Milton’s Ludlow Maske and Remaking English Nationhood

Recent scholarship has devoted increasing critical attention to the complexities of Milton’s expressions of nationalism and England’s exceptionalism, although with less attention to his early works. This chapter examines Milton’s Ludlow Maske (1634) in order to address the young writer’s efforts to assert himself as an author engaged in debates about remaking English nationhood. Milton treats significant national issues uniquely at a moment when the Caroline masque, including Thomas Carew’s lavish Coelum Britannicum (1634), was giving national exceptionalism spectacular representation. In A Maske Presented at Ludlow Castle the notion of refashioned English nationhood remains an ideal not yet realized in ‘this dim spot/Which men call Earth’; English nationhood requires continual and strenuous testing. A Maske looks forward to the arduous remaking of godly English nationhood that would characterize Milton’s controversial writings during the crises of the revolutionary decades and their aftermath.