1. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (London: Penguin, 1978), 147.
2. Carey describes the play as “a Platonic pastoral drama”; see Milton: The Complete Shorter Poems, ed. John Carey (London and New York: Longman, 1971), 170. All future citations of Comus are to this edition and will appear in the text with reference to line numbers.
3. But see Robert Henke’s discussion of tragicomedy’s links to pastoral in “Pastoral as Tragicomedic in Italian and Shakespearean Drama,” in The Italian World of English Renaissance Drama: Cultural Exchange and Intertextuality, ed. Michele Marrapodi (Newark and London: University of Delaware Press, 1998), 282–301.
4. For this argument, see David Norbrook, Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance (London: Routledge, 1984), ch. 10.
5. Paul Alpers states that “The most widespread view of pastoral is that it is mere wish fulfillment”; see The Singer of the Eclogues: A Study of Virgilian Pastoral (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 4–5.