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.

Guide, advisor, teacher, tutor – the connotations of ‘mentor’ are unambiguous enough, and the relationships that arose between the young and older Britten and more experienced acquaintances outside the immediate family are invariably matters of interest to biographers and critics. Britten first met the composer and conductor Frank Bridge in 1927, and remained in close contact until Britten’s move to America in 1939. He first met W. H. Auden on joining the GPO Film Unit in 1935, and soon encountered several of Auden’s literary associates, including Christopher Isherwood, Louis MacNeice and Stephen Spender. While in America (1939–42) Britten and Peter Pears lived for a time in Auden’s New York house, after a spell with the Mayer family on Long Island. The Bridges, the Mayers, and Auden and his associates all contributed to the social and aesthetic context within which Britten was able to produce his early compositions, and while a different set of mentors and friends could have had an identical effect, the distinctive qualities of those who actually filled these roles are what matters here. It was in Britten’s nature to resist potentially intrusive mentoring as much as to invite it.