Milton scholarship and the Agon over Samson Agonistes

Huntington Library Quarterly

Volumn 65, Issue 3-4, 2002, Pages 465-488

  Rudrum, Alan ^a  

^a SIMON FRASER UNIVERSITY   (Canada)

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EID: 47849103816     PISSN: 00187895     EISSN: 1544399X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Review

References (62)

1. So described by Milton in the prefatory "Of that sort of dramatic poem which is called tragedy."
2. Mark R. Kelley and Joseph Wittreich, eds., Altering Eyes: New Perspectives on Samson Agonistes (Newark, Del., 2002), 11.
3. References in the text to Samson Agonistes are to John Leonard, ed., John Milton: The Complete Poems (London, 1998). See Judges 13:5: "he shall begin to deliver Israel out of the hands of the Philistines."
4. John Carey and Alastair Fowler, eds., The Poems of John Milton (London, 1968), 335.
5. John Carey, Milton (London, 1969), 138-46.
6. Alan Rudrum, A Critical Commentary on Milton's "Samson Agonistes" (London, 1969).
7. 6 September 2002, no. 5188, pp. 15-16.
8. See E. D. Hirsch Jr., Validity in Interpretation (New Haven, Conn., and London, 1967), passim.
9. Blair Worden, "Milton, Samson Agonistes, and the Restoration," in Gerald MacLean, ed., Culture and Society in the Stuart Restoration (Cambridge, 1995), 111-36.
10. Another important essay, linking Samson to "the Restoration decade," is Janel Mueller's "The Figure and the Ground: Samson as a Hero of London Nonconformity, 1662-1667," in Graham Parry and Joad Raymond, eds., Milton and the Terms of Liberty (Cambridge, 2002).
11. F. Michael Krouse, Milton's Samson and the Christian Tradition (Princeton, N.J., 1949; reprint ed., 1963), 24.
12. John Diodati, Pious and Learned Annotations upon the Holy Bible: plainly Expounding the most difficult places thereof. I quote from the third edition (London, 1651).
13. Mary Ann Radzinowicz, Toward Samson Agonistes: The Growth of Milton's Mind (Princeton, N.J., 1978), 6-7.
14. "Question and Answer in Samson Agonistes," Critical Quarterly 11 (1969): 237-64;
15. reprinted as chapter 12 ("The Temptation of Understanding") in How Milton Works (Cambridge, Mass., 2001).
16. How Milton Works, 410-11. The rules of ordinary speech make it likely that the referent of the pronoun "who" at the beginning of line 47 is the immediately preceding reflexive pronoun "myself" at the end of line 46. Radzinowicz examines this passage to better effect, concluding that "complication indicates the functional purpose of the irregular syntax.... Samson protracts and underlines [his self indictment] as he postpones it" (pp. 25-26). However, it is unclear by what rule the syntax is "irregular"; its verbal economy is indicated by the words Radzinowicz needs to "regularize" it; the "functional purpose" indicated builds strongly to the climactic "But weakly to a woman must reveal it."
17. Fish is by no means the only critic who is unclear about this crucial distinction. G. A. Wilkes writes, "His second alliance, with Dalila, was also divinely ordained," quoting "I thought it lawful from my former act" ("The Interpretation of Samson Agonistes," Huntington Library Quarterly 26 [1962-63]: 363-79 at 368).
18. Anthony Low writes: "When [Samson] married Dalila,... no divine impulse is mentioned: Samson says only that 'I thought it lawful from my former act.'" He goes on to comment, "If Samson married Dalila without specific divine sanction,... then clearly he broke the law and behaved wrongly, and this action was responsible for beginning the train of events which led to his downfall" (The Blaze of Noon: A Reading of Samson Agonistes [New York, 1974], 133). There is no need to be tentative because the interpretation rests only on the turn of one phrase; Milton wastes no words in Samson Agonistes, and the distinction would be clear to any instructed contemporary reader. This is one of very few places where Radzinowicz can be faulted. She writes that "[Samson] chose Dalila as his second wife in the same manner he chose his first, from among the overlord, unclean, and forbidden tribe, because of the earlier divine guidance and its recognized intention" (p. 30). Missing the point of "I thought it lawful from my former act," which signals the crucial distinction between "God's Sprit within and a person's own fancies," she writes, "Suppose, then, that Samson was right in thinking that God prompted him to marry [Dalila]"; and (in a footnote), "This supposition has been generally disallowed, but on no other evidence than that the marriages which resulted from inner impulse turned out badly" (p. 48 and n. 36).
19. Originally published in 1946; reprint ed., Chicago, 1992. The whole book is essential reading for students of seventeenth-century religious consciousness; but see especially the second chapter, "The Discerning of Spirits," in which Nuttall takes note of answers to the inevitable question of "how men could discern God's Spirit within them from their own fancies" (p. 35). References to "the Light" provide significant support to the conclusion of the present essay. I do not here discuss Fish's 1989 essay, "Spectacle and Evidence in Samson Agonistes," Critical Inquiry 15 (1989): 556-87
20. Of it Carey remarks that "after reading Wittreich, Fish has become noticeably even less certain about [the issues discussed in his 1969 paper]," concluding that "the only wisdom to be carried away from the play is that there is no wisdom to be carried away'" (Complete Shorter Poems, 2d ed. [1996], 353).
21. Frank Kermode writes, "I have already hinted that I find Fish's treatment of Paradise Regained faulty, and now I have to say that he appears to misunderstand "Samson Agonistes" even more completely" (New York Times Book Review, 24 June 2001, vol. 150, p. 12).
22. Irene Samuel, "Samson Agonistes as Tragedy," in Joseph A. Wittreich Jr., ed., Calm of Mind: Tercentenary Essays on Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes (Cleveland, 1971), 235-57 at 235, 236.
23. Derek N. C. Wood, "Exiled from Light": Divine Law, Morality, and Violence in Milton's Samson Agonistes (Toronto, 2001), 51.
24. The Blaze of Noon: A Reading of Samson Agonistes (1974), also cited above, n. 19.
25. E. M. W. Tillyard, Milton, rev. ed. (London, 1966), 283-84
26. quoted by Low, Blaze of Noon, 185.
27. J. Martin Evans, review of Toward Samson Agonistes, Review of English Studies 31 (1980): 353-54.
28. Joseph Wittreich, Shifting Contexts: Reinterpreting Samson Agonistes (Pittsburgh, 2002).
29. As Wittreich has listed Evans, along with Philip J. Gallagher, Anthony Low, and Alan Rudrum, as representing orthodox readings, it is amusing that Evans should remark that G. A. Wilkes was closer to the truth in his claim that the fundamental theme of Samson Agonistes is not so much about the regeneration of Samson as about the spectacle of an irresistible Providence "undeflected by anything in its path." This attempt to split God and Samson off from one another would not have commended itself to contemporaries in tune with Milton's thinking. Once again, see Nuttall, The Holy Spirit.
30. Evans's reference is to G. A. Wilkes, "The Interpretation of Samson Agonistes? Huntington Library Quarterly 26 (1962-63): 363-79.
31. A more thorough and balanced review of Radzinowicz's book is that of John Steadman, Renaissance Quarterly 32 (1979): 449-52.
32. See also the review by Balachandra Rajan, Journal of English and Germanic Philology 78 (1979): 552-54. In contrast to Evans, who wrote that the book would have been "twice as good if it had been half as long," Rajan describes it as "tautly argued" and ends his review with the remark that "it is difficult to think of a Milton scholar who will not want to read this book more than once." I concur; indeed it is the only book on Milton of such a length that I have twice read cover to cover.
33. The two essays on Samson reprinted in How Milton Works, originally published in 1969 and 1989, respectively.
34. See the excellent article by Miriam Muskin, "'Wisdom by Adversity': Davidic Traits in Milton's Samson" Milton Studies 14 (1980): 233-55.
35. John Carey, ed., John Milton: Complete Shorter Poems (London and New York, 1997), xiii.
36. Wendy Furman, "Samson Agonistes as Christian Tragedy," Philological Quarterly 60 (1981): 169-81.
37. Anthony Low, review of Interpreting Samson Agonistes, Journal of English and Germanic Philology 86 (1987): 415-18.
38. Philip J. Gallagher, "On Reading Joseph Wittreich," Milton Quarterly 21 (1987): 108-13.
39. Milton: The Complete Poems, ed. Leonard, 942.
40. William Empson, Milton's God, rev. ed. (London, 1965), 211.
41. Papers in Language and Literature 23 (1988): 291-302.
42. John C. Ulreich Jr., "The Tragedy of Dalila," in Julia M. Walker, ed., Milton and the Idea of Woman (Chicago, 1988), 185-210.
43. For fuller discussion of this point, see Alan Rudrum, "Discerning the Spirit in Samson Agonistes," in Charles W. Durham and Kristin A. Pruitt, eds., "All in All": Unity, Diversity, and the Miltonic Perspective (Selinsgrove, Pa., 1999), 245-58.
44. Joan S. Bennett, Reviving Liberty: Radical Christian Humanism in Milton's Great Poems (Cambridge, Mass., 1989):
45. "Asserting Eternal Providence: John Milton through the Window of Liberation Theology," Stephen B. Dobranski and John P. Rumrich, eds., Milton and Heresy (Cambridge, 1998), 219-43.
46. Furman, "Samson Agonistes as Christian Tragedy," 170.
47. Helen Damico, "Duality and Dramatic Vision: A Structural Analysis of Samson Agonistes," Milton Studies 12 (1978): 110.
48. Richard Bentley's 1732 edition of Paradise Lost emends the last lines thus: "Then hand in hand, with social steps their way / Through Eden took, with heav'nly comfort cheer'd" (cited by Marcus Walsh, Shakespeare, Milton, and Eighteenth-Century Literary Editing [Cambridge, 1997], 71).
49. David V. Erdman, ed., The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, rev. ed. (New York, 1988), 702.
50. This both anticipates and rebuts Derek Wood on Samson in relation to the Law.
51. For liberation theology in action, including especially the choice between evils, consider the story of Irene Gut Opdyke, a young Polish woman who saved many Jews from the gas chambers at the risk of her own life. For a summary, see her obituary in the Times (London), 28 May 2003; for a fuller account see her book (co-written with Jennifer Armstrong), In My Hands: Memories of a Holocaust Rescuer (New York, 1999).
52. To the work cited by Joan S. Bennett I should like to add a quotation, from one of the earlier works on liberation theology, that is especially relevant in answering those who question the efficacy of Samson's action in the light of subsequent biblical history: Gustavo Gutierrez writes: "Without liberating historical events, there would be no growth of the Kingdom. But the process of liberation will not have conquered the very roots of oppression and the exploitation of man by man without the coming of the Kingdom, which is above all a gift. Moreover, we can say that the historical, political liberating event is the growth of the Kingdom and is a salvific event; but it is not the coming of the Kingdom, not all of salvation"; A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, and Salvation, ed. and trans. Sister Caridad Inda and John Eagleson (London, 1979), 177 (first edition, in Spanish, 1971).
53. "'Then Stood Up Phinehas': Milton's Antinomianism, and Samson's," Milton Studies 33 (1996): 27-46.
54. Stephen M. Buhler, reviewing Wood's book in Seventeenth Century News 6, nos. 1 and 2 (2003): 26-29, wrote that "[Wood's] chief strategy can only be described as 'Samson-bashing.'"
55. Some Tame Gazelle (London, 1950; reprint ed., 1982), 24 and 188. Among the reasons for the opening lines being "wonderful" is that they convey both the misery of Samson's present state and, in the evocation of the prophecy of Zacharias, promise of his renovation. What Wood fails to see, Wordsworth evokes.
56. See G. R. Cragg, Puritanism in the Period of the Great Persecution, 1660-1668 (Cambridge, 1957). The word "decades" in my text is actually an understatement. Disabilities imposed upon Catholics and Dissenters remained in place through to the nineteenth century.
57. The eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, gives the figure of four hundred deaths among the imprisoned Quakers.
58. Thomas O'Malley, "'Defying the Powers and Tempering the Spirit': A Review of Quaker Control over Their Publications, 1672-1689," Journal of Ecclesiastical History 33, no. 1 (1982): 72-88 at 75.
59. I am indebted to a former pupil, Scott Sowerby, who is writing a dissertation at Harvard University on Quakerism under James II, for conversation on this subject.
60. Meir Sternberg, The Poetics of Biblical Narrative: Ideological Literature and the Drama of Reading (Bloomington, Ind., 1985), 282.
61. Nearly all modern scholars agree that Paul did not write Hebrews; but there is in the second half of 11:40 an interesting parallel with Romans 8:19-22, in which "the creature" awaits "the manifestation of the sons of God." See Alan Rudrum, "For then the Earth shall be all Paradise: Milton, Vaughan, and the neo-Calvinists on the Ecology of the Hereafter," Scintilla 4 (2000): 39-52, esp. n. 25. I should like to take this opportunity to mention that I owe my knowledge of the Trinity Apocalypse, reproduced in that essay, to Diane McColley.
62. "The Star"; Alan Rudrum, ed., The Complete Poems of Henry Vaughan (1976; reprint ed., London, 1995), 252; see note (p. 600).