could be read simply as a verbal duel between temperance and luxury, and the difficulty was that opera—an expensive, flamboyant, foreign import—was

irreversibly associated with Comus’s side of the argument. Thomas McGeary’s overview of the cultural opposition to opera is telling.

Literary critics claimed opera was an irrational, sensuous art form, sung in a foreign language that violated verisimilitude and decorum. Dramatists and friends of British theatre saw opera and highly paid singers as threats to native talent and dramatic traditions. Social reformers and moralists, continuing in the vein of Jeremy Collier, condemned opera as an expensive offspring of luxury that led to vice, sensuality, and effeminacy, and whose castrato singers posed a sexual threat to women and gender norms. Nationalists object to the presence of foreign art on the London stage, especially at times when Britain was engaged in Continental wars.¹⁴

Adapting a masque by Milton might help to counter some of the nationalist arguments, but to import the character of the Lady into Sabrina would have been to give the opera an anti-operatic heroine, speaking the language of the social reformers.

Instead of the three-sibling family central to A Mask, Rolli added two family sets of siblings, brother and sister, each of which is engaged to a member of the opposite gender from the other family—so Brunalto is engaged to Grandalma, whose brother Crindoro is engaged to Belcore, Brunalto’s sister. Barring incest, the relationships are about as neat, symmetrical and neo-classical as it is possible to get. Comapses (as the Comus character is known in the opera) threatens this harmonious relationship by summoning a storm that parts the couples. Then, through his magic, he impersonates Brunalto in order to marry Grandalma,

13 Barbara Lewalski, The Life of John Milton: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 63.

14 McGeary, The Politics of Opera in Handel's Britain, p. 1.

while Brunalto is cursed to be continually mistaken for a shepherd until he is guided to Sabrina’s fountain, and by the blessing of the goddess his rightful identity is restored. He arrives in time to interrupt Comapses and Grandalma and to show Comapses in his true form, at which Grandalma faints, but, by the power of Sabrina, is revived.

There is very little in the way of Miltonic language in the opera. Key points from A Mask, like the Song to Echo or the Lady's paralysis and rescue by Sabrina, are occasionally visible, but the former is merely a brief reference during a storm aria as Brunalto cries 'Ahi!

ch'e l'Eco! / E risponde pietosa al mio lamento' [Echo I hear does answer give / To the too piercing grief I vent], and the latter is passed over in less than twenty lines, with the libretto leaving it unclear whether Grandalma has been enchanted by Comapses or has merely fainted.¹⁵ The contest between temperance and indulgence is cut from the plot. Since Comapses impersonates Brunalto, whom Grandalma desires to marry, there is no need to tempt or seduce her, a decision that makes the masque a much more acceptable opera, but excises the thematic heart from Milton’s work.

This excision has undoubtedly harmed the work’s standing with Miltonists, and Klimt puts the point across strongly when she writes that ‘[b]y converting Milton’s Maske into a romantic comedy, lowering the stakes from the preservation of the Lady’s sacrosanct virginity to the outcome of some sylvan star-crossed loves, Rolli could be said to misunderstand the masque totally.’¹⁶ I would argue instead that Rolli understood the reputation of Italian opera in eighteenth-century London too well. The structure of A Mask

15 Paolo Antonio Rolli, Sabrina: A Masque (London, 1737), pp. 18–19. I use the English translation provided alongside the Italian libretto, which also appears to be by Rolli. No other name is mentioned on the title page; Rolli is known to have provided the English libretto for several of his other operas;

and the versification has an awkwardness which suggests a non-native speaker.

16 Klimt, ‘An Eighteenth-Century Italian Musical Adaptation’, p.32.

was easily adaptable to the opera, but to adopt Milton’s themes of temperance and chastity would have laid Rolli open to repeating the arguments of the opera’s cultural enemies.

Klimt finds value in the textual links she draws between Sabrina and the works of Tasso and Petrarch, arguing that this is part of Rolli’s project of emphasizing the Italian sources of A Mask. To complement and contrast with her argument, I would suggest that many elements of Rolli’s new plot suggest an attempt to balance these Italian features with plot elements taken from William Shakespeare. Comapses’s ability to summon up a storm recalls Prospero’s powers in The Tempest; a later scene where Sabrina visits Comapses at night to warn him not to pursue Grandalma recalls the haunting of Richard III on the night before the Battle of Bosworth Field; and a story where two sets of couples are lost in a wood and at the mercy of mercurial demi-god would naturally have recalled A Midsummer Night’s Dream. All three were popular stage productions in eighteenth-century Britain, while The Tempest and A Midsummer Night’s Dream had an honourable history of operatic adaptation, as John Dryden and William Davenant’s The Tempest; or the Enchanted Island (1670) and Henry Purcell’s The Fairy Queen (1692). What we seem to be seeing here is an attempt to naturalise Italian opera, if not through faithful adaptation of Milton, then through a

combination of popular English plot devices, especially where they offered a potential for additional stage spectacle.

Sabrina also makes the most of the opportunity to flatter British national pride.

Sabrina also makes the most of the opportunity to flatter British national pride.