Milton’s Tenderness: Post-Critique and Its Limits in Comus

Abstract: The emerging critical consensus is that Milton only gradually becomes a critic of royal power and that A Mask (Comus) shows signs of his early desire to elevate rather than reform the Caroline masque. Post-critical readers would see that shift as part of a broader movement in literary studies away from the “hermeneutics of suspicion.” By foregrounding the link between Milton’s iconoclasm and what Hazlitt calls his “beauty and tenderness,” this essay argues that Milton pushes us to reflect on what Rita Felski calls the “limits of critique,” while still placing far greater emphasis than she does on judgment.