ABSTRACT
In 1634 the Earl of Bridgewater’s children performed John Milton’s Comus at Ludlow Castle. In 2016 professional actors performed Comus at Shakespeare’s Globe for a London audience. In each incarnation of the masque, a young woman’s movement, song, and speech animated the central character of the Lady, in 1634 by the fifteen-year-old Alice Egerton and in 2016 by the twenty-something Emma Curtis. To frame the temporal tensions that emerge in the 2016 production, I use Mark Fisher’s musicalized discussion of Jacques Derrida’s “hauntology.” I close the temporal circuit between the two “Ladies” to consider how the past might be reanimated onstage in the present and how today’s performances of early modern texts and music manifest the tension between then and now.
