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.

Chapter Two focuses on imagination, the cognitive faculty allegedly residing in the front of the brain. Early moderns worried about this faculty especially, as it introduced harmful forms into girls’ minds and enabled them to produce illicit visions. But it also appears as a generative faculty in girls. The adolescents under consideration here use their imaginations to see beyond what is tangible and take on uniquely ameliorative roles in relation to dominant restrictive ideologies and damaging norms. The chapter begins with fifteen-year-old Alice Egerton and her performance as the Lady in John Milton’s Comus. Her imaginative brainwork emerges as a powerful, righteous phenomenon against her sorcerer-captor. Next, a reading of Othello’s Desdemona demonstrates how her extended imagination challenges the gender and race codes that inform the play’s basest mentalities. Desdemona also serves as a case study in how marriage binds the female mind to her husband’s fantasies, eventually limiting its cognitive reach. Finally, the chapter analyzes the teenagers of Fletcher and Shakespeare’s Two Noble Kinsmen. The “coining” brain of the Jailer’s Daughter is shown to complement and compound the brainwork of particular girls within and beyond the play — including Desdemona — and gives their previously contracted, suffocated body-minds a second life.