Chapter 1 - Peer Review

Summary

Comparing Milton's tract Of Education with the Ludlow Masque, this chapter studies the schoolboys of the masque and how their education into manhood is developed in these works. Comparing the masque to Shakespeare's Two Gentlemen of Verona, the chapter shows how young men school themselves into heteronormative power. In the cultural contexts of humanist pedagogy, with its ambivalent views of both peer review and maternal tutors, Milton's Comus, Lady, Sabrina, Thyrsis, and brothers reenact a graduation into masculinity that depends upon the lost mother and the silenced woman.