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.

I live in Longmont, Colorado, on the western edge of the Great Plains. Settlers from Chicago founded the modern city of Longmont in 1871 by the St. Vrain River (a generous term for a small watercourse), adjacent to the slightly older community of Burlington (Estes et al. 1971). Longmont has grown since then from a population of a couple of hundred to a community of nearly 100,000. My city’s many amenities include Sandstone Ranch, a park just east of town that includes athletic fields, a wildlife refuge, and an elegant late-19th-century home that a pioneer named Morse Coffin built at the base of a sandstone cliff overlooking the St. Vrain.