Interpreting SAMSON AGONISTES

by Joseph Anthony Wittreich

Overview

Joseph Wittreich reveals Samson to be an intensely political work that reflects the heroic ambitions and failings of the Puritan Revolution and the tragic ambiguities of the era. He sees in the work not the purveyance of Medieval and early Renaissance typological associations but an interrogation of them and a consequent movement away from them.

Originally published in 1986.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691639123
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	04/19/2016
Series:	Princeton Legacy Library , #375
Pages:	430
Product dimensions:	6.40(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.20(d)

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Interpreting Samson Agonistes

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By Joseph Anthony Wittreich

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1986 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06671-4

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CHAPTER 1

SAMSON AGONISTES AND THE STATE OF MILTON CRITICISM

... the best way of resisting the dominant ideology ... is not surprisingly, to bring its existence out into the open and to discuss it. — Christopher Butler

No sooner had Raymond Waddington told us what we could all agree upon — that Samson Agonistes is a drama of regeneration — than Irene Samuel declared she could not agree, and in such a way as to remind us of the Johnsonian proposition: "this is the tragedy which ignorance has admired, and bigotry applauded." It has been suggested that we will never know exactly what Johnson meant inasmuch as published commentary on Milton's tragedy hardly existed at the time. Some commentary did exist, however, both visual and verbal, with illustrative criticism (a good index to any text's status in the culture) foregrounding the catastrophe at the pillars and arraying around that subject Samson meditating and Samson encountering Dalila. Verbal criticism was more various still, with Samson Agonistes being regarded as a tragedy that, even if unadapted to general taste, was Milton's most nearly faultless, most finished work. Recognized as "a perfect model and standard of tragic poetry" and then ranked third among Milton's poems — above Lycidas but below Paradise Lost and Comus — Samson continued to be praised, as it had been anonymously praised in 1692, for its exquisite descriptions (especially of Samson's death) and delicate narrations, for the turn of the whole, for its being so intricately of a piece with Milton's entire canon, and for its "terrible Satyr on Woman" Dr. Johnson may never have worried over the poem's alleged misogyny; but he was clearly unsettled by a poem whose unorthodox aesthetic features bespoke what was for Johnson Milton's more objectionable unorthodoxies in matters of religion and politics.

Moreover, such criticism as existed by mid-century received codification in Thomas Newton's variorum commentary where Milton is regularly beheld "in the person of Samson" and where, repeatedly, Milton's dramatic poem is regarded in its political aspect as a reproach to his countrymen, and in its religious aspect as "a concealed attack on the church of England" whose "opulent Clergy ... he tacitly compares with the lords and priests of the idol Dagon." Many of the notes printed by Newton cross-reference passages in Samson Agonistes to the classics and the Bible, to Spenser, and especially to Paradise Lost, Yet the most provocative of these notes represent Samson as a deeply autobiographical poem steeped in political awareness and concern. Samson's "That fault I take not on me" speech (241 ff, but see 679-709) is said to address, as plainly as Milton dared, "the Restoration of Charles II, which he accounted the restoration of slavery," with the annotator Jortin wondering "how the Licensers of those days let it pass." Reflecting upon lines 628 ff, the annotator Newton suggests that Milton probably intended them as "a secret satir upon the English nation, which according to his republican politics had ... chosen bondage with ease rather than strenuous liberty." Manoa's application for Samson's deliverance is thereupon paralleled with Marvell's petition for Milton's deliverance; Dalila is represented as a composite portrait of Milton's first two wives; and Milton, while brooding over "the trials and sufferings of his party after the Restoration," is thought also to focus upon his own situation, and probably that of Sir Henry Vane, and then to describe through the sufferings of Samson his own grief and misery, his own melancholy.

It is misleading to argue that in the eighteenth century Samson Agonistes received only perfunctory attention and exerted little influence, for by the end of that century the premises for a criticism of the poem were firmly established: this is a poem in which Milton creates a new type of heroic character, the likes of which are not to be found even in Homer; it is a poem in which, through the character of Samson, Milton paints himself and one that, because it records so poignantly Milton's experience of defeat, must have been composed early in the 1660s. Eighteenth-century criticism simply paves the way for the dicta of the next century: that Milton is "a second Samson" or the "Samson among Poets," that "Samson is Milton in hard Hebrew form," and that Samson Agonistes is the poet's "last effort ... to rescue the English nation from disgrace and servitude." In the words of Sir Egerton Brydges, this is a poem in which we see Milton "revenging himself on his age," crushing "the Philistines, as Samson in death buried his enemies"; this is a poem, in the eloquent formulation of Richard Garnett, that is at once national and prophetic:

"Samson Agonistes" deserves to be esteemed a national poem, pregnant with a deeper allusiveness than has always been recognized. ... Particular references to the circumstances of his life are not wanting. ... But, as in the Hebrew prophets, Israel sometimes denotes a person, sometimes a nation, Samson seems no less the representative of the English people in the age of Charles the Second. ... The English nation is ... the enslaved and erring Samson — a Samson, however, yet to burst his bonds and bring down ruin upon the Philistines. "Samson Agonistes" is thus a prophetic drama, the English counterpart of the world-drama of "Prometheus Bound."

Though criticism of Samson Agonistes had become more finely nuanced in the nineteenth century, its basic concerns are nonetheless epitomized by an estimate of Milton's tragedy reprinted in the Memoirs of Thomas Hollis and offer clues, certainly, to the kind of interpretation that caused Dr. Johnson to recoil from the poem:

Let us consider ... [Milton's] tragedy in this allegorical view. Samson imprisoned and blind, and the captive state of Israel, lively represents our blind poet, with the republican party after the Restoration, afflicted and persecuted. But these revelling idolators will soon pull an old house on their heads; and GOD will send his people a deliverer. How would it have rejoiced the heart of the blind seer, had he lived to have seen with his mind's eye the accomplishment of his prophetic predictions!

Judging from the off-hand remark by Walter Savage Landor, this is the sort of interpretation that, engulfing Samson Agonistes in the eighteenth century, continued well into the next century. The revolutionary call is there in the play; but Landor remains "reluctant to see disturbed [by it] the order and course of things, by alterations at present unnecessary." Milton's tragedy may be urging that "when an evil can no longer be borne manfully and honestly and decorously, then down with it, and put something better in its place"; yet Landor counsels "guarding] strenuously against such evil," for "the vigilant will seldom be constrained to vengeance."

For Johnson, presumably, this is just the sort of play, though devoid of Landor's prudent counseling, that the surly and acrimonious Milton could be expected to write; it is just the kind of play that Christopher Hill credits him with having written. "About Samson Agonistes," Hill writes:

... "neo-Christians" are as mealy-mouthed as they are about Milton's defence of polygamy. They emphasize that the poem is about the regeneration of Samson. They do not emphasize that it is also about revenge, about political deceit and murder, and that the two themes are inseparable. ... Milton's message seems clear: however difficult the political circumstances, be ready to smite the Philistines when God gives the word.

Johnson and Hill discern in Samson Agonistes the same sentiments; it is just that what appalls Dr. Johnson Professor Hill applauds. In this connection, it should be noticed that the critic cited in the Memoirs of Thomas Mollis represents a reading of Samson apparently current in the eighteenth century but one from which he himself would divest the poem: "these mystical and allegorical reveries [representing Milton as a spiteful Samson] have more amusement in them, than solid truth, and savour but little of cool criticism." What is evident from this brief foray into the record of criticism is that Samson Agonistes, like its titular hero, is the captive of history — of a history from which one hopes a new criticism can release the poem. There is no doubt, if we credit at all the critical observations of Johnson and Hill, that Samson Agonistes is a polemical poem; but criticism has yet to investigate the polemics of Milton's polemic, and its authors would be welladvised to begin such a task in the understanding that Hill's Samson is the Samson of most of Milton's editors and commentators from Thomas Newton to David Masson.

In the past decade, it has become increasingly apparent that Miltonists cannot agree on the most fundamental issues concerning Milton's "tragedy": on whether, for instance, Samson Agonistes is a tragedy or a divine comedy. And, of late, there is the curious spectacle of conventional interpreters confirming their orthodoxies by sidling up to Professor Hill and using his rhetoric to dispose of Irene Samuel's argument which is that:

Milton's critical and religious thought, his view of tragedy, his habit as a poet, the nature of tragedy generally and of tragedies like Samson in particular — none of these supports such a reading of the play [as is provided either by the regenerist critics or by Dr. Johnson].

According to Samuel, Milton's "poetry shows a sensibility hardly narrower than Shakespeare's and a moral vision rather finer"; and what seems always to wedge itself between Milton and his readers is a false assumption:

... that he is less poet than polemicist, doctrinaire rather than doctrinal, rigidified by his Christian convictions into inhumanity rather than illumined to a clearer reading of the human condition. It is understandable that Dr. Johnson preferred to read Milton as narrowly partisan and bigoted. It is less understandable that Milton's professed admirers so consistently diminish his whole human awareness.

Samuel's Samson Agonistes is no martyr play, nor is it about Milton's protagonist's being restored to divine favor. Rather, this poem is emphatically a tragedy about a man defeated who, despite his virtues, "has a hamartia so deep in his ethos that he snares himself in folds of dire necessity more subtly woven even than those in which Clytemnestra netted Agamemnon."

No two critics summarize better than Samuel and her respondent, Wendy Furman, the interpretive issues governing the criticism of Milton's poem, nor better illustrate the ideological underpinnings of that criticism. Their controversy is methodological and, in the broadest sense, political. Furman's formulations derive from a methodology whose chief proponent, at least in terms of Samson Agonistes, is Michael Krouse. If Krouse's premises go unexamined, so too do his conclusions:

That part of hermeneutic literature which pertains to Samson was affected surprisingly little by the great break in the Christian tradition which began at the opening of the sixteenth century when Luther posted his theses in Wittenberg. The Reformation ... left few traces in interpretation of the Old Testament. This fact is best demonstrated by reference to Renaissance commentaries which are omnium gatherums, drawing together and interweaving great quantities of earlier exegesis to expound a single biblical text.

To restrict attention to, or even settle it upon, such gatherings of previous, mostly Medieval, exegesis is to insure continuity between its and the Renaissance Samson. On the other hand, to redirect attention to sermons (often prophesyings in the sense that they articulate freshly emerging interpretations of biblical texts) and to political tracts (often dependent upon, and developments of, the new discoveries of such prophesyings) is to enlarge the historical perspective by engaging the contrary evidence. Such an effort contributes complexity and nuance to what survives as an inadequate and flattened historical record. To look beyond the theologians to the poets is to augment that record still further, and further yet by glancing beyond Samson Agonistes to a later commentary, especially when it can be shown that Milton's text helped to spawn a later Samson hermeneutic, the outlines of which accord with Samuel's, but not with Furman's, profile of Samson.

This controversy also has a conspicuously political aspect, making such matters as the politics of reading and of interpretation special concerns here. Michael Walzer, for example, poses questions concerning Puritanism that Furman and Samuel present in reference to Samson Agonistes. Conceding that Puritanism is "an ideology of the transition" within which the chain of being is "transformed into a chain of command" and within which "the emphasis of political thought [is shifted] from the prince to the saint," thus providing continuing religious sanction for political action, Walzer addresses the same issue to which Furman and Samuel respond so differently. Where does Milton stand in relation to this ideology, he asks, on the near or far side of it? Is he an adherent to the Puritan ideology or a critic of it? And is Samson Agonistes written to engender, or to repudiate, a state of mind that would confront the existing order in an attitude of war, urging sympathizers to strike when the iron is hot and to impose justice rather than wait upon its eventual implementation? These are questions that do not easily answer themselves. But they may at least begin to answer themselves in the realization that political discourse often solidifies into formulaic language and subjects its mythic content to hackneyed interpretation; it mesmerizes its audience into accepting this, not that, perspective on an inherited story. A vital part of seventeenth-century political rhetoric, the Samson story is reincarnated by Milton as tragedy, with Samson Agonistes affording a good example of how a nearly obsolete political language, and a story engrafted with its commonplaces, is given a new lease on life.

In "Samson Agonistes as Christian Tragedy: A Corrective View," Furman responds tartly to Samuel, "if it is 'the tragedy ignorance has admired and bigotry applauded', so be it," even as she contends that Samuel "is speaking of a system of values clearly at odds with the Bible." Then Furman accuses Samuel of pursuing interpretive options "possible since the advent of higher criticism in the nineteenth century ... but ... hardly ... open to the seventeenth-century Christian" who would never have encountered "Samson's accomplishments [being] belittled or criticized," not even in the Book of Judges and whose Samson, in any event, would be the apotheosized Samson of St. Paul's Epistle to the Hebrews.

For Furman, presumably, the Samson of the Higher Criticism, a Samson without precedent in the seventeenth century, is conceptualized in the nineteenth century, probably by the likes of George Bush, who writes, "No part of the Scripture has afforded more occasion for the doubts of sceptics, or the scoffs of infidels, than the history of Samson. His character is indeed dark, and almost inexplicable. By none of the judges of Israel did God work so many miracles, and yet by none were so many faults committed." As others had been, Bush is troubled by Samson's marriage to the Woman of Timnath which, despite the fact that it is entered upon without the consent of his parents, has seemed "highly deserving of commendation"; by the foxes episode where there is on Samson's part a mingling of "ridicule with revenge"; and by the temple catastrophe where Samson is "the instrument of a signal act of vengeance." Bush's conceptualization persists into the twentieth century with William Kelly, for example, lamenting that we do not find in this unworthy instrument "the generous disinterestedness of grace"; we have here "the strangest and most humbling of histories" boldly marking "how little moral strength keeps pace with physical power." And in our own time there is the further, and still more striking, example provided by Steven Brams, who finds in the Samson story an outstanding instance of sexual desire overriding political judgment. Samson is "ecumenical" in his carnal desires and "surreptitiously manipulates] events"; he avenged his captors in "an unprecedented biblical reprisal that sealed both his doom and the Philistines'"; and this "harassment" story, however difficult for Samson, sends out confusing signals about God's purpose in history and control over historical events.

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

• FrontMatter, pg. i
• Contents, pg. vii
• Preface, pg. ix
• Citations, pg. xxxi
• Chapter I. Samson Agonistes and the State of Milton Criticism, pg. 1
• Chapter II. Samson Agonistes and the Samson Story in Judges, pg. 53
• Chapter III. The Judges Narrative and the Art of Samson Agonistes, pg. 116
• Chapter IV. The Renaissance Samsons and Samson Typologies, pg. 174
• Chapter V. Samson Among the Nightingales, pg. 239
• Chapter VI. Milton's Samsons and Samson Agonistes, pg. 296
• Chapter VII. Samson Agonistes in Context, pg. 329
• Index, pg. 387