Exiled From Light: Divine Law, Morality, and Violence in Milton's Samson Agonistes 9781442674714

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'Exiled from Light": Divine Law, Morality, and Violence in Milton's Samson Agonistes

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'Exiled from Light' Divine Law, Morality, and Violence in Milton's++++++++++++

DEREK N.C. WOOD

U N I V E R S I T Y OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

www.utppublishing.com © University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2001 Toronto Buffalo London Printed in Canada ISBNO-8020-4848-X (S)

Printed on acid-free paper

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Wood, Derek N.C. Exiled from light: divine law, morality, and violence in Milton's Samson Agonistes Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBNO-8020-4848-X 1. Milton, John, 1608-1674. Samson Agonistes. 2. Samson (Biblical judge) - In literature. I. Title. PR3566.W66 2001

822'.4

COO-932187-X

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).

With Love to Grazia, Lara, and Marco

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Queen Boadicea, fearlessly riding at the head of her army ... the poor little Princes in the Tower ... hateful, drab Cromwell... Charles I, Martyred King ... the heroic Empire-builders, bravely quelling the black hordes of Africa for the glory of England ... the wicked Indians of the Black Hole of Calcutta ... the Americans, who had been expelled from the Empire for causing trouble and no longer had the right to be a pretty pink on the map ... the filthy Huns ... the Russian Bolshies ... the good so good, and the bad so bad, history as taught by Muv was on the whole very clear to me. Jessica Mitford, Hons and Rebels 7

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Contents

Acknowledgments+++ Abbreviations++++ Preface+++++ 1 Introduction: The Critics and Some Problems of Meaning 2 Intertextuality, Indirection, and Indeterminacy

27

3 Fictional Consciousness and the Author's Voice 46 4 Tragedy: Theory, Form, and Meaning 60 5 Exiled from Light: Sin, Regeneration, the Hero of Faith 80 6 Samson and Dalila: Love and Marriage 99 7 Samson: Divine Impulsion in the Hero of Faith, Charity, and the Imitation of Christ 118 8 The Structure o++++++++++++++++++ 9 Milton and Politics in Old Age 166 Epilogue+++++ Appendi+++++

3

x Contents Notes

195

List of Works Consulted++++ Index of Biblical Citations++++ Index of Citations from the Works of John Milton General Index

237

229

Acknowledgments+

Some of the material in chapters 2, 3, and 4 has already appeared in print, although much altered and revised for this work. Part of chapter 2 was first published in+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Intertextual Space/ Essays on Intertextuality, edited by Heinrich Plett, in Untersuchungen zur Textheorie, general editor Janos S. Petofi (Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 1991), 192-206, and part appeared in 'Intertextuality, Indirection and Indeterminacy in Milton's+Samson Agonistes/ English Studies in Canada 18 (1992): 261-72. Chapter 3 is a revised version of what first appeared in '"Exil'd from Light": The Darkened Moral Consciousness of Milton's Hero of +++++++++++++of Toronto Quarterly+58 (1988-9): 244-62. Chapter 4 contains material that was first published in 'Aristotle, the Italian Commentators and Some Aspects of Milton's Christian Tragedy,++++++++++++29, edited by A.C. Labriola (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992): 85-106, in 'Catharsis and "Passion Spent": Samson Agonistes and Some Problems with Aristotle,' Milton Quarterl+26 (1992): 1-9, and in 'Aristotle and Milton's Poetics,' Renaissance-Poetik/Renaissance Poetics, edited by H. Plett (Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 1994), 362-76.1 would like to thank the respective publishers for permission to develop these ideas in this book. I am deeply grateful to the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada for generously supporting my travel to libraries in Florence and London for several years. I am also grateful to the University Council for Research at St Francis Xavier University for their continuing support in spite of their perplexity at the evident narrowness of my scholarly interests over so many years. I am happy to thank the anonymous readers of the SSHFC. Their support was very encouraging and their criticism was thoughtful and

xii Acknowledgments

constructive. I am very grateful to John Leonard and John C. Ulreich, Jr, who kindly read my Preface and made valuable suggestions, to Jane Strickler, and Judy Williams, my copy-editor, who mercilessly hunted down errors in the manuscript, and to my good friends, Ed Carty, who kept a philosophical eye on my Greek, Mary McGillivray, who kept an eye on my French, and Tom Roach, who volunteered to proofread a long, untidy manuscript, helped me with his observations, and cheered me with his asides, and John Livesey, for his comments, suggestions, and support over the years.

Abbreviations

All quotations from Milton's poetry are from Poems, and those from his prose works are from CP, unless otherwise stated. AJP+ CL CP CQ Else,+Argument

ELH+ ESC French+LR Hill,+MER Hill++Defeat HL+Q HT+R JEG+P Krouse, Tradition Low, Blaze

American Journal of Philology Comparative Literature Complete Prose Works of John Milton.+Ed. Don M. Wolfe et al. 8 vols. New Haven: Yale UP, 1953-82 Classical Quarterly Gerald F. Else. Aristotle's Poetics: The Argument. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1963 Journal of English Literary History English Studies in Canada J(oseph) Milton French.+The Life Records of John Milton. Compiled by J. Milton French. 5 vols. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1949-58 Christopher Hill.+Milton and the English Revolution. London: Faber and Faber, 1977 Christopher Hill.+The Experience of Defeat: Milton and Some Contemporaries. New York: Viking, 1984 Huntington Library Quarterly Harvard Theological Review Journal of English and Germanic Philology F. Michael Krouse. Milton's Samson and the Christian Tradition. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1949. Rept. New York: Octagon, 1974 Anthony Low.+The Blaze of Noon: A Reading of Samson Agonistes. New York: Columbia UP, 1974

xiv

Abbreviations

Masson

David Masson. The Life of John Milton: Narrated in Connexion with the Political, Ecclesiastical, and Literary History of His Time.+London: Macmillan, 1859-80. Kept. New York: Peter Smith, 1946. 6 vols. Plus Index, 1894. Revised editions of vol. 1,1881, of vol. 2,1894 ME A Milton Encyclopedia. Gen. ed. W.B. Hunter. 9 vols. Lewisburg, Perm.: Bucknell UP, 1978-83 MLN+ ++++++++++++++++ MLQ+ Modern Language Quarterly MLR+ +Modern Language Revie MP+ Modern Philology MQ+ Milton Quarterly MS+ Milton Studies N&Q Notes and Queries Parker,Debt Milton's Debt to Greek Tragedy in 'Samson Agonistes.' 1937. Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1963 Po+++++++ Aristotle.+Aristotelis De Arte Poetica Liber.Ed. R. Kassel. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1965 Poems The Poems of John Milton.+Ed. John Carey and Alastair Fowler. London: Longmans, 1968 PL Paradise Lost PLL Papers on Language and Literature PMLA+ +Publications of the Modern Language Association of America PQ Philological Quarterly PR Paradise Regained Radzinowicz, Lady Mary Ann Nevins Radzinowicz. Toward 'Samson Towards A Agonistes': The Growth of Milton's Mind.+Princeton: Princeton UP, 1978 RES+ +Review of English Studies RN+ +Renaissance News RP+ Renaissance Papers SA Samson Agonistes SCJ+ +Sixteenth Century Journal SP Studies in Philology+ TLS+ +[London] Times Literary Supplement TSLL+ +Texas Studies in Literature and Language UTQ University of Toronto Quarterly Wittreich, InJoseph A. Wittreich, Jr. Interpreting 'Samson Agonistes.' terpreting SA Princeton: Princeton UP, 1986

Preface+

NOW faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. For by it the elders obtained a good++++++++++what shall I more say? for the time would fail me to tell of... Samson ... Who through faith subdued kingdoms ... stopped the mouths of lions. Hebrews 11:1-2, 32-3

Then had I not been thus exiled from light; As in the land of darkness yet in light, To live a life half dead, a living death, And buried; but O yet more miserable! Myself, my sepulchre, a moving grave. SA 98-102

According to A Letter to Hebrews, Samson is a saint. The violent Nazarite Judge, bane of the ancient Philistines, is celebrated as a hero of faith by the New Testament writer of the Letter. Most critics of Milton's tragedy++++++++++++++ave read in Samson a narrative of sanctity and exemplary Christian heroism. The play is usually interpreted as representing some sort of Christian process. It may be a redemptive ascent from despair, or spiritual growth through a process of regeneration. It may be a movement towards sainthood as the hero overcomes a Almost every idea in this brief introduction is echoed, taken up and developed more fully later in the book, so citations and references to sources are kept to a minimum here, apart from the introductory discussion of the Law and the Gospel.

xvi

Preface

series of temptations or gains increasing hope of the renewal of God's favour. Other Christian concepts are often invoked, such as typology, conversion, election or purification, return to spiritual life, Reformation casuistry, right Christian action, the recovery of grace, liberty under the Law, and patience triumphant. However, disturbing voices have been heard for decades, questioning these views and focusing on the brutality and murderous violence of Samson's morality, a morality that seems out of harmony with that celebrated in Milton's epics. One reader stresses in the hero 'only ... resentment, which has been gnawing inwardly.' Another sees Samson as acting primarily out of vengeance; his miracle was 'a wonder-working spell by a cantankerous old fighter-priest who would slay the enemy in effigy.' William Empson defends Dalila and condemns Samson's inexcusable brutality. Irene Samuel, in her classic condemnation of Samson's violence, describes him as an egocentric monomaniac, 'who bringfs] himself to destruction through his shortcomings.' Most disturbing is Joseph Wittreich's central assertion that Samson is to be associated with Satan and the Antichrist, and that his behaviour in the play should be read as ultimately satanic. Other writers, less than certain of Milton's meaning and of the value of Samson's achievement, have seen the play as complex and ambiguous, and have tried to chart its uncertainties and apparent contradictions. I suggest in this book that the problem has arisen because of what readers have inferred from the words of Hebrews. Many have tried to present the hero of faith as a Christ-like figure, at least as a figure morally or theologically exemplary. Yet Hebrews insists on the difference between these heroes of old and++++e., those who have received the promise. Indeed, much of their behaviour, apart from their acts of faith, may have been unsavoury or even sinful, as in the case of David or the prostitute, Rahab. The focus of Hebrews, then, is on us: 'God having provided some better thing for us' (Hebrews 11:40). What 'we' have, they did not have. 'FOR the law having a shadow of good things to come, and not the very image of the things, can never with those sacrifices ... make the comers thereunto perfect' (10:1). We now have a new covenant and a new priest, 'Who is made, not after the law of a carnal commandment, but after the power of an endless life' (7:16), i.e., not the carnal commandment that so troubles the Danites in the play, 'the covenant that I made with their fathers' (8:9). Tor the law made nothing perfect, but the bringing in of a better hope did; by the which we draw nigh unto God' (7:19). The new priest is Christ, who was made

Preface xvii

'surety of a better testament' (7:22). Christ 'obtained a more excellent ministry' than Moses and is the 'mediator of a better covenant' (8:6). Samson is rich in intertextual allusions to Hebrews, allusions that have meanings for the reader unavailable to the personae in the play. We have in the play a father and a son, we have deliverance, bondage, redemption, ransom, salvation, liberty. Samson, the judge, takes vengeance into his own hands, destroying and being destroyed; Hebrews stresses 'Vengeance++++++++nto me, I will recompense, saith the Lord. And again, The Lord shall judge his people' (10:30). Samson, type of Christ but lacking knowledge of the image of Christ, acts out a savage, pre-Christian morality; he knows no better. His ignorance is his tragic hamartia: as tragic as Oedipus's ignorance that it was his father he killed and his mother he married. There are many references in the play to 'Law' and to what is 'lawful/ and one effect is to concentrate our attention on Samson's struggle to escape the constraints of the Law; but the Law it is that moulds and limits Samson's moral consciousness. In The Reason of Church Government,+Milton says that God is 'no more a judge after the sentence of the Law, nor as it were a schoolmaister of perishable rites, but a most indulgent father governing his Church ... in the sweetest and mildest manner of paternal discipline' (CP 1:837). The state of religion under the Law was different from that under the Gospel. Samson's moral consciousness is formed under the Law, that Law which, Milton wrote, was an 'imperfect and obscure institution' (762) and which could not 'give rules to the compleat and glorious ministration of the Gospell, which looks on the Law, as on a childe, not as on a tutor' (762). It is a 'sandy bottome' (775), 'a repugnant and contradictive Mount Sinai' (843). The 'outward carnality of the Law' is to be contrasted with 'the inward power and purity of the Gospel' (766), the 'rigid and peremptory Law' with 'the considerat and tender Gospel' (CP 2:281). '[T]he Gospel enjoyns no new morality, save only the infinit enlargement of charity, which in this respect is called the++ew Commandment' (330-1). So, we must understand clearly what Milton meant by 'The Law' and The Gospel'; that is central to an understanding of the mentality and objectives of the tragic protagonist of his play. In Christian Doctrine we are told: THE MOSAIC LAW WAS A WRITTEN CODE, CONSISTING OF MANY STIPULATIONS, AND INTENDED FOR THE ISRAELITES ALONE. IT HELD A PROMISE OF

xviii Preface LIFE FOR THE OBEDIENT AND A CURSE FOR THE DISOBEDIENT. ITS AIM WAS TO MAKE THE ISRAELITES HAVE RECOURSE TO THE RIGHTEOUSNESS OF THE PROMISED CHRIST, THROUGH A RECOGNITION OF MANKIND'S, AND THEREFORE OF THEIR OWN DEPRAVITY. ITS AIM, ALSO, WAS THAT ALL WE OTHER NATIONS SHOULD AFTERWARDS BE EDUCATED FROM THIS ELEMENTARY, CHILDISH AND SERVILE DISCIPLINE TO [308] THE ADULT STATURE OF A NEW CREATURE, AND TO A MANLY FREEDOM UNDER THE GOSPEL, WORTHY OF

GOD'S SONS. (CP 6:517)

Milton's view of the Mosaic law is far from orthodox. He shows no interest in unifying the Old and New Testament as Calvin does. In Christian Doctrine,+Milton is almost defiantly distinctive in his reading of Scripture on this point: he claims to have 'satisfactorily established the truth in the face of pretty well all the theologians [he] had then read. It was their opinion that the Mosaic law had not been totally abrogated' (533). He excepts a couple of names, '[b]ut all the rest stick to the doctrine propounded by the converted Pharisees, and believe that the law should still be observed even in gospel times... It is maintained that the law has many uses even for us Christians' (534). This was certainly true of Calvin, who warns against emphasizing the differences between Law and Gospel. Milton separates the Gospel with its promise from the Law, whose stipulations are for Israelites alone, and whose discipline he dismisses as slavish and childish. Its function was to demonstrate to them their sinfulness and depravity. That Law had been enacted for certain reasons: 'to stimulate our depravity, and thus cause anger; to inspire us with slavish fear, as a result of the enmity and the written accusation directed against us; to be a schoolmaster to bring us to the righteousness of Christ' (528). Milton refers to Paul's 'by the law is the knowledge of sin' (Romans 3:20). The incompleteness and inadequacy of the Law is continually stressed by Milton: The imperfection of the law was made apparent in the person of Moses himself. For Moses, who was the type of the law, could not lead the children of Israel into the land of Canaan, that is into eternal rest. But an entrance was granted to them under Joshua, that is, Jesus' (CP 6:519). Michael explains this to Adam in the great vision at the end of+Paradise Lost: Doubt not but that sin Will reign among them, as of thee begot; And therefore was law given them to evince Their natural pravity, by stirring up Sin against law to fight; that when they see

Preface xix Law can discover sin, but not remove, Save by those shadowy expiations weak, The blood of bulls and goats, they may conclude Some blood more precious must be paid for man

(12.287-93)

With the coming of Jesus, life is very different for human beings: THE GOSPEL IS THE NEW DISPENSATION OF THE COVENANT OF GRACE. IT IS MUCH MORE EXCELLENT AND PERFECT THAN THE LAW. IT WAS FIRST ANNOUNCED, OBSCURELY, BY MOSES AND THE PROPHETS, AND THEN WITH ABSOLUTE CLARITY BY CHRIST HIMSELF AND HIS APOSTLES AND THE EVANGELISTS. IT HAS BEEN WRITTEN IN THE HEARTS OF BELIEVERS THROUGH THE HOLY SPIRIT, AND WILL LAST UNTIL THE END OF THE WORLD. IT CONTAINS A PROMISE OF ETERNAL LIFE TO ALL MEN OF ALL NATIONS WHO BELIEVE IN THE REVEALED CHRIST, AND A THREAT OF ETERNAL DEATH TO UNBELIEVERS.

(CP 6:521)

This is a new covenant, more excellent and perfect than the Old Mosaic Law. It is written on the hearts of all who believe in Christ. The Law is to be separated from the promise of the Gospel; indeed, the old covenant is to be abolished (525-6). While other Christian reformers might agree to abolish only the ceremonial part of the Law, Milton believes that the entire Law is dead and gone, and he cites Paul to show that 'we are released from the law in the same way as a wife is released from her dead husband' (526). He pauses on the 'ceremonial code' and makes quite clear that the annulment goes beyond it, embracing the whole Law. That was a 'law of sin and of death ... opposed to the law of the spirit of life'(529). Milton concluded that the Law was fulfilled in love. Unlike Calvin, he did not believe that the two great commands of the Gospel were implied in the Decalogue. The entire Mosaic Law, Ceremonial, Judicial, and Moral, and the Decalogue itself held humanity in bondage. The new dispensation offered freedom. This rejection might appear to make Milton antinomian, a question that has been much debated by modern scholarship. However, an inward law, which he believed had replaced the old Law, was an ethical and rational guide to the law of nature. It is to be accepted and obeyed freely and voluntarily. The former old slave was now emancipated; this was Christian liberty: 'BEING MADE SONS INSTEAD OF SERVANTS AND GROWN MEN INSTEAD OF BOYS, WE MAY SERVE GOD IN CHARITY THROUGH THE GUIDANCE OF THE SPIRIT OF TRUTH' (537).

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Preface

The law of nature, then, was, for Milton, unwritten; it was inscribed in the human heart. Its moral absolutes reflected the will of God. It was given to Adam in Eden in a state of perfection. 'A kind of gleam or glimmering of it still remains in the hearts of all mankind. In the regenerate this is daily brought nearer to a renewal of its original perfection by the operation of the Holy Spirit' (516). Obedience to the law of Nature is not slavery; it is given willingly and with love for God. Abdiel corrects Satan's sneer: Unjustly thou deprav'st it with the name Of servitude to serve whom God ordains, Or nature; God and nature bid the same, When he who rules is worthiest, and excels Them whom he governs. This is servitude ... Thy self not free, but to thy self enthralled

(PL 6.174-8,181)

The reading I propose accommodates, to some extent, both the orthodox and the heterodox readings now current. The fictional protagonist Milton fashioned out of the story in Judges is, I suggest, an emblematic or iconic embodiment of his vision of Old Testament consciousness: the state of religion under the Law, rigorous, incomplete, enslaved, literalistic, and uncomprehending. There is perhaps no better gloss to Milton's play than this passage in A Treatise of Civil Power: the state of religion under the gospel is far differing from what it was under the law: then was the state of rigor, childhood, bondage and works, to all which force was not unbefitting; now is the state of grace, manhood, freedom and faith; to all which belongs willingness and reason, not force: the law was then written on tables of stone, and to be performd according to the letter, willingly or unwillingly; the gospel, our new covnant, upon the heart of every beleever, to be interpreted only by the sense of charitie and inward perswasion. (CP 7:259)

Samson, the imprisoned slave, images bondage from the start. Blind and degraded, he is in need of guidance to the end. Samson does not even know the Old Testament as a whole; most of it has still to be acted out in the time before Christ comes. He seldom turns to Scripture for guidance.

Preface xxi

This time before Christ must be a time of sorrow. Adam felt threatened by claustrophobic horror: Yet one doubt Pursues me still, lest all I cannot die, Lest that pure breath of life, the spirit of man Which God inspired, cannot together perish With this corporeal clod; then in the grave, Or in some other dismal place who knows But I shall die a living death? (PL 10.782-8)

Samson, forsaken by sleep (459), must experience the misery of this death-in-life, exiled from light; As in the land of darkness yet in light, To live a life half dead, a living death, And buried; but O yet more miserable! Myself, my sepulchre, a moving grave (98-102)

Samson's blindness is his most important iconic feature. Unseeing, unknowing, he can only cry out hopelessly for the light, of which sin has deprived him: 'Light the prime work of God to me is extinct' (168); by contrast, Christ 'receives / Light from above, from the fountaine of Light' (PR 4:288). To some extent, the tragedy of Samson is that the time is not yet come '[t]o open the blind eyes, to bring out the prisoners from the prison, and them that sit in darkness out of the prison house' (Isaiah 47:2). This was the condition of the fallen consciousness: 'Seeing then that we have such hope, we use great plainness of speech: And not as Moses, which put a vail over his face, that the children of Israel could not stedfastly look to the end of that which is abolished: But their minds were blinded: for until this day remaineth the same vail untaken away' (2 Corinthians 3:12-14). All the Danites are endlessly troubled with doubts, uncertainties, unanswerable questions. They muse ineffectually on the riddles of life and eternity; 'what it is, hard is to say, / Harder to hit' (SA 1013-14). They are hopelessly beset by misconceptions which Christ's coming will enlighten, as we saw earlier, especially about ransom, freedom, salvation, deliverance. Samson also mirrors the state of fallen man. The Fall is frequently hinted at tropically in Samson's

xxii Preface

condition: Manoa is horrified by the 'miserable change' in the chosen one (340). His shocked exclamation echoes that of Satan when he first sees the fallen Beelzebub. The morality and behaviour of this hero contrast with those of the Son, who rejects the values that inform Victorious deeds/ 'heroic acts/ '[b]rute violence/ and 'tyrannic power' (215-19): Yet held it more humane, more heavenly first By winning words to conquer willing hearts, And make persuasion do the work of fear; At least to try (PR 1.221-4)

Samson can only understand brute violence and tyrannic power and achieves nothing with them. He has no conception of what is humane, of the value of winning words, of using persuasion rather than fear. So, the tragedy does not question whether Samson is a hero of faith, nor does it affirm he is a 'Christian' hero. Samson is tragically ignorant of the exemplary life of Christ as he shapes his own agonized moral choices, honestly but painfully and uncharitably. He acts in faith, but Milton's fictionalization with its dark emphases presents Samson as a profoundly ambiguous example for Christian imitation. The events of Old Testament history were unquestionably a part of God's mysterious design, but Christ's coming, in the view of a Christian, changed human life profoundly. Against Samson's divinely confirmed faith, Milton sets this questionable moral consciousness, this harshness of human experience under the Law, this state of indirection that creatures suffered as they struggled to find a path to God, this condition of un-Christian savagery acted out in all honesty by human beings ignorant as yet of the living example of Christ's life in time. What Samson Agonistes does is to dramatize the mentality of those raised in the state of religion under the Law. For Milton, Christ's coming is not merely a formal payment of ransom for Adam's sin; it changes human life immeasurably. Christ's life stands as a perfect example for imitation. Not only is the overt preaching in the New Testament didactic but so is the entire exemplary narrative of Christ's life, with all its concrete parabolic moments, with all his symbolic and signifying responses and relationships. The heroism that Milton celebrates explicitly in his epics is that of Jesus Christ, 'the same yesterday, and today, and for ever' (Hebrews 13:8); in his tragedy the same ethic is celebrated implicitly.

'EXILED FROM LIGHT'

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Chapter One

Introduction: The Critics and Some Problems of Meaning

Mflz's+meme au point de vue des plus insignifiantes chases de la vie, nous ne sommes pas un tout materiellement constitue, identique pour tout le monde et dont chacun n'a qu'a aller prendre connaissance comme d'un cahier des charges ou d'un testament; noire personnalite sociale est une creation de la pensee des autres. Meme I'acte si simple que nous appelons 'voir une personne que nous connaissons' est en partie un acte intellectuel. Nous remplissons I'apparence physique de I'etre que nous voyons de toutes les notions que nous avons sur lui, et dans I'aspect total que nous nous representons, ces notions ont certainement la plus grande part. Ellesfinissent par gonfler si parfaitement les joues, par suivre en une adherence si exacte la ligne du nez, elles se melent si bien de nuancer la sonorite de la voix comme si celle-ci n'etait qu'une transparente enveloppe, que chaquefois que nous voyons ce visage et que nous entendons cette voix, ce sont ces notions que nous retrouvons, que nous ecoutons.1 Marcel Proust, A la recherche du temps perdu l.i. 18-19

There is less agreement now than there ever has been about the meaning o++++++++++++++++++Meaning' is not intended here in any eso or theoretically modish sense, such as 'signifiance/ or cultural poetics, or re-presentation of history, or the like. Quite simply, even accounts given by belated liberal humanists and 'close readers' of what happens in the play can differ so startlingly from one another that the reader is left wondering if their authors have been reading the same text. There is no consensus about the nature of the central character, the moral significance of what he achieves, the authority or ideological status of any character or of almost any statement made in the play.

4 'Exiled from Light'

As a result, the place of the poem in the context of the author's work and the nature of his own views in old age about politics, morality, and Christianity are much less clear than they appeared to be twenty years ago. It is still not agreed whether the play is an early work or his last or his second-last - poem. Even contemporary theorists and postmodern critics writing, say, a feminist reading of Dalila as harlot, or a Marxist reading of Samson's spiritual capital investment, or an assessment of Milton's own sexual or social politics make assumptions that are undermined by this pervasive uncertainty about almost every aspect of the drama. Samson Agonistes+has always generated controversy, since Dr Johnson and Richard Cumberland in the eighteenth century disagreed over its structure. Other more fashionable controversies have taken centre stage at times - Milton's God, Milton's Satan, Milton's poetic language, Milton and women, the provenance of++++++++++++++++++but seldom, perhaps, have readers of Milton focused as much attention as now on the problem of reading this play. That having been said, it is true that there exists an orthodoxy in criticism of++++++++ brief look at the major scholarly works on the play in the last fifty years will introduce my own book and suggest some of the problems that the current orthodoxy leaves unsolved. In 1949, P.M. Krouse published a reading of Milton's Samson against a background of centuries of Christian tradition. For Krouse, '[tlhe Samson whom we meet in Milton's play is a saint, a champion of God, a great hero'++++++++04). He found it 'difficult to see in Milton's poem any departure from the established conception of Samson as saint' (108). Krouse so surely indicated the predominating view of Samson for the next twenty years that it is easy to forget how negative were the critical reviews his book received. In a review, W.R. Parker thought that an admirable topic had been 'unhappily marred by such reckless riding of a thesis,' and was highly critical of a book he considered an extravagant waste of money and, at $3.75, 'unfair to libraries, to potential purchasers, to the subsidizes and to Krouse's argument.' In fact, Krouse's book was symptomatic of a true post-war change of interest in the play, a movement away from the issues that had concerned R.C. Jebb and Parker himself in the 1930s: the 'spirit' of Milton's tragedy, whether the play, was essentially Hellenic or essentially Judaic. A concentration on Christian theology in relation to Samson was now to develop, and Parker's own pre-war study of the play, Milton's Debt to Greek Tragedy in 'Samson Agonistes,' would be cited surprisingly seldom in the years to come.

Introduction 5

Even more sympathetic reviewers, such as A.S.P. Woodhouse, found some of Krouse's inferences from Christian tradition 'absurd' (117) and concluded that he had not escaped the danger of letting the tradition 'distract attention from the poem' (118). Most important, Woodhouse noticed that Krouse tried to persuade us that 'for Milton Samson was a type of Christ because this was part of the tradition' (118); in other words, this interpretation was influenced more by the tradition than by the evidence of the text. Another sympathetic reviewer, Ernest Sirluck, was troubled by Krouse's finding that 'the poem is really an allegory of Christ's victory over Satan in the wilderness.' Sirluck found virtually no tangible evidence for this in the poem. These questions should be recalled when we turn later to some of the problems of meaning in the text and, also, the difficulties created by many readings of the play. Now, nearly fifty years later, Krouse's approach seems to have a kind of innocence about it. His acceptance of Samson's brutal physical violence as comparable to Christ's victory was unquestioning and unanalytic. His trust in the Chorus as a sound moral guide and theological commentator would find little support today, and his assumption that many opinions expressed by the fictional dramatic characters were Milton's own views seems almost as simplistic as some of the old autobiographical readings such as those of Warburton and Masson. Yet, as we shall see, readings similar to these can still reappear from time to time. Krouse's scholarship is so honest that he quotes a great deal of evidence that does not bear out his own thesis but which accumulates to suggest a very different hero-figure, one who is complex, ambivalent, soiled, vindictive, ugly; but when he draws his conclusions, he simply ignores or forgets that evidence: 'Samson's story, paralleling as it does the story of Christus Victor, reveals him as Homo Victor, a palpable exemplification of the meaning to Man of his Redemption ... The+agon against evil and its temptations, in whatever form, is Man's vocation' (132-3). When Archie Burnett said that Krouse was 'his own best critic' (157), it may be this sort of thing that he had in mind. More recent readings of the play, over the last twenty years or so, suggest to us a Milton who, one might be inclined to say, is less dull, insensitive, and unimaginative than once appeared to be the case. Samson's murderous physical assault on the Philistine overlord was quite futile as an attempt to liberate Israel; in fact, it was a part of a process which one redactor in the Book of Judges welcomed as leading to the establishment of a monarchy in Israel. In 1671, having lived through one bloody and futile attempt to liberate Israel-in-England which led to the re-establishment of the monarchy, was Milton too

6 'Exiled from Light'

simple to see that analogy? Yet, it is on such a reading of the play, more or less, that Christopher Hill, in Milton and the English Revolution, bases his view of Milton as a defiant, undaunted old revolutionary, still confident that the Good Old Cause could some day prevail, rejecting 'quietism/ dreaming bloody dreams of another violent cleansing of England. Hill's later book, The Experience of Defeat, is almost as much about Milton as about the social, political, and intellectual context of the failed revolution, and it restates his earlier view of the poet. It is firmly based on a reading of+++++++which is a very questionable one, as we shall see.2 In spite of the unpromising reviews his book received, Krouse pointed the way orthodox readings of Samson would tend for the next thirty years or more: Samson as Christian saint, a type of Christ, growing spiritually and overcoming a series of temptations to triumph as God's victorious servant and champion. Many scholars, after Krouse, turned to typological hermeneutics to explain Samson's behaviour. In typological exegesis, the Old Testament is seen as prefiguring the New Testament, although often only obscurely. Old Testament heroes such as Adam and Judas Maccabeus are imperfect types of Christ, who is the perfect antitype. Samson delivering the Jews from subjection to the Philistines is for T.S.K. Scott-Craig a type of Christ the Redeemer; for Lynn Veach Sadler he is Christ the Exemplar, while for Barbara Lewalski ('Samson Agonistes')+the terrible doom Samson visits on the Philistines typifies Christ in final apocalyptic judgment. In 'orthodox' readings, then, Samson is most frequently seen as the fallen sinner who struggles towards regeneration and triumphant reunion with God. With cautious backward looks at the stern, ghostly presence of Dr Johnson, readers have suggested many neat, attractive patterns for the structure of the play, especially those which make it fit the Protestant schemes of election, conversion, regeneration, and penitence. Samson's encounters with his visitors have most often been seen in terms of Christian patterns of temptation. He is shown as triumphing over usually three, sometimes five, and even as many as nine temptations to sin. Many other Christian concepts have been invoked to explain the action of the play. Reformation casuistry, the nature of 'right' Christian heroic action, the recovery of grace, the problem of Christian despair, patience, Christian liberty and liberty under the Law, and regenerative purification through trial have been the most important. (See chapter 8 for detailed references.) Anthony Low's fine study of the play, The Blaze of Noon, which

Introduction 7

appeared in 1974, tactfully and courteously synthesized many of these Christian readings, presenting a Samson-hero who is 'the image and example of the champion of God' (117). Low did discuss the question of Samson's violence, justifying it as the legal right of the magistrate, but while he presented his case impressively, it cannot be said that he dealt convincingly with dissenting voices, which were being heard increasingly since the 1960s. For instance, he barely referred to Irene Samuel's devastating criticism of Samson's homicidal 'morality' ('Samson Agonistes as Tragedy'). Although he did take note of the increasing uneasiness about the foolishness, and at times near-blasphemy, of the Chorus, which had been ignored by those for whom they were the voice of the author himself, Low simply dismissed politely those readers who insisted that Samson was far from being an admirable Christian hero. In her monumental study published in 1978,+Toward 'Samson Agonistes/ now the orthodox view of the play, Mary Ann Radzinowicz spent fractionally longer acknowledging those dissenting voices, only to dismiss them as irrelevant and marginal, if not wilfully misled (6-7, 60). She brought impressive knowledge of Milton's works and their biblical context to illustrate her thesis that '[t]he drama imitates and concludes Milton's own intellectual development; it demonstrates the necessity of mental labor for tempering of the mind and control of the passions ... as all tragedy should, it leaves us freer for our own efforts to free ourselves from our own incompatible passions and disharmonies' (7). In this beautifully written, learned book, she argued that 'Samson Agonistes is a poem of growth and change, depicting a hero who achieves late insight superior to his earlier insights. He breaks through clusters of timeencapsulated beliefs to achieve a new synthesis of understanding ... Milton is true to his personal experience, true to his historical experience, true to his national experience' (xx). The impressive scholarship of this study may well have silenced doubts, making them seem only quibbles, but in dealing with the problematic aspects of the play, Radzinowicz is driven by an unqualified admiration for both Milton and Samson. This leads her to conclude that really nothing is here for tears, nothing to wail. The bloody mess of crushed Philistine bodies, the 'heaps of slaughtered' (1530), the 'horror' are for her 'a human imaging of God's might ... an exemplary act which teaches how God gives freedom' (346). Many readers find it impossible to share her unreserved exultation in Samson's achievement or to agree with her response to the horror of Samson's final act. Milton makes his messenger enter in a

8 'Exiled from Light'

state of shock, almost incoherent at the ghastliness of what he has seen and will never forget. But for Radzinowicz, '[t]he exemplary in Samson Agonistes+illustrates the mercy of God; Samson's final act in effect is to "spread his name / Great among the Heathen round." The knowledge that the "mercy of heaven" may reside even in a "hideous noise" is the consolation the drama brings. Thus deeds meriting fame are deeds exemplifying knowledge, deeds "to knowledge answerable." Samson lives to learn and dies to educate' (264-5). By 1978, however, even so impressive a voice as this could not silence those other voices that expressed doubt about the supposed splendour of Samson's achievement. Milton's condemnation of warfare and social violence had been convincingly pointed out; doubts had been expressed about the relevance of the regeneration pattern to what happens to the Samson-hero; moral relativism rather than absolutism had been noted in the play, especially when the similarity between Dalila's motivation and Samson's was noticed; the profound ironies undercutting almost everything said by the Chorus and Manoa increasingly convinced readers that they were anything but the mouthpieces of Milton. John Carey found in Samson 'no spiritual development, only ... resentment, which has been gnawing inwardly' (Milton 139). In his edition of the play, he quoted Kenneth Burke, who saw Samson as acting out of vengeance; this was '"a wonder-working spell by a cantankerous old fighter-priest who would slay the enemy in effigy'" (Poems 335). Irene Samuel, in her classic condemnation of Samson's violence, described him as an egocentric monomaniac, who 'bring[s] himself to destruction through his shortcomings' (250). Writers less than certain of Milton's meaning and of the value of Samson's achievement have seen the play as complex and ambiguous, have tried to assess its uncertainties and apparent contradictions. Stanley Fish has been especially thought-provoking. He questions the now orthodox reading of the structure of the play as reflecting Samson's upward, regenerative spiritual progress, deciding it was a play 'without a middle' ('Question' 252). He finds the play is full of questions that the characters never answer for themselves and which remain unanswered for the reader. He is not as critical of the Chorus as some readers now are, noting the 'precision with which they articulate the misgivings we ourselves have felt, both as men and as readers' (247). Finally, the play is 'bearable and even invigorating' (263). The uncertainties and unanswered questions leave the reader with the 'conviction that if he only knew enough, that is, if he were only God, it could be understood ... [Milton's] purpose is not to deny the reality of a

Introduction 9

just and benevolent God, but to suggest that we cannot infer his benevolence or validate his justice from the known facts' (263). John T. Shawcross felt frustration at 'the uselessness of such action' ('Irony' 294) and at 'the evil which hope becomes in man'; he felt 'a sense of waste, of the meaninglessness of good' (304). No serious study of this play can any longer afford to ignore or dismiss whatever it is in the text or context that has provoked such responses. By the end of the 1980s, Barbara Lewalski found that '[whatever consensus] once obtained about Samson Agonistes no longer exists.' As she began her own reconsideration of the play, she could hear from its readers only a 'cacophony of critical voices' ('Milton's Samson' 233). The appearance in 1986 of Joseph A. Wittreich's Interpreting 'Samson Agonistes' had helped to provoke this. This work not only focused on those parts of the text and authorial context which had been troubling revisionist critics but went so far beyond them as to shock critics and specialist scholars of Milton. Wittreich brought his considerable authority and knowledge not only of Milton but also of the Apocalypse, of Renaissance exegesis, and of the Romantics to insist that 'Milton's "martyrplay" is ... less a celebration than a censure of its hero' (326). He draws on a wealth of Renaissance commentary and devotional literature that, he claims, 'exhibits a tarnished Samson - a Samson who, nurtured in blood, delights in vengeance and whose enterprise entails the wretched interchange of wrong for wrong' (244-5). Wittreich amassed a huge body of evidence, attempting to establish a complete recontextualisation of Samson in a counter-tradition quite different in spirit from that described by Krouse. No less an authority than Luther was invoked, as was Calvin, besides a considerable number of Protestant divines: Samuel Bird, Daniel Dyke, John Trapp, John Goodwin, John Lightfoot, Edward Vaughan, William Perkins, Henry Bullinger, and many others. Wittreich's display of scholarship was received enthusiastically by some early reviewers, and respectfully if a little cautiously by others, such as Thomas Healy, Janel Mueller, and J. Martin Evans. Wendy Furman reviewed the book gently but firmly, pointing out that Wittreich had oversimplified the complex analyses of the sinner-saint that were now current. She doubted that Wittreich's new ideology of Samson the unregenerate would be widely accepted but did pay tribute to his 'massive and intelligent' (393) scholarship. However, it was the integrity of this scholarship that soon came under the surgical knife in two brilliant pieces of research and analysis, reviews by Anthony Low and Philip Gallagher, who cast serious doubts

10 'Exiled from Light'

on its credibility, on the soundness of passages supposedly quoted from authoritative sources, in fact, on most of the ideas presented about the opinions of the writers of the source texts. As a result, Wittreich's conclusions must be treated very cautiously as things stand. However, they deserve to be interrogated since they are so momentous for our understanding of Milton. The contextual source material needs to be reexamined more thoroughly than is possible in a book review. For instance, Wittreich makes the very important point, with wide reference to seventeenth-century religious commentary, that Samson is an example of how the Christian should not behave. Indeed, we find Samson is a negative example++++++++++++++++one not to be imitated, in Luther's opinion (22, 32), while Calvin found his faith '"halting and imperfect/" his prayers '"defective"' and even '"perverted"' and much in his behaviour reprehensible, notably his 'vicious longing for vengeance' (29). It has always been recognized that the sinfulness of the biblical Samson troubled commentators through the ages, and criticism of his antics figured prominently in the tradition; even Krouse quoted abundantly to indicate the unsettling aspects of the saint's activities. Wittreich goes back to that tradition, but, as Low and Gallagher warn us, there are silences, distortions, and lacunae in his presentation of the contextual evidence. For instance, Wittreich insists on what is negative in Luther's opinion of Samson, but he does not make clear that, for all his criticism, that great theologian does not doubt for a moment that Samson is a saint and a hero of faith. What he did was a miracle. 'Such a miracle is not impossible, but very rare and hazardous. Where the Spirit is so richly present it may well happen.' Samson could behave as he did because the Spirit filled him so. 'Samson was called of God to harass the Philistines and deliver the children of Israel... he did not do so in order to avenge himself or to seek his own interests, but to serve others and to punish the Philistines' (Luther's Works 45:104). Talking to Veit Dietrich about the strength of Samson, Luther said, '"[t]he spirit of Samson was the Holy Spirit, who makes holy and who produces actions which are obedient to God and serve him ... I often wonder about the example of Samson. There must have been a strong forgiveness of sins in his case. Human strength couldn't do what he did"' (54:79). Wittreich comes to the conclusion from comments on Samson's sins and unruliness that there had been an erosion which led to the 'collapse of the usual Samson typology' and that Milton's lifetime saw its 'eventual demise'++++++++++++++++Samson is not a saint but a fallen,

Introduction 11

tragic figure from whom God hides and to whom light is now darkness. Wittreich gives the impression that this is the final status or total significance of the Samson figure, rather than a phase in Samson's development. He decides that Samson's supposed heroism remains challenged and that he departs as an angry spirit never to be healed or harmonized. Milton demythologizes the legend and shapes a poem that is unsettling: 'Samson himself, who for so long seemed to be the glory of Israel, is shown to be her grief (181). Most striking or disturbing is Wittreich's central assertion that Samson is to be associated with Satan and that his behaviour in the play should be read as ultimately satanic. Wittreich is convinced that a significant number of the commentators identified Samson with the Antichrist, 'an idea implicit in identifications of Samson with the third angel of the Apocalypse' (38n). The third angel was 'represented as a militarist, an agent of carnal warfare,' a corrupt and fallen creature of the Earth (42). Can the Nazarite, 'at the end of his life, be numbered among the redeemed or... sorted with the reprobate' (43)? With the latter, Wittreich claims, Milton chooses to place him. As with the 'discovery' of cold nuclear fusion a few years ago, it is very difficult to replicate these findings. Often, remarks Wittreich cites are not to be found on the pages cited. A crucial suggestion may be followed by a recommendation to 'see' a certain work. When this is consulted, it often has no bearing on the suggestion. Francis Rollenson does not come close to affirming what he is supposed to have said: that Samson 'may in the end be that Antichrist' (Wittreich,Interpreting SA 37). What Rollenson actually says is that he 'was a great glory to the tribe of Dan: for the Tribes of Reuben, Simeon, Gad, and Aser, were the more ignoble' (141). A little later Rollenson calls him 'the worthiest & most valiant of all the ludges of+++++++41) and, talking about the serpent and the adder, explains these as emblems not of sin but of the Judge's cleverness, '"because hee vsed to set vpon the Philistines suddainely & subtilely"' (143). The reference to the serpent does not associate Samson with Satan but instead is a 'commendation of his familie, because it is a good thing to imitate the Adder or Serpent in wisedome, & therefore our Sauiour exhorteth his disciples+to be as wise as Serpents' (143).3 Luther, too, considers the pope is the Antichrist; Samson is a viper only in Rollenson's sense that he harms his enemies (8:280-84). Low could not find that the commentators who had been referred to identified Samson with the Antichrist (review 416) nor could Gallagher

12 'Exiled from Light'

find where Perkins was supposed to have contrasted Samson with Christ, or to have implicated Samson with the third angel of Revelation and with the Antichrist (review 111). What Perkins really does say is that 'Christ is called a Nazarite ... that which is said properly of Sampson(e) who was a most excellent figure of Christ... Now Christ is called a Nazarite ... because hee was the truth, and substance of that order: for in him was fully accomplished that holinesse, which was figured by that order' (172). Wittreich suggested that many other commentators also associated Samson with Antichrist but again it is difficult to locate this in the sources indicated. Richard Bernard does not concentrate on a contrast between Christ and Samson to the latter's discredit. In++++++++++++++++it is not Samson but the city of Rome that is Babylon, in 'the eyes of all that winke not wilfully' (43). Protestant commentators are so anxious to focus on establishing Rome and the papacy as Antichrist that they work hard to quash ancient murmurs that continued to be heard that the tribe of Dan was somehow connected with the Antichrist. Far from suggesting that Samson is a cruel or sinful destroyer, let alone a false prophet, in++++++++++++++ernard speaks not with condemnation but only praise for those who fight in the Lord's causes. He justifies war and God's support of it in some cases: 'God would send his spirit vpon them to encourage them to the warre, as he did vpon Gideon, Ehud, Sampson.' Samson is not treated as if he were a sinner but as someone renowned, glorious, and valiant (25, 32, 79,165). One problem, then, for readers of Wittreich's book is to understand what may be called his idiosyncratic use of citation or reference. He constructs ugly, negative images of Samson out of details he has found in the tradition; for instance, Samson condemned as carnal destroyer and evil killer of men, or Samson the offshoot of Satan. This is typically followed by a reference in the footnotes to some contemporary sermon or exegesis, but, when consulted, the text often fails to illustrate or validate the opinion put forward by Wittreich. There may well be a discussion of the Antichrist or of Satan in the cited text but there may be no reference in it to Samson, or indeed Samson may turn out unexpectedly to be defended or even praised there. So, Wittreich's discussion may condemn Samson's violence but the text cited as supportive may praise warfare in the business of the Lord and commend Samson. Gallagher, checking the seventeenth-century authorities cited by Wittreich, found little or nothing to substantiate the points of view or even the words he quoted. Low concluded in his review:

Introduction 13 what reader would question such weighty and confident-sounding citations of absent 'proof texts/ unaware that some fail to mention Samson's name, others speak of him in innocuous or irrelevant contexts, and not one supports the repeated assertion that 'Revelation's commentators' identify Samson with an evil and elusive third angel of apocalypse? Or was it Wormwood? or Antichrist? Or maybe it was Delilah they were thinking of, not Samson? These confusions make a poor foundation on which to build an entire 400-page book. Wittreich's methods do not inspire confidence; his thesis is unproved. (418)

The truth is that the texts cited by Wittreich do usually at some time criticize aspects of Samson during the period when he was a sinner and even express surprise that one who had sinned and failed in his high Nazarite vocation should finally be a hero of faith. The vital question is whether Samson ends his life forgiven, a saint serving God and finding acceptance for his behaviour. Almost invariably, the authors who voice criticisms of Samson accept without reservation the pronouncement in Hebrews that Samson was a hero of faith, a statement that they receive as divinely inspired. Samson may be a strange hero of God, unpredictable and inexplicable, but who can understand the ways of God? The writers referred to take the New Testament as an irrefutable authority in this matter of Samson's faith. For all this criticism, Wittreich's book is important. He has focused on many aspects of Milton's Samson which for years were glossed over or ignored as scholars constructed their own portraits of Samson the Puritan saint or Samson the selfless revolutionary, true patron of the New Model Army. Wittreich's insistence that Samson is presented as a bad model for Christian action is especially convincing and important. If I may speak for myself here and introduce my book, I must acknowledge that it was Wittreich's study that encouraged me to publish my own thoughts about the play. In the 1960s and 1970s, I had read with disbelief the accepted accounts of Samson but, with little specialist knowledge then of Milton and seventeenth-century religious thought, I restricted my doubts to the classroom. In 1979,1 presented to an audience at Keele University a reading of Samson that was in outline fairly close to the one developed in the pages that follow. Wittreich's book focused on most of the passages that had interested and troubled me but which seemed to be ignored or misread in the studies of Milton's work that were best known then - above all, those passages which emphasized Samson's brutality, his ethic of physical strength and vio-

14 'Exiled from Light'

lence, and those strange satanic overtones to his behaviour. Wittreich was also clearly fascinated by the very same contextual echoes that interested me, particularly the relevance of the serpent, the Antichrist, and the ambiguous status of the tribe of Dan; we were both puzzled, as were some commentators, that Samson had actually been considered a saint as they pondered the sinfulness and soiled morality of this Old Testament bully. Wittreich mentions with respect some of the readings I have found most helpful, readings that are often ignored or marginalized as 'revisionist/ those by Carey, Donald F. Bouchard, and 'chief among them, Irene Samuel/ going on to affirm, 'Their Samson is my Samson... [and] ours is Milton's' (Interpreting SA xxvii-viii). Perhaps most important is his concern that 'Milton's critics have made us confront a monolithic conception of the Samson story instead of, as we should, a story that is pluralistic, polysemic, and analogical rather than typological, in most of its seventeenth-century forms' (xviii). For all the reservations I made earlier, Wittreich has drawn our attention to the dark, negative element in the Samson tradition as well as in Milton's text which we must read as attentively as the version we find in Krouse and the orthodoxy. There have been responses to Wittreich and other 'revisionists' in important articles and chapters of recent books on Milton. Generally, there has been a strengthening of the orthodox reading in the last decade. Joan S. Bennett is close to Mary Ann Radzinowicz in her careful, thoughtful reading (Reviving Liberty). She traces a profound difference between the consciousness of Samson and that of all the other Danites. They are literalistic and pietistic, creatures of the Mosaic Law. Samson, she considers, has the rational ability to interpret the letter of the Law in the spirit of love in which the Law was given. In understanding his sin and finding repentance, Samson achieves Christian liberty. The Philistines are punished by God for their evil. Samson's motions come from God: 'there are some times when one can know' (160). It is wrong to think the destruction of the Philistines is murderous, brutal, or cruel: as in the destruction of the hosts of Pharaoh, this is an act of redemption and of divine love: The flames that destroyed Sodom as well as the flames that consumed the sacrificial ram on Moriah were, as Milton would have had his angel say, the "flames of true love"'(156-7). Stanley Fish published a sequel twenty years later to his influential

Introduction

15

article on Milton's play, one that acknowledged recent revisionist voices. He sees the characters, Samson and the others, discovering in the world stories that confirm its 'reasonableness (and therefore the predictability)' ('Spectacle' 558); they try to 'wrest intelligibility from a history that seems continually to upset it' (564). There is one possibility no one dares to admit: that there is no sense to be seen. Unlike Joan Bennett, Fish believes we cannot know what motioned Samson. 'God and Samson unite only in being inaccessible ... The only wisdom to be carried away from the play is that there is no wisdom to be carried away, and that we are alone, like Samson, and like the children of Israel' (586). For Ashraf Rushdy, Samson 'is not an agent of the Spirit (or a subject of God or a Son of God), but rather a vessel of the Spirit (or subject to God or a servant of God)' (298) Rushdy, too, understands that Samson could have found Christian liberty but decides, 'Samson did not become a son of God precisely because ... he foreclosed the opportunity for self-knowledge leading to agential liberty' (339). Rushdy is very careful in his analysis of the motions that impel Samson, particularly at the end of the play, examining readings in which they are treated as God's grace and others in which they are simply Samson's personal desire. He dismisses Fish's assurance that they are unverifiable, since he is sure it is possible to determine how 'authentic divine commands are differentiated from self-delusions' (300). Samson is impelled by God 'after he has already done his [own] thinking' (304); '[a]fter the "rouzing motions," Samson's will is simply not his own. He has by now become the vessel he thought he was in his opening soliloquy' (305). Samson has lost the 'agency of choice' in his 'failure at self-knowledge' (306). This is the sort of disagreement about fundamental aspects of the play that I referred to earlier in this chapter. Other important essays will be discussed in the chapters that follow. The main purpose of this introductory chapter is to indicate why anyone should imagine another book on Samson is worth producing. The truth is I find it difficult to read much that has been written about this play without thinking of the Emperor's new clothes. For instance, G.A. Wilkes said that Stein uses 'Milton's text as the raw material from which he weaves a superior fabric of his own' (367). One often feels something like this as one studies the massive corpus of critical literature about the play. One can see recurring patterns of bias and distortion, which I will briefly identify here and return to when it is relevant later. The following seem to me to the most important.

16 'Exiled from Light'

A. Failure to Give Due Weight to Textual Evidence 1. The Autobiographical Mode Many contextualist readings of the play depend on importing meaning from outside the text and many of these are frankly intuitive. Once, 'autobiographical' readings of the play were the norm. Masson marvelled that 'this strictly objective poetic creation, should have been all the while so profoundly and intensely subjective' (6:670). For Masson, it seemed obvious that '[a] tragedy on Samson would be in effect a metaphor of the tragedy of [Milton's] own life' (664). Such readings are nowadays dismissed as outdated, hopelessly naive: blind Samson or misogynistic Chorus identified with blind Milton, the divorcer; blind Nazarite champion as representing Cromwell's blind Latin secretary. But although this sort of identification is now smiled at as simplistic, the truth is that the autobiographical mode is actually flourishing, although lightly camouflaged. James Holly Hanford's still-respected reading assumes that 'into the representation of Samson [Milton] has undoubtedly put more of himself than into any other of his imaginative creations' (Milton Handbook 291). D.C. Allen takes for granted 'Milton's self-identification with the young judge of Israel' (82). Northrop Frye is certain 'the self-identification of the blind Milton with the blind Samson is impossible to miss' (158). More recently, David Loewenstein barely disguises his reading of the play as a personal, even autobiographical, statement: 'The terrifying drama of iconoclasm in++amson Agonistes, moreover, expresses something of a deep wish fulfillment on Milton's part: the impulse not only to remake and overturn history, but, in the process, to devastate one's enemies by means of a spectacular act' (Milton+45; see Loewenstein's entire chapter). Characteristically, as we shall frequently see with such interpretations, contextual support is drawn from the early prose works, and the possibility that Milton's views changed with the failure of the revolution and the passage of decades of disillusionment and failed hopes is not investigated: The horrid spectacle of++++++++++++++++herefore allows Milton his m pronounced expression in his major poems of his iconoclastic vision and temperament. The iconoclasm, rage, and violence of Samson Agonistes resembles most closely the vehement polemics of Eikonoklastes, where Milton demolishes, with such unrelenting rancor and fury, the image and spectacle of royalty projected in+++++++++++143). It is the 'rage and violence of Milton the polemicist and iconoclastic thinker'

Introduction 17

(150) that the play expresses. But how do we know that Milton approved of the iconoclasm, rage, and violence of Samson in 1671? How do we know that his 'rancor and fury' continued to be unrelenting? This book attempts to answer these questions. The lightly camouflaged autobiographical approach seems especially favoured by historians who have turned their skills to literary criticism. It may reflect a tendency to read a dramatic text as a historic document, like a charter, treaty, even diary or memoir, rather than one which is a fiction, driven by literary conventions, genre presuppositions, or intertextual expectations. So A.L. Rowse asserts confidently that 'all persons of insight into literature and the ways of writers are agreed that Samson Agonistes++is the most autobiographical work of this most aut biographical of writers' (255). One may very well use this sort of elementary rhetoric in support of a hunch but it takes rather more to prove that fiction is autobiography. Can one show from the text (or the paratext or the context) that any opinion expressed by any fictional character is that of the author? Nicholas Jose equates the Chorus's hatred of Dalila with a hatred he supposes is Milton's, missing all the textual signs that the Chorus may be wrong (146-7). Christopher Hill decides that the choice of subject was 'influenced by the experience and the defeat of the English Revolution, reinforcing the analogy between Samson's blindness and Milton's own'+++++429). He sees this as the manifesto of a bloodthirsty old revolutionary: the sense of '"heaven's desertion"' (432) is 'not incompatible with... Milton's feelings about the failure of the English Revolution' (433); the poet 'saw his cause as a Phoenix' (477, emphasis added). In chapter 2, we shall examine the near impossibility of identifying the author's voice in the dramatic text and see how Milton resorts to indirection to avoid personal comment on his protagonist's behaviour. In chapter 3 we shall look at the mode of fiction and see what authorial detachment from his fictional creations tells us about the meaning of Milton's tragic poem. 2. Milton's Point of View Identified with That of a Dramatic Character

This is a variant of the autobiographical reading. It identifies one of the dramatic characters as the voice of Milton. Sometimes it is Manoa. M. V. Rama Sarma thinks Manoa is Milton himself, who 'is greatly in love with the idea of martyrdom which according to him is the noblest form of heroism'+++++8). For Anthony Low, 'the pleasure Manoa feels at the destruction of the Philistines is not unlike the "savage jubilation" Milton

18 'Exiled from Light'

himself would feel at the destruction of Charles I!' (Blaze 185-6). In chapter 3 I argue, from the way Milton manages fiction, against the likelihood that any such identification is accurate. 3. Milton's Intentions Presumed to Be Known This is another variant of the autobiographical reading. Scholars assert what Milton intended here or there, without textual evidence; again, it is usually intuition at work. For instance, Parker says we accept the last chorus 'as Milton's explanation of the story which his drama unfolds ... [w]e accept it as ... the only safe means, the only fair means, of understanding the author's intentions' (Debt 232). We shall see why this is neither safe nor fair. Another suggestion is that 'Milton intended Samson's error in challenging Harapha to reveal his impulsive temper' (Tung 486). We hear often of 'Milton's view,' that Milton 'believed,' 'felt/ 'knew,' 'interpreted' or that his readers 'were intended to think' this or that. Surprisingly often, there is no evidence in the text or support drawn from the context for these inferences about what was going on in the mind of the writer. My own impression is that his mind is more subtle and complex than is suggested by most of these reductive assumptions, which tend to trivialize a tragedy that is more profound than the rather obvious, outdated propagandist pamphlet it is often made out to be. Criticism of Samson has generated more of this sort of unvalidated hunch-playing than any other area of Milton scholarship. 4. God's Intentions Presumed to Be Known It may well be blasphemous to find amusing the certainty with which some critics track an unsearchable and unknowable God's movements, plans, interventions, and thoughts in this play. This too is usually done without assistance from the text. What, one wonders, would Milton have made of this? In Paradise Lost, when God or a divine agent speaks, it is fair for a textual analyst to infer and gloss the intentions of a God who is Truth. In a dramatic text, where no agent has divine sanction, God's intentions are inferred at our peril. For Northrop Frye, Samson's longing for death 'in itself is despair, but God transmutes it to a heroic achievement ending in death. God is thus acting in accordance with the same homeopathic principle, of casting out salt humours by salt and the like' (143). 'God returns to him' (Low, Blaze 80), 'God finds a way' (89), 'Samson has gained God's favor back again' (183): to many of

Introduction 19

Milton's readers, God's mind and his ways are reassuringly transparent. Nicholas Jose calculates the distinction 'between true and false histories from providence's point of view' (137). Loewenstein sees Samson as 'acting utterly alone (except for God's mysterious presence) in his final performance+++++++135). With this sort of access to the mind of God, it is not surprising that some commentators are more confident than I am about what the play means. For Allen, 'God, working through Samson, has put Dagon down' (93); for John N. Wall, Jr, 'the silence of God ends with the divine entry into human history once again' (135). Perhaps these readers think they are working from the text, but this demonstrably is not the case. It is hard to understand how the God of Christians can ever be said to be absent from human history. It is even harder to hear the God of Samson breaking his silence. All we know from the text is that an unnaturally strong man kills vast numbers of his enemies out of revenge, probably believing this to be a good thing. Even critics who are privy to God's will should should be modest about claiming the authority of textual evidence. B. Failure to Give Due Weight to Contextual Evidence If the previous paragraphs gave the impression of being an apology for a 'New Critical' approach, that impression must be corrected. A number of readers, who do not have a common position, especially those who are likely to be classed as 'revisionists,' can be criticized for not paying enough attention to the context of ideas that gloss and clarify the text. Irene Samuel, mauled by Christopher Hill, gives us a reading based largely on Aristotelian dramatic theory and close reading, not recognizing where Milton and the Stagirite part company about the relationship between God and humanity. Hill sees her as a (wishy-washy?) twentieth-century liberal (MER 444-5). There is something in what he says, since she is not interested in contextualizing Samson's behaviour or motives. The revisionists or 'heretics' of+++++++criticism tend to be much fairer in their attention to the text than orthodox critics, but they are less interested in the intellectual context (Wittreich in Interpreting and John Ulreich in his essay on Dalila, we shall see later, are notable exceptions). John Carey does not begin, like many contextualizing scholars, from a built-in sympathy for Samson, based on his supposedly Christian heroism or his typological credentials. Carey's is a close textual analy-

20 'Exiled from Light'

sis, a psychological reading, probing the inner life of Milton's characters: '[Dalila's] claim to religious and political loyalties is ventured, one suspects, mainly for its Samson-appeal+++++++42). Or, 'it would be hugely insensitive to suggest that Samson is putting on an act... But the nature of his audience is forcing him, as he sees it, to turn against himself indignation which he desperately wants to divert elsewhere hence the undercurrent of excuse, and the hint of attitudinising' (140). Carey does not try to reduce the play's themes or personages to theological or historical formulae. His textual analysis - of a kind more often found in readings of Jacobean drama or nineteenth-century novels - is intelligent and invigorating, but he does not often turn to the authorial or larger intellectual context to gloss the text. This is a lacuna, a missing dimension, a criticism that often applies to critics labelled 'revisionist/ but it is usually accompanied by a far more attentive reading of the text than we find in many contextualist readings. C. Problems with and Dangers of Contextualist Readings 1. Cheating on the Text The contextualist critic has a tendency to import meaning into a text that will not bear it. The authorial context or the larger social, political, or theological context may supply a structure or interpretive detail that the text will not support. Readers influenced by other works of Milton's, who have decided that Samson is a model of Christian behaviour, may fail to cite passages in the text that make the Samson-figure unsympathetic or even repellent. They may notice only the context that supports their preferred reading. We see Miriam Muskin trying to deal with this tendency. She finds that the play 'lacks any specifically Christian message' but notices that since most readers start from the presumption that 'Milton can be termed the Christian poet par excellence, the hero, moral drama, and overall direction of Samson must be placed within the same Christian tradition as the two epics' (234). Here the context dictates assumptions about the text before reading begins. Many readers start with a preconception of what they think Milton means to say and then construct a meaning that satisfies their presuppositions, surely seeing in the text what fulfils them. Most of the best criticism of the play for years has been contextualist. Radzinowicz says of her author-contextual reading: '[i]t allows an intellectual and ... a psychosocial placing ... [AJuthor-contextual reading

Introduction 21

bridges the gap between the intrinsic or formalistic study of literature and the extrinsic or causal study of literature' (Toward SA xiii). Contextual readings must be holistic - almost any scrap of information might be relevant to deciphering meaning - and are inevitably incomplete. There may simply be no record of the one pertinent statement that could gloss an enigmatic textual crux. If only Aristotle had written three or four times about catharsis! What in a cacophony of intertextual echoes is the relevant voice that speaks to a particular phrase? As Wittreich says, 'the problem of contextualization is one of locating the relevant contexts for criticism; it is finally a problem of value' (xvi). It is certainly a problem of evaluation and knowledge and judgment. So, the contextualist tends to deal with text in a characteristic way we shall look out for. 2. Schematization Schematization is endemic to contextual scholarship. It probably follows from the nature of the human mind, especially the scholar's mind, that there is a drive to look for patterns and to establish taxonomies. It is also natural for a disciple to elaborate an attractive schema. Allen notices that Krouse analyses Samson 'in terms of an accepted theory of temptation which is illustrated in both++++++++++++++Paradise Regained' (83). Then he goes on to refine the schema, formulating it as a tetralogy which includes A Masque (83). Patrick Cullen's beautiful schema of temptations for Samson deserves mention: Manoa = Flesh = Lust; Dalila = World = Avarice; Harapha = Devil = Glory. Michael Atkinson comes up with a schema that is highly symmetrical and even more elaborate, an infernal trinal triplicity (291) of nine temptations in three sets of three. Irene Samuel noticed this 'idol of the tribe' at work in Woodhouse's reading: 'once he is intent on showing how properly Samson Agonistes demonstrates theological doctrine, [he] can thus ignore large segments of the human action, as well as the human agents, that Milton wrote into his tragedy' (237). In other words, the context has produced a schema that becomes more important than the text when that text is 'interpreted.' There is a wonderful example early in this century of how the pressure to impose a schema or intellectual template on the text can wrestle with critical integrity. J.W. Tupper in 1920 tried to show that the dramatic movement in the play shifted from Dagon's victory over Jehovah to Jehovah's victory over Dagon. He could not fit Dalila into the schema. He was too honest to label her a

22 'Exiled from Light'

temptress, for he saw her as a repentant wife seeking reconciliation. He felt sympathy for her and found no sign of Christian virtue in Samson's severity. So he concluded that Milton was simply an incompetent dramatist, inferior to Shakespeare in realistic characterization, who failed to make Dalila as bad as he wanted her to be as a character. Later, I will try to show that Tupper's reading of the textual Dalila was more fair and honest than he realized. He should have trusted in his honest reading of what Milton wrote, but the schema won over the text. Contextualization has many other dangers; one will concern us greatly later. If Milton's views changed late in life, he could not state them openly or publish them, as a hated regicide. We certainly cannot assume they did not change. We must read the last poems as carefully encoded documents. Of these the most cryptic is the tragedy. As noted already, author-contextualists inevitably quote from early pre-Restoration polemic, although they cannot guarantee that the early prose represents Milton's later views. This is one of the questions this book will address as we try later to decode the last great poems. These questions are simple but central. Is Samson's achievement good or bad and how does it relate to the God Milton believed in? Since all contextualizing is problematic, what in the context really does relate to the text, illuminate it or validate it? In the context of seventeenth-century Protestant exegesis, commentary, and theology, where should we place Milton's hero? And where in the authorial context: which of Milton's other writings explain or reveal the meaning of his tragedy, and how does it speak to them? C.A. Patrides once warned that the flat, denotative language of Christian Doctrine is not always a satisfying gloss for the metaphoric and 'odd' theological language of the great poems+Figures 215-30). We should recall those words as we try to contextualize and decode the poetry of the play. These are the kinds of pitfalls or literary potholes that lie in the way of the critic of Milton's play. They lie in the way of every critic of every work, but because Milton, the defender of the regicides, could not speak out openly after the Restoration, and because the play is a highly political, although heavily coded, statement, the dangers of stumbling into them are greater than is normal. I cannot hope to have avoided them all myself, but I have tried always to be aware of them. Most writers have proceeded as if there is one meaning to the play and as if there is one key to this meaning, which is perhaps what Wittreich means by a 'monolithic conception' of the story++Interpreting SA xviii), as if regeneration or typology or re-election or Christian

Introduction

23

liberty or temptation overcome might be the key to the meaning, explaining the nature of Samson's achievement, the structure of the play, or its place in the context of Milton's theology or poetics or politics. This book begins by interrogating that assumption in chapter 2. The three chapters following this introduction are all about practical hermeneutics, about how the play is to be read, if we are to avoid subjection to the 'idols' of the mind touched on above. The autobiographical mode mentioned earlier is alive and well and has grown a lot more sophisticated than it once was. Of course, it often has a postmodern flavour now. The problem is to determine the 'ideological' status of views expressed by the dramatic characters: would the writer have agreed with this or that view expressed by a fictional character? Have we methods more reliable than hunch or intuition? What is a sound balance between textual and contextual evidence? These three chapters focus closely on such questions, examining the linguistic and formal instruments Milton had, and how he used them to communicate meaning. Chapter 2, then, examines Milton's deliberate strategy of indirection and authorial withdrawal. The play finally offers us indeterminacy, an indeterminacy that simulates and recreates the problems a Christian faces in reading the Word of God whose ways are inscrutable and whose final plan is at present unknowable. Its focus is on language: the play's intertextuality and Milton's subtle manipulation of and cooperation with its intertext to fashion meaning and communicate it unobtrusively. In doing so, he communicates the moral and theological limitations of the persons in the play. The author is silent and hidden (but not dead by a long way). Chapter 3 also concentrates on++++he text is to be read, but the focus here is on the fictional mechanism. Milton's fictional changes and emphases are as suggestive and as guarded as his manipulation of the intertext, for the author seems to have been at pains to silence his own voice. No Urania is invoked to inspire any privileged commentator in this poem. Many readers think they hear Milton's voice at various times in the play, particularly in the final lines. There is little reason for thinking so. Various appraisals of the value of Manoa's or the Chorus's assessment of events have been made and the disagreements among commentators in recent years have been considerable. The fourth chapter concentrates on Milton's dramatic theory and, particularly, his reading of Aristotle. Serious errors have been made over the last five centuries about what the Greek philosopher is believed to have said about drama. Not all recent scholarship in classical

24 'Exiled from Light'

studies has been universally accepted, but many findings are helpful in this rereading of Samson. Milton scholars seem to be seriously out of touch with modern classical scholarship and its recuperation of Aristotle. Aristotelian readings of Milton's play perpetuate some of the worst misconceptions and distortions of what the Greek philosopher is now thought to have said about poetics. Milton read Aristotle and available Italian commentaries with even better understanding and respect than he has been given credit for, as we shall see. So, the next three chapters are all about hermeneutics: technical linguistic, formal, and genre considerations that affect our reading of Milton's play. They are also interpretive, hinting at the questions that will arise and making early suggestions about answers, if there are any. All will point us to an interpretation of the play that is less than orthodox. The next three chapters, 5 to 7, focus closely on the Samson-hero. They begin by suggesting why the themes of election, conversion, regeneration, renewal of God's grace or favour are not of central interest to Milton in his fictionalization of Samson as they are in the case of Adam. We will see how differently Milton treats sin in Adam, Satan, and Samson. In each case, the author's concerns differ. Samson is a hero of faith; he is not a limb of Satan or the Antichrist. However, he is a hero who 'received not the promise' (Hebrews 11:39). He is 'exiled from Light' (SA 98) in the darkness under the Law, acting out a brutal ethic of strength and violence, denied the example of the Incarnate Christ. For Wittreich, the play does not reveal a Samson who realizes his potentiality as a minister of his deity but who falls short of that potentiality because of his persistence in error. However, Wittreich never confronts the affirmation in Hebrews of Samson's heroic status. The fictional protagonist Milton fashioned out of the material in Judges is an emblematic or iconic embodiment of his vision of Old Testament consciousness: the state of religion under the Law, rigorous, incomplete, enslaved, literalistic, and uncomprehending. Samson's relationship with Dalila is at the heart of the play in an ironic sense because it reveals his inability to love. In chapter 6, I argue that Dalila has been seriously misread by all but a few critics. She is repentant and her brutal rejection by Samson reflects not his spiritual growth but his error, his cruel, uncharitable, un-Christ-like nature. The contrast between Samson and Christ continues in the next chapter. Unlike Christ, Samson is not an exemplar, but he is some sort of moral exemplum: an example not to be imitated, an example of a bankrupt morality that must be shed and

Introduction 25

purged away with the help of the example of Christ's life in time. Chapter 7 ends with another look at that all-important crux, the 'motions' that rouse Samson and impel him to go to the temple of Dagon after having refused to because Hebraic Law forbade it, and surveys the evidence that their provenance is uncertain and unknowable. This crux was often read, and still sometimes is, without reference to its intertext, as confirmation of divine direction to the elect Nazarite: God has now returned. Some scholars talk of this as a clear sign of 'prevenient grace,' 'election/ 'regeneration,' or perhaps as a sign of Samson's redemption. The political implications here are crucial. If God has directed this action, it must be a true and exemplary Christian way to act. If there is no doubt that God has intervened, Samson can, should, perhaps must, be used as a guide for Christian political action, an inference commonly made early in the English Revolution. In his recent fine study of Milton's poetry and politics, Ashraf Rushdy concludes, as we have seen, that we can 'find how authentic divine commands are differentiated from selfdelusions' (300). Rushdy's argument and his dismissal of Stanley Fish's doubts about the origins of those commands has been taken by a number of recent writers as convincing, so my disagreement is timely. No human machinery existed to verify the origin of impulsions, not even for the most honest Christian saints, as chapter 7 attempts to show. The subject of chapter 8 is the structure of the play, almost the oldest topic of interest in criticism of Milton's drama. I have some new suggestions about the formal shapes and patterns that organize the ideas in this dramatic poem, and also some suggestions about what those theological, moral, social and historical ideas are (and are not). The chapter ends with an analysis of the structure of the play and an attempt to describe its structural unity and greatness. The last chapter will discuss Milton in old age. Speculation about Milton in old age has been circular in a sense: Samson has often been interpreted in the assumption that Milton thought in such and such a way during his necessary silence after the return of the monarchy. Then readings of the play have followed from these assumptions to reinforce inferences about the poet's social, political, and religious thinking in his last years. What Samson 'means' is essential to our understanding of its writer's experience of defeat, failure, and disillusionment. The attempt in this chapter to recontextualize the text is as much a matter of personal interpretation as any of the attempts that have preceded it. We only attempt such an exercise because we feel that what is relevant in the context has been ignored or misunderstood. When the author is as

26 'Exiled from Light'

evasive and withdrawn as he is here, when the code is as cryptic as this one, contextualization is not only more difficult, it is also more interesting and more necessary. Philip Gallagher once spoke of Milton's 'unchanging mind' ('Role' 257) but is that a correct assessment? Little allowance has usually been made for discontinuity in Milton's views in spite of the terrible blow that the failure of the revolution was to him. His views on revolutionary violence were confident in the 1640s and 1650s but these are quite implausible as glosses for Samson's brutal religious heroism. Some of Milton's biographers seem almost proud that he was as stubborn, inflexible, and unchanging as they make him out to be. The evidence for such a characterization is scarce and much depends on what we make of his last poems. Most attempts to relate the views and experiences dramatized in these poems to their authorial context have given us a more static or homogeneous or linear narrative than that which will appear in the following pages. Milton, too, changed greatly as he grew old in disappointment. What we make of+++++++s central to our understanding of that subject.

Chapter Two

Intertextuality, Indirection, and Indeterminacy

nos quoque has apes debemus imitari et quaecumque ex diversa lectione congessimus, separare, melius enim distincta servantur, deinde adhibita ingenii nostri cura et facultate in unum saporem varia ilia libamenta confundere, ut etiam si apparuerit, unde sumptum sit, aliud tamen esse quam unde sumptum est appareat.1 Seneca, Ad Lucilium: Epistulae Morales Ep. Ixxiv. 2:278

He was alone when he wrote and he was not alone then, all these voices sang, the same words, golden apples, different words in different places, an Irish castle, an unseen cottage, elastic-walled and grey round blind eyes. There are readings - of the same text ... that hear a rustling of unheard sound+s. AS. Byatt, Possession 511-12

It is a frustrating experience to search Milton's writings after 1660 for a clear, unequivocal comment on Samson, a remark which will tell us what he thought late in his life of that hero's achievement as the scourge of the Philistines. How is the Christian to use the biblical story of a hero of faith? What moral guidance does it offer?+Samson Agonistes was Milton's daring, and only, attempt to equal, if not overgo, the great tragedians of antiquity. So, surely, after completing Paradise Lost, he must often have reflected on the meaning of Samson's achievement, the morality or even effectiveness of political violence, its place in the life of a Christian saint. Samson was a saint and a hero of faith, but Michael had told Adam that there was a great deal he must add to faith:

28 'Exiled from Light' Add virtue, patience, temperance, add love, By name to come called Charity, the soul Of all the rest: then wilt thou not be loath To leave this Paradise, but shalt possess A paradise within thee, happier far. (PL 12.583-7)

What, then, did Milton think of an Old Testament character who was so far from having or knowing about a paradise within, who was so poorly equipped with temperance or charity, for instance? Even if Milton had written part of++++++years before, it is unthinkable that so consummate a craftsman could have tossed in a juvenile work with Paradise Regained as little more than padding, simply to fill out the slim volume for the printer: that he would not have fashioned it meticulously to express his latest thoughts on what mattered most to him, the right Christian life. This was his tragedy, 'the gravest, moralest, and most profitable of all other poems' (1-2), as he says in his introduction. It would be judged against those of 'Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, the three tragic poets unequalled yet by any, and the best rule to all who endeavour to write tragedy' (introduction to+++52-4). Can we miss the resonance of that 'yet'? This was the company of poets that Milton meant at least to equal. He had thought since his youth about the best possible subject for Christian tragedy. He was familiar with the Renaissance debate about whether tragedy or epic were the superior form. Aristotle had given the pre-eminence to tragedy. Now the Christian poet had made a tragedy to place beside his epic Paradise Lost and his brief epic Paradise Regained. We have no reason to believe that he was not writing to the fullest extent of his creative power or making the most serious intellectual statement he was capable of. Milton chose for his subject a figure who had meant different things to him at different times in his earlier life, one of the most ambiguous and problematic of the saints, against whose faith must be placed his womanizing, with Philistine women moreover, his uxoriousness, his garrulity, his law-breaking, his betrayal of God, and finally his suicide. Most recently, Samson had come to his mind at the moment in+Paradise Lost when Adam and Eve woke to realize their 'guilty shame' (PL 9.1058). It was the fallen, disobedient Samson whom Milton recalled, 'shorn of his strength/ of his confidence, his righteousness: a figure of sin and remorse (1062). Apart from this suggestive association, Milton was silent in his latest work about his tragic hero, strangely silent. Dramatic form more than any other literary form makes it possible

Intertextuality, Indirection, and Indeterminacy 29

for the author's own voice to be emptied out of the text. Critics have made many claims to hear the voice of the author at one point or another, whether it be Manoa or Samson or the Chorus speaking, but all these suggestions can be questioned. Cedric Brown notices the guiding, didactic force of the 'narratorial voice' in Paradise Lost, 'sometimes magisterial, sometimes Socratic, sometimes withering, sometimes charming.' The poet intervenes 'in so many obviously instructional ways'; 'some of them direct, like the many judgemental, ironic, or impassioned asides, blatant pieces of didacticism in the narrator-reader relationship; other guiding devices are less direct' (156). In the drama there is none of this. There is almost no guidance in the paratext. Even the 'Agonistes' of the title is problematic: does this refer to Samson fighting the good agon or is it meant to indicate simply the unredeemed sinner, 'there the second time,' having learned nothing? So, to a reader searching for Milton's opinion of a figure who must have loomed large in his own consciousness and one who was so enigmatic and contradictory in Christian tradition, the writer seems almost perversely and obstinately silent. There are many moments in the later work when Samson might naturally have been referred to: for instance, in++++++++++++++when Milton is discussing the magistrate's powers and the protection of religion (CP 6:794-9), violence and vengeance on the enemies of the Church (754-5), or war on the ungodly (802-4), or good temptations (337-40), or justifiable lies (759-64) or suicide (719). Nor is he mentioned, on the other hand, when Milton lists penitents who were unregenerate, such as Cain, Esau, and Judas (458). He alludes to Hebrews when he mentions the first three names in the order listed there, Abel, Enoch, and Noah, 'illustrious men who lived under the law' (475), and Hebrews is his authority when he discusses implicit faith in the harlot Rahab (475, 472). His silence about Samson may suggest a determination to leave his dramatic poem to speak for itself, by calculation ambiguous and enigmatic. The dramatic text he has fashioned is highly 'scriptible.' Before the Restoration, of course, Milton had made a number of references to Samson, but we cannot treat them as comments on the Samson in his play. It is likely, as we shall see later, that Milton's views changed with the failure of the revolution and that our misreading of this play has obscured our understanding of that change. In fact, those earlier references show how differently he thought about Samson at different times. In a sense, they show him being manipulated by the complex intertext of the traditional Samson narrative. Laurent Jenny

30 'Exiled from Light'

has described the Renaissance, like the early twentieth century, as a particularly interesting period for the student of intertextuality. As he says, 'le dogme de 1'imitation propre a la Renaissance est aussi une invite a une lecture double des textes et au dechiffrage de leur rapport intertextuel avec le modele antique. Les modes de lecture de chaque epoque sont done aussi inscrits dans leurs modes d'ecriture' (258-9).2 Samson Agonistes++peaks to a vast intertext of classical, biblical, and Renaissance pre-texts and hypo-texts. Wittreich shows that 'Milton's poems are always a plurality of other texts, which help to unravel their significance; their intertextuality, whether overt or covert, provides access to their meaning' (Interpreting SA 330; see 329-34). If Milton had commented on his hero in 1671, would he have spoken of him as the champion of God, as we would infer from Hebrews, or as an imp of Satan, as has been argued? Would he have described his achievement as a triumph of Christian morality, perhaps typifying Christ's redemptive death, or as a sinful, presumptuous, self-indulgent orgy of vengeful violence? The author's voice is silent, but there are signs and coded allusions in the intertextual space in which the play is written that are suggestive. As we shall see, attention to its intertextuality reveals in Samson not this or that interpretation but a sustained multivalency held poised as it were in delicate suspension. It offers the reader unanswered and unanswerable questions. It enacts the problems encountered by the Christian in reading the Word of God, when that Word raises questions and uncertainties that are not clarified by the silent, Divine Author. Especially it enacts the problems that must be faced if a biblical figure other than Christ is used as a model for Christian imitation, as the Samson-figure was used politically by both sides during the English Revolution. Criticism of Samson Agonistes in the last three decades has been predominantly contextual as scholars have tried to find a location for it in the geography of Milton's work; some have laboured to recuperate in it what others have found intolerable. Most readers have tried to achieve a simple linear resolution of its multivalent ambiguities. Few have indicated the problem of textuality as honestly and revealingly as John Ulreich, who exclaims: 'Is Samson Agonistes a demonic parody of the Apocalypse? Or is Samson the antitype, the Word made flesh, of which Samson's holocaust is the type? I am not sure that this choice can be determined from the evidence of the play' ('Beyond' 313; emphasis added). Postmodern theorists have shown something less than interest in the function of the 'author' for reasons justified by their own premisses. However, even if a text is thought of as no more than a series of codes,

Intertextuality, Indirection, and Indeterminacy 31

the activity of the encoder can be plotted, and sometimes it deserves and rewards scrutiny. Linda Hutcheon may only be interested in the strategies a text exhibits but she admits that 'someone obviously had to place those strategies in the text' (234). Although Roland Barthes reduces the author's contribution 'to mix[ing] writings/ that is itself an interesting activity ('Death' 146). Every act of selection - of genre, sentence, word - by the author implies an act of criticism. As Michael Riffaterre states, '[t]he literary representation of reality, then, for all its objectifying stance, is essentially an interpretive discourse ... In sum, intertextuality cannot avoid being hermeneutic' ('Intertextual' 159-60). Milton, working skilfully within a poetics of imitation, is a writer with a particularly sensitive intertextual awareness. Few works are better examples than is+++++++++++++++++++ Jenny's affirmation: Tintertex designe non pas une addition confuse et mysterieuse d'influences, mais le travail de transformation et d'assimilation de plusieurs textes opere par un texte centreur qui garde le leadership du sens' (262).3 Late in the play, the Chorus celebrates Samson's destruction of the Philistines in words that will serve to illustrate not only the intertextual density of Milton's poetic language but also the delicately controlled authorial indirection which we must recognize if we are to understand his meaning: With inward eyes illuminated His fiery virtue roused From under ashes into sudden flame, And as an evening dragon came, Assailant on the perched roosts, And nests in order ranged Of tame villatic fowl (1689-95)

Modern scholarship has tried to assess the seventeenth-century reader's response to the Chorus's conception of 'virtue.' Should the reader accept or reject the Chorus's idea of Virtue' as a sound Christian one? It is fair to say that we cannot decide from the text alone. This what I meant when I spoke in the last chapter of uncertainty about the 'status' or 'authority' of characters and speeches in this play. I spoke also of disagreement about the reliability of the Chorus as commentator or interpreter. Virtue is a word that acts in Milton's poems like an intertextual signpost. It works through the fiction and is itself an act of fiction, silently revealing the ideological values and limitations in the consciousness of its user. The author seldom intervenes to indicate

32 'Exiled from Light'

where the sign directs us. When Satan in++++++++++upbraids the fallen angels for reposing their 'wearied virtue' abjectly (1.320), it reveals Satan's, not Milton's, idea of virtue. The word is devoid of the Christian significance it has when used by the narrator of the sinners Adam and Eve 'destitute and bare/Of all their virtue' (9.1063). Sometimes, what looks at first like authorial indication is nonetheless fictional, as in 'philosophic pride,/By him called virtue' (4.300-1); the commentator here is ideologically perfect, for it is 'our Saviour' in Paradise Regained evaluating the Stoic (285). However, Satan's intellective limitations are revealed when, misconceiving God's nature, he speculates, '[w]hether such virtue spent of old now failed /More angels to create' (PL 9.145-6). While Eve's pre-lapsarian wisdom is undefiled, she can play subtly with the word's meanings of 'power' and 'goodness': 'Fruitless to me, though fruit be here to excess,/The credit of whose virtue rest with thee' (9.648-9); but, yielding to her tempter, she sadly mistakes the nature of the fruit and of virtue: 'Fair to the eye, inviting to the taste,/Of virtue to make wise' (777-8). In each quoted instance, the author is silent about his own view of virtue, and the context controls and reveals the meaning. The reader is the accomplice of the writer, and meaning works through that unspoken understanding between writer and reader which is the essence of irony. In The History of Britain, for instance, when Milton does not need this ironic complicity, poetic compression, and aloofness, he is often more directly didactic: 'Lies and falsities, and such as could best invent them, were only in request. Evil was embrac'd for good, wickedness honour'd and esteem'd as virtue' (CP 5:139). However, in the prose too virtue may be seen as ambiguous or misconceived. '[FJugitive and cloister'd,' it may be 'but a blank vertue, not a pure; her whitenesse ... but an excrementall whitenesse' (CP 2:515-16). Justice, failing to perform its more dangerous duties, 'were not Justice, but a fals counterfet of that impartial and Godlike vertue' (CP 3:346). If we return to the Chorus in Samson, we may notice that the rejoicing of the Danites recalls another response in Milton's poetry to horrifying destruction. Sin congratulates Satan on his 'magnific deeds' (PL 10.354): Thou hast achieved our liberty ... Thine now is all this world, thy virtue hath won ... thy wisdom gained With odds what war hath lost, and fully avenged Our foil in heaven (368-75)

Intertextuality, Indirection, and Indeterminacy 33

They proceed to 'destroy' (611), 'waste and havoc' (617). The similarities in the two situations, that is, the intertextual implications, are disturbing for those who would believe that the voice of the Chorus is anything like the voice of Milton. Rationalizing self-interest, in both cases, distorts the analysis of events. Victory, honour, and liberty are wrongly conceived of. Destruction is made to serve as a measure of success. The echoes are amplified in the dragon image. Samson's 'virtue' is 'fiery' (1690). This is a pre-Christian 'virtus' - or physical might ravaging the nests of 'tame villatic fowl' (1695). The image does, indeed, call to mind the serpent in the way of the Lord in Genesis, but what is its relevance to one who died a saint of the Lord? I am not suggesting that we are to read Samson's morality as 'satanic/ but the intertextual echoes warn us that it is, at least, disturbing. Samson keeps some ugly company. Christopher Hill, we have seen, dismisses Irene Samuel's reading of the play as distorted by 'a modern liberal Christianity which [Milton] did not share' (MER 444), but this is to ignore the intertext of the play. It is Sin who misconceives destructiveness as virtue. It is not impossible then that the Chorus also misconceives the nature of virtue as, by Christian standards, its Judaic members very well might. Is it not also possible that they are fashioned to act out a fictional Judaic consciousness as seen by a Christian? This may seem to be obvious in a chorus of Israelites living at the time of Judges, but that is not how their attitudes have been read by many who have claimed to see a Christian ethic in the play's personae. The author is silent. He has left us with indirection, an indeterminate rather than a clear moral conclusion, knowing that other texts will speak to this text. The deep disagreements among scholars and critics, who often flatly contradict one another about every important element in the play, suggest that Milton has failed hopelessly to communicate its meaning. Another possibility is that the indirection is controlled and deliberate. Sometimes an intertextual echo clearly reveals the author working at this. The Chorus rejoices in Samson's self-confident strength: O how comely it is and how reviving To the spirits of just men long oppressed! When God into the hands of their deliverer Puts invincible might To quell the mighty of the earth, the oppressor

(1268-72)

Manoa also speaks of Samson's being 'invincible' (341), although it is with the bitter realization of defeated hope. Joseph Wittreich has ar-

34 'Exiled from Light'

gued from other texts that 'invincibility is an attribute only of Godhead' (249), and human boasts about invincibility are more indicative of intractability and pig-headedness. Manoa and the Chorus are wrong in the way they think about invincibility. A Treatise of Civil Power contains an intertextual gloss on Samson's outmoded, pre-Christian ethic: 'Force is no honest confutation; but uneffectual, and for the most part unsuccessfull, oft times fatal to them who use it' (CP 7:261-2). We will look more carefully later at the complex question of Milton's attitude to political violence. In the field of listening to+++++++o paraphrase Barthes - meaning comes sometimes from glimmerings, sometimes from eclats, penetrating blows from other scenes. Characteristic of the poetic language in the play is a condition of misconception: concepts that have a certain significance in Christian theology are understood differently by the fictional Judaic characters, concepts such as+edemption, bondage, deliverance, ransom, victory, or freedom. It is as if the intertext available to the users of these words in the play excludes a large portion of the intertext available for a later reader to consult. C.A. Patrides contemplates the impossibility that sealed eyes such as Manoa's can ever be made to see. A prisoner of his senses, Manoa credits only what he can see or touch or feel, whether in commending the 'friends' in the Chorus who are in fact Samson's most dangerous enemies, or in prosecuting his plan to free his son through 'ransom' - the very word which, in its theological context, pertains solely to the redemption of man by God ... and as his blindness persists, he voices Milton's crowning instance of dramatic irony in the play by asking that the 'heroic' Samson be carried to 'his father's house' (1. 1733). But 'heroism' involves much more than the slaughter of one's enemies, just as 'Father' has more than the single point of reference upheld by Manoa. (Figures 243)

Michael Riffaterre in a passage of analysis describes the effect of certain words as being that of 'signs which have the primary function, at the level of significance, of telling the reader there is a latent intertext at work. These connectors work by triggering presuppositions, by compelling the reader to recognize that the text makes sense only by reference to meanings found neither within the verbal context nor within the author's idiolect but within an intertext' ('Intertextual' 148). This is precisely what happens when Judaic characters in the play use terms in a limited Judaic sense and are unaware of their meaning in a Christian intertext.

Intertextuality, Indirection, and Indeterminacy 35 The reference of Samson's poignant lament at his blindness is particularly complex. Riffaterre's analysis helps us to understand how Milton communicates meaning. Here we see how the writer controls the intertextual reference with great care but also with a calculated evasiveness or indirection: Light the prime work of God to me is extinct, And all her various objects of delight Annulled, which might in part my grief have eased, Inferior to the vilest now become Of man or worm; the vilest here excel me, They creep yet see, I dark in light exposed To daily fraud, contempt, abuse and wrong, Within doors, or without, still as a fool, In power of others, never in my own; Scarce half I seem to live, dead more than half. O dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon, Irrecoverably dark, total eclipse Without all hope of day! O first-created beam, and thou great word, Let there be light, and light was over all; Why am I thus bereaved thy prime decree? Since light so necessary is to life, And almost life itself, if it be true That light is in the soul (70-92) The intertextual reference here works quite differently from that in the great invocation in Paradise Lost, with its entirely Christian allusions to the light of the Son: Hail, holy Light, offspring of heaven first-born, Or of the eternal co-eternal beam May I express thee unblamed? since God is Light, And never but in unapproached light Dwelt from eternity, dwelt then in thee Bright effluence of bright essence increate. (3.1-6) In the case of Samson, the pre-text of his anguished cry is Genesis 1:2-4, which he quotes consciously: 'And the earth was without form, and void: and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of

36 'Exiled from Light'

God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that+t was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.' However, there is meaning in the space between Samson's intertext and that of Milton's reader. Samson, of course, is unconscious of the Christian material that forms the intertext of the epic invocation, but someone reading the fictional Samson's words must read them in the context of the Christian Gospel, commentary, sermon, and allusion, including prominently the words that begin the Gospel of St John: IN the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God ... In him was life; and the life was the light of men. And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not... That was the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world. He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not. He came unto his own, and his own received him not. But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God,++++o them that believe on his name ... And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth ... And of his fulness have all we received, and grace for grace. For the law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ. (1:1-17)

Samson is consciously quoting Genesis but Milton makes him unconsciously echo John. The 'connectors' evoke presuppositions in the modern reader which are not available to Samson. The allusion focuses our attention on Samson's profound incomprehension of John and his Christian message. Samson is 'exiled from light' (98). Milton's subtle manipulation of the intertext is worth exploring carefully. It reveals Samson (man of faith, no doubt) as a dramatic exemplum of a moral consciousness that is honest but flawed, morally flawed through ignorance of the example and teaching of John's Christ Incarnate in time. Samson, in physical and moral darkness, cannot know the light and the Incarnation of the Word that will come centuries later and teach an ethic so different from Samson's ethic of strength and destruction. That Word will teach a word Samson does not mention: 'charity.' Milton's emphasis is not on Samson as type of Christ or triumphant champion of God. If the focus were on Samson in these traditional roles, he would be a suitable model for Christian imitation. The

Intertextuality, Indirection, and Indeterminacy 37

intertextual connectors are not clear. As Heinrich Plett writes, "The receiver, i.e. the listener or reader, who comes across a quotation text, may either notice the quotations or he may not. If he overlooks them, the text misses its purpose which consists in opening up dialogues between pre-texts and quotation texts. The culprit for such an aesthetic failure cannot easily be identified. Part of the responsibility lies with the author who should feel obliged to supply the quotations with markers' (306-7). That may be so, but it may be in the interest of the author to avoid precise or unambiguous markers, to be evasive, to be discreet, to be delicately suggestive rather than clear and positive. Here the effect seems to be one of calculated indirection. If Milton had intended a typological reading, for instance, the markers could easily have been supplied, as they were elsewhere: ... informing them, by types And shadows, of that destined seed to bruise The serpent, by what means he shall achieve Mankind's deliverance. (PL 12.232-5) And

... he grants what they besought Instructed that to God is no access Without mediator, whose high office now Moses in figure bears, to introduce One greater, of whose day he shall foretell

(238^42)

Here, he was not working simply within the typological tradition of biblical hermeneutics to present Samson as a type of Christ. However, he was certainly conscious of that important element in the intertext that supplied yet another voice to suggest a meaning for the+Samson text. So, dramatic form makes it easier for the author to silence his own voice and to exclude the voice of any privileged, authoritative moral commentator, such as we hear in the epics. Any evaluation or even narrative framing that occurs must be done by the fictional dramatic characters, and all their judgments, assessments, and moral comments are, it follows, subject to error. Indeed, I have suggested that the author makes an effort to present them from the start as being morally and

38 'Exiled from Light'

intellectually flawed. I will need to return to this point in a later chapter. The author's indirection has an important effect. It makes it more difficult to decipher the code, difficult to read the moral significance of the text. What this does is to mime the Christian's difficulty in reading the significance of its great pre-text, the Bible. Milton's tragedy actually enacts the problem of reading the Word of God, itself enmeshed in a formidable network of echoes, glosses, cruxes, and obfuscations. Sometimes the meaning of a passage in the Bible is quite clear, as it is when A Letter to Hebrews contextualizes Judges and affirms Samson's status as a hero of faith. Yet that letter insists on the differences between the Law and the Gospel: it praises those who died in faith but adds 'And these all, having received a good report through faith, received not the promise: God having provided some better thing for us, that they without us should not be made perfect' (11:39-40); in the words of the New English Bible: '[t]hese also, one and all, are commemorated for their faith; and yet they did not enter upon the promised inheritance, because with us in mind, God had made a better plan, that only in company with us should they reach their perfection'++++++++++++++++++++114-15; see notes). How then should Christians, read the Samson story? Should Christians be meek, turn the other cheek and reject the power of this earth as Christ does in Paradise Regained, or should they admire this Old Testament hero and revere him as a model, with his violence and brawling destructiveness? Christopher Hill for one is quite certain that Milton's Samson is offered unambiguously as a role model for contemporaries who hated the enemies of God, namely the Caroline monarchists (Defeat 310-19). Is Samson really an example of Christian strength in weakness, or instead of the un-Christian misuse of deadly force? The ambiguous Samson tradition had manipulated Milton himself over the years. Before the Revolution, he had treated Samson as a praiseworthy figure, but had identified the 'mighty Nazarite' with the king whom he praises for his 'noble strength and perfection' while he has the laws waving about his 'god like shoulders' unshorn by the prelates with their 'strumpet flatteries' (CP 1:858-9). In Areopagitica he had caressed the English people by allusively comparing them, 'a noble and puissant Nation,' to Samson rising in his strength (CP 2:558). In+Eikonoklastes Samson came to his mind as a figure of degradation, again like the king but now powerless, blinded, abused, and scorned (CP 3:461, 545-6). Later, in the+++++++++++Samson was cited as a heroic liberator, a godly destroyer of tyrants and overlords (CP 4:1.402). Finally, as we have seen, it was Samson as sinner, shorn of his strength, whom the

Intertextuality, Indirection, and Indeterminacy 39

writer recollected at the moment when fallen Adam and Eve awaken with darkened minds to guilt, shame, and remorse. Years after the Revolution had collapsed, words Milton had written earlier as he gloated over military and political triumph could be thrown back at him in mockery.4 The same material success that he boasted was a sign of God's approval had shifted to the enemy. After 1660, with the machinery of earthly justice securely in the hands of the monarchists, and surrounded by the ruined remnants of victories won by physical resistance, the revolutionaries had to cope with disillusionment, not only about their vanished achievements but about their very aims and their methods. Hill describes very well their mood at this time: 'How could the God who willed 1649 also will 1660? And how could he sacrifice his servants then even if others had let down his Cause? Men had believed that their cause was invincible because it was God's. The defeat therefore called in question either God's goodness or his omnipotence, or their understanding of God's will... "The Lord had blasted them and spit in their faces," wailed Major-General Fleetwood'+++efeat 307). The revolutionaries' understanding of what constituted right heroic behaviour in the service of God appeared to have been mistaken. For many revolutionaries, Samson had symbolized the Good Old Cause and the New Model Army. Samson was now used by the monarchists as an image of Charles II, returning in vengeance. Those revolutionaries must reread the text of the Samson story and remember, perhaps, that he had achieved nothing for the deliverance of Israel. Hill has suggested that, 'whilst others adapted to the experience of defeat, Milton ... knew there must be a way forward again' (Defeat 317). Perhaps, but we certainly do not know this. Also: '[i]f Samson had died in vain, the doubts about God's justice expressed at the beginning of the play would have been justified'++++++318). Quite a strong argument could be made that, in a sense, he did die in vain, but why would that justify the grumblers' doubts about God's justice? We shall see later that they are wrong about most things, anyway. How competent were their blundering assessments about God's 'unsearchable dispose' (SA 1746)? We must return later to Milton's own attempt to cope with defeat, most importantly in the final chapter. The deeply ambiguous nature of this poem, produced when revolutionary violence had proved to be futile, can best be appreciated if we are sensitive to the cracks and interstices in the intertext. We have noticed that one of the most important cruxes in the text is the moment when Samson suddenly reverses his refusal to go to the temple of

40 'Exiled from Light'

Dagon, indicating to his Israelite companions that he is impelled by God to do so. 'I begin to feel/Some rousing motions in me which dispose / To something extraordinary my thoughts' (1381-3). Many read this simply as a divine sanction for Samson's destruction of the Philistine temple, seeing God's impulse moving his champion to heroic Christian action. Wittreich, however, with his very different reading, shows how unconvincing the textual evidence is for this: 'Samson's last act is left ambiguous, deliberately so ... Milton's poem is not about Samson's regeneration but, instead, about his second fall' (Interpreting SA+80). Again, at a crucial moment, we see the problem indicated by Ulreich earlier of the difficulty of understanding this play from a reading of the text alone. In fact, the word 'motions,' with its implied claim to divine impulsion or inner light, is a word that should explode in the reader's mind with a polyvalent clamour of contradictory voices. It is an especially vivid example of poetic language which fractures and slides around a complex network of meaning; in Julia Kristeva's words, 'en effritant ainsi... le langage poetique met en proces le sujet a travers un reseau de marques et de frayages semiotiques' (58).5 There has been so much disagreement among scholars about the significance of these 'motions' and the intertext is so interesting that I will return to examine it in more detail towards the end of chapter 7. By 1660, a multitudinous host of fools, charlatans, and fanatics had claimed divine impulsion for their excesses and seemingly blasphemous and outrageous behaviour. Knowing the truth of another human being's claim to have been motioned by God was entirely problematic. The word 'motions' here is a syllepsis. Riffaterre explains Derrida's use of the term: syllepsis consists in the understanding of the same word in two different ways at once, as++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ textual meaning is that demanded by the word's grammatical collocations, by the word's reference to other words in the text. The intertextual meaning is another meaning the word may possibly have, one of its dictionary meanings and/or one actualized within an intertext. In either case, this intertextual meaning is incompatible with the context and pointless within the text, but it still operates as a second reference - this one to the intertext. ('Syllepsis' 637-8)

And he adds: 'undecidability can exist only within a text; it is resolved by the interdependence between two texts.' 'Motions' is sylleptic here

Intertextuality, Indirection, and Indeterminacy 41

as Virtue' and 'light' were seen to be earlier. Undecidability is what the author here fashions for the reader. It is mimetic of the ambiguity any individual must cope with when probing the conscience of any other. By the end of the Puritan revolution, the most partisan of believers were forced to reflect ruefully on the claims of those who insisted they had been motioned by God. It is difficult to know God working in oneself, let alone in another, and in this too++++++++++++++++++++ ambivalences of human understanding. Milton harshly condemns hypocrites who pretend that they have been moved by the Spirit. His sylleptic use of 'motions' reminds the reader of all the mountebanks and pseudo-prophets who had claimed to be led by divine impulse. Samson himself had been baffled by his own experience of being motioned and what that meant for future decision-making. He believed God had motioned him with intimate impulse to marry the woman of Timna. That whole episode had been a humiliating failure. Milton had certainly been unsure of of the provenance of Samson's motions: 'whether prompted by God or by his own valor, [he] slew at one stroke not one but a host of his country's tyrants, having first made prayer to God for his aid' (CP 4:1.402). It is difficult to read God's signs in one's own mind. It is profoundly difficult to read God's text, given its baffling intertextuality. The meaning of++++++++++++++s located in an intertextual space that had already been frequently intercrossed when the latest narrator in Judges reworked a story that had come out of a trackless antiquity of sacrificial sun-heroes and springtime renewal. It has been endlessly overwritten since then by centuries of exegesis, allusion, citation, liturgical juxtaposition, and reconstruction. The space Milton worked in was full of queries, contradictions, flickerings of meaning, echoes, questions, whispered doubts, and noisy contradictions: 'un echange chatoyant de voix multiples, posees sur des ondes differentes et saisies par moments d'un fading brusque, dont la trouee permet a 1'enonciation de migrer d'un point de vue a 1'autre sans prevenir' (Barthes, S/Z 49).6 We looked in the first chapter at the hugely different responses the text has evoked in its readers. Each reader seems to have selected a pattern from a mosaic that contains many other patterns. However, the 'meaning' may deliberately include many of the patterns. The truth may be that the author is not trying to underline one possible meaning for the behaviour of his protagonist but that he is co-operating with the intertextual multiplicity of possible motivations for behaviour and possible divine judgments on the actions and sayings of Samson and his

42 'Exiled from Light'

companions. He refrains from comment or direction for the reader. Dramatic form allows the writer conveniently to withdraw from the fictional scene. The text has been shaped to allow for many possible responses: 'Le propre de 1'intertextualite est d'introduire a un nouveau mode de lecture qui fait eclater la linearite du texte... etoilant le texte de bifurcations qui en ouvrent peu a peu 1'espace semantique' (Jenny 266)7 Milton exploits this. The outcome is a play that is a practical demonstration of the hermeneutics of uncertainty, the uncertainty with which Milton late in life reads the story of Samson. The imitation of a biblical pre-text has especially interesting implications in the Christian poetics of imitation. There were compelling constraints on the poet-maker that were quite different from those controlling the retelling of a fictional story or the fictionalization of a historical event. The seventeenth-century Christian reader could not treat a biblical hypo-text as simply fictional or historical. It had an absolute factual validity that the 'truth' of human history did not have in a sinful, doomed world in which the evidence of the senses is misleading, specious, illusory. The main pre-text, in Judges, sets up certain expectations because of the force of scriptural sanctions: Samson is a Nazarite, he is sacred to God, there are angelic predictions about his future achievements, his strength is above human and its mysterious location in his hair indicates divine intervention, especially when it is restored. The implications of the story for a seventeenth-century Christian are worth examining. They were particularly relevant in the case of the revolutionary who believed it was possible to establish Christ's kingdom on earth by force in 1650 but who turned away from force, as the Quakers did, to a spiritualization of hope after 1660, when most revolutionary optimism died. The presuppositions in the minds of such readers were richly contradictory and have been well set out by P.M. Krouse and Joseph A. Wittreich, as we saw in the preceding chapter. Krouse amasses commentaries over the centuries that lead him to emphasize 'Samson's zealous heroism, his confidence in his calling as a champion of God, and his readiness as a saint to endure dark captivity with patience and suffer martyrdom with fortitude' (Tradition 99n). Wittreich stresses evidence that the significance of Samson in the seventeenth century grows 'increasingly ambiguous. Once regarded as a plague to the uncircumcized, Samson now appears to be a plague to his own people. His story, previously cast as a saint's life, continues to figure in such literature, but now to mark the fall and mortification of various saints, not their recovery and exaltation+++++++++++++82-3). How is one to read the biblical text?

Intertextuality, Indirection, and Indeterminacy 43

Now, the intersection of the scriptural intertext with the richly varied intertext of Christian tradition has an interesting consequence. The affirmation in Hebrews that Samson is a hero of 'faith' has, as we have seen, absolute, divinely underwritten validity (Dickson 207, cols.+1,2). What is not clear is how much of Samson's behaviour met with divine approval. Much of even a believer's behaviour could be sinful and indefensible, but which aspects precisely? The intertextual force of the tradition is that almost any aspect of this behaviour, except Samson's faith in his final moments, might be read as sinful, even at times verging on the satanic or demonic. The writer might intervene to exclude possible traditional interpretations but Milton does not. He submits to the intertextual contradictions and even intensifies them. It is strange that there are people who look on Milton as a thinker who deals only in simple certainties. He was always conscious of the complexity of human motivation, not least the motivation of those who attempt to act as God wishes: 'with what safety can the Remonstrant rely upon the Martyrs as Patrons of his cause, when as any of those who are alleg'd for the approvers of our Liturgy or Prelaty might have bin though not in a wrong cause Martyrs, yet whether not vainly ambitious of that honour, or whether not misreported, or misunderstood, in those their opinions God only knowes' (CP 1:912). God only knows the truth about Samson. In the dying moments of the Revolution, Milton went into hiding. He came close to being excluded from indemnity and he was imprisoned until he endured the humiliation of suing for the king's pardon and 'paying his fees' (Masson 6:194). Frank Kermode imagines the degradation and self-disgust Milton must have felt at this: 'the sense of a vocation or an allegiance betrayed ... Confident of his election, he could explain all his actions and all his sufferings; except, perhaps, his submission to the authority of Charles II. This was a violation of his own purity, and could well have seemed likely to be the worst of his pains' (517,528). Many scholars have studied Milton's Christian Doctrine looking for exhortations to a violent and militant Christianity. What they have not given enough emphasis to are the many reservations there hedging about the use of violence, the exhortations to peaceful persuasion, to teaching in preference to force. Christ in Paradise Regained held it more humane, more heavenly first By winning words to conquer willing hearts, And make persuasion do the work of fear; At least to try (1.221-4)

44 'Exiled from Light'

Is Samson's political violence and bloody vengefulness, then, admirable or misguided? John T. Shawcross expresses frustration at 'the uselessness of such action... the evil which hope becomes in man... a sense of waste, of the meaninglessness of good' ('Irony' 304). Yet, there still is the complexity and the ambiguity of the Samson-figure to consider. I have been emphasizing the negative, dark side of this hero under the Law because it is the side that is so often suppressed or overlooked but then there is also the hero of faith, the zealous servant of God who searches for a way to serve God and be beloved by him. For one sin, he seems to be cast aside, enslaved and degraded. God seems to reject him and is silent. 'By how much from the top of wondrous glory, / Strongest of mortal men, / To lowest pitch of abject fortune thou art fallen' (1679). For all his penitence, Samson does not receive the consolation that Adam soon receives. Strangely, he does have a sign - the return of his supernatural strength - but somehow is unable to see it as a sign of God's favour. His sense of guilt and shame and his blindness make him a figure of pity, in some ways like Oedipus at the end of his day of horror. Like Oedipus, he finds his blindness is almost a comfort and shield from worse suffering: 'had I sight, confused with shame, / How could I once look up, or heave the head' (196-7). Like Job, he must suffer. There is no ease for his mind with its 'restless thoughts' which torment him 'like a deadly swarm / Of hornets armed' (19-20). His blindness is more than a physical deprivation. The darkness of the sun is 'silent as the moon' (87). The resonance of the epithet is uncanny in English: it suggests that total alienation of the death-in-life that he is experiencing in his exile from light, '[s]ince light so necessary is to life' (90). Faithful, he is alone and unsupported when he checks the impulse to blame God: 'Yet stay, let me not rashly call in doubt / Divine prediction' (43-4). The constancy of his faith is admirable, given the severity of his loss and his humiliation. He checks his father: Appoint not heavenly disposition, father, Nothing of all these evils hath befallen me But justly; I myself have brought them on, Sole author I, sole cause (373-6)

The only hope that relieves him is an unthinking, unreasoning certainty that God will 'arise and his great name assert' (467). He still hopes for the final pardon of his God, '[w]hose ear is ever open' (1172). He trusts. There is an antique nobility about his resolution as he goes to the death

Intertextuality, Indirection, and Indeterminacy 45

which he offers to his God, whom he is zealous to praise and honour: 'I am content to go' (1403). Milton may have known and admired heroes of faith like Samson who went to their deaths under Cromwell to liberate God's England from the Philistine Charles I. After the Restoration, he may have heard details of their execution under the Philistine Charles II and counted the cost of their sacrifice. The intertextual complexity of++++++++++++++then, vividly highlights the problems a seventeenth-century reader faced in reading the Bible itself and using it as a guide-text to moral behaviour. The rewards for reading that text were not mere earthly++++++++ut eternal joy; the punishment for inept reading was eternal perdition. So the problems were significant: the choice might be sin or salvation. Those problems are integral to the meaning of the poem. Possible meanings intercross in the space on which Samson is written, but the writer's voice is silent and he points to no one of these paths. In a sense,++++++++++++s about the nature of reading itself and it is about the meaning of meaning. As Laurent Jenny says, in spite of all the records of historians, 'le site de la bataille reste introuvable. C'est que precisement, dans 1'ecriture, 1'evenement reste insituable, il se derobe, on n'en a que des versions' (280-1).8 Milton had lived through a violent revolution. He had favoured its cause and had supported its methods, proudly justifying its most violent climactic act. His Old Testament Book of Truth presented him with a history of slaughter and destruction. By 1671, he no longer read it with the old confidence of the justified. The text was clear about the important things in a Christian's relationship with God and humanity. It was clear on the most important articles of faith. In this matter, however, it was ambivalent and indeterminate. Should one imitate a hero of faith in fighting tyranny and evil? Milton turns to tragedy to imitate and, indeed, re-enact the mystery of the divine ordering of the universe, 'the unsearchable dispose' (SA 1746) of omnipotence and omniscience shaping post-Adamic history.

Chapter Three

Fictional Consciousness and the Author's Voice

So+as he goeth hand in hand with nature, not enclosed within the narrow warrant of her gifts, but freely ranging only within the zodiac of his own wit... [these] be they which most properly do imitate to teach and delight, and to imitate borrow nothing of what is, hath been, or shall be; but range, only reined with learned discretion, into the divine consideration of what may be and should be. Sir Philip Sidney, The Defence of Poesy 216, 218

Let us turn now from Milton's subtle management of language to his shaping of fiction as he reworked what he found in his biblical pre-text. Milton's play dramatizes a fictional Old Testament consciousness in all its personages. This is shown to be different, even in a morally committed individual, from the consciousness made possible by the full Revelation of the Gospel and by the instructive example of Christ's incarnate life in time. In the last chapter, we looked at Milton's use of syllepsis and intertextual allusiveness to indicate this. W.G. Madsen pointed out years ago that Milton 'is concerned with measuring the distance between the various levels of awareness ... possible to those living under the old dispensation and the level of awareness revealed by Christ in Paradise+Regained'+(198). The implications of this have often been forgo ten in orthodox readings which sometimes seem to begin with the premise that Samson is a saint and then proceed to interpret the whole play as an exploration of saintliness, structured to reveal spiritual growth and heroic Christianity. But when Samson quits himself like Samson, what matters most, I hope to show, is that he is not like Christ. Most orthodox interpretations of+++++++++++++are 'contextualist':

Fictional Consciousness and the Author's Voice 47

textual analysis is supported (or even controlled) by illustration from a relevant context of ideas. I introduced such readings in chapter 1. The context may be socio-historical or it may be theological: typological exegesis, Reformation casuistry, Talmudic and Rabbinic commentary. Mary Ann Radzinowicz calls her approach 'author-contextual'+(Toward SA xiii). Contextualist critics throw light on ambiguous or crucial moments in the text from sources other than the text. Our discussion earlier showed how essential this is in this poem. As Radzinowicz reminds us, however, 'a context is not... a plate or mirror to be slipped behind a poem in order to put it into convenient focus for literary microscopy. A context is not a real entity, and none comes ready-made' (xv). Establishing a context is hermeneutic. It requires a critical choice, a decision about what in the background is relevant or illustrative. The danger is that the choice of context may import meaning into the text or force into it patterns derived irrelevantly from contexts that are alien to the text. The tradition of 'autobiographical' interpretation of++++++is an obvious instance. The various modes in which this reappears were also discussed in chapter 1. What a great deal of writing about this play has done is to put in question what is fundamental to the mode of Renaissance poetics:+ut pictura poesis. It is always dangerous to assume that anyone writing poetry before about 1800 is not practising the craft of 'feigning notable images.' The T of even a satiric poet, like Pope, may be that of a rhetorical persona. As Milton reminds us in the epigraph to his play and also in the preface, this is a mimesis, an imitation. It is not a tract or a sermon or a revolutionary pamphlet. Having, as we do, so much of Milton's thought expressed in his own voice, as it were, most readers of Samson Agonistes have been tempted to trace what appear to be echoes of this voice in the words of his dramatic characters; the enormous difficulty of doing so with certainty has already been touched on. In the process of placing the play in its supposed context, we have often failed to appreciate the workings of the fiction - the extent to which a statement is the product of a fictional consciousness rather than the opinion of the dramatist himself. Milton's skill and sensitivity as a creator of fiction have been underestimated by some scholars who believe they have recognized his own voice among the fictional voices on stage. When Milton wrote, in+++++++++about decorum in dramatic dialogue, seventeen years had passed since the young poet had written Comus. He had clearly thought much about the distance between an

48 'Exiled from Light'

author's opinions and the statements made by fictional characters. He attacked Salmasius energetically for his 'rashness and lack of judgment' in assuming that a character in a play by Aeschylus was used by the author to state his own opinion: 'we should consider not so much what the poet says, as who in the poem says it. Various figures appear, some good, some bad, some wise, some foolish, each speaking not the poet's opinions but what is appropriate for each person' (CP 4:1.439). The insistence, here, is on the detachment of the author's point of view from that of the fictional dramatis personae, a detachment which may apply to every word of dramatic dialogue in++++++++++++++We must read the text with the kind of scrupulous respect for it that Milton himself demanded of a textual analyst: 'no inferences should be made from the text, unless they follow necessarily from what is written. This precaution is necessary, otherwise we may be forced to believe something which is not written in place of something which is' (CP 6:583). In the text, Samson triumphs over his enemy with a brutality and savagery that many readers today, and also in the centuries before Milton, have found impossible to celebrate as Christian saintliness. It is worth looking carefully at how the dramatist deliberately fashions fictional plot, character, and language to emphasize the horror of Samson's violence and to alienate the reader. Manoa's attempt to ransom Samson was Milton's invention. It has been suggested that Milton was trying to indicate the old man's inability to understand God's great plan and that this sets off Samson's greater comprehension. For Krouse, this invention 'amplifies Samson's zealous heroism, his confidence in his calling as a champion of God, and his readiness as a saint to endure dark captivity with patience and suffer martyrdom with fortitude' (Tradition 99n). It is very difficult to agree. Milton's Manoa speaks with satisfaction of what he has achieved: I have attempted one by one the lords, Either at home, or through the high street passing, With supplication prone and father's tears To accept of ransom for my son their prisoner, Some much averse I found and wondrous harsh, Contemptuous, proud, set on revenge and spite; That part most reverenced Dagon and his priests, Others more moderate seeming, but their aim Private reward, for which both god and state They easily would set to sale, a third

Fictional Consciousness and the Author's Voice 49 More generous far and civil, who confessed They had enough revenged, having reduced Their foe to misery beneath their fears, The rest was magnanimity to remit, If some convenient ransom were proposed. (1457-71)

For Manoa, who is so much better able to love than Samson is, the commitment to revenge marks out the worst of the Philistines, the most 'harsh, / Contemptuous/ the most fanatically idolatrous. There is no trace of sympathy for revenge, spite, and pride. They are to be found in the most despicable of the enemy overlords. Magnanimity is identified with forgiveness, generosity, and civility. The best of the Philistines put aside revenge with embarrassed revulsion: who+++++++++They had enough revenged' (emphasis added). They even leave it generously to the old supplicant to propose whatever ransom is 'convenient.' The public officer also expects the lords to put aside revenge and set their now-forgiven enemy free (1412). Gentleness and a willingness to remit and forget, especially where there is nothing to fear, are presented as qualities to be admired, and they can even be found in the best of the Philistines. This is the precise moment Milton chooses to juxtapose with the shout that draws attention to Samson's revenge. The horror to come is preceded by an exquisite quiet moment when the reader is made to linger on the qualities of tenderness, gentleness, and love: 'It shall be my delight to tend his eyes,/And view him sitting in the house' (1490-1). Manoa comes in with 'youthful steps' (1442), greeting his friends with '[p]eace' (1445) and 'hope' (1453). 'Joy' (1505), love, 'delight' (1490), caring, nursing, friendship, and fatherly cherishing are put in our minds and they contrast with the actual horror and make it more startling. The lords who would have forgiven Samson and who were revolted by an excess of revenge were presumably among the slaughtered. The 'hideous noise' 'horribly loud' signals the destruction nearby. Radzinowicz suggests that this shows that the '"mercy of heaven'" can reside even in a '"hideous noise"++++++++++64-5). It is difficult to agree that the text suggests that. Nor is it easy to see how in slaughtering his audience Samson becomes 'the benevolent example for which Milton chose him ... a man of good works' (246). Rather, when Manoa exclaims 'Mercy of heaven/ he is mouthing the words formulaically, unthinkingly - at best mechanically invoking mercy on himself. In Samson's act, all mercy is extinguished. The reduction of 'mercy' to an

50 'Exiled from Light'

irrelevant expletive is poignantly ironical, as is its juxtaposition with a universal groan, 'As if the whole inhabitation perished, / Blood, death, and dreadful deeds are in that noise' (1512-13). Philistine forgiveness is followed swiftly by a massacre of Philistines by a Hebrew, and the fiction is shaped to emphasize the ethical choice Samson makes. Poetic language underlines that moral statement: repetition hammers home the Hebraic perception of the meaning of Samson's deed: 'A dreadful way thou took'st to thy revenge' (1591); 'O dearly-bought revenge, yet glorious!' (1660); '[Samson] on his enemies / Fully revenged, hath left them years of mourning/And lamentation' (1711-13). It is horror that the poetic language vividly communicates. The avenger's body lies 'soaked in his enemies' blood/ a mess of 'clotted gore' (1726,1728). The messenger blunders in, shocked, almost hysterical, imprisoned in a claustrophobic revulsion: O whither shall I run, or which way fly The sight of this so horrid spectacle Which erst my eyes beheld and yet behold; For dire imagination still pursues me. (1541-4)

His reason is disturbed as he tries to distance himself from 'the place of horror' (1550). It is hard also to agree that Samson's 'last act was a kind of passive resistance, attacking a building instead of the Philistines, delivering the Hebrews, as Christ delivered mankind' (Mulryan 220). Many readers have, in effect, distanced themselves from the text in their determination to find in this last act a Christian significance. Passages like this tend to be ignored in celebrations of the saintly Samson. Especially, there has been a tendency to minimize the glorification of revenge. Like so many others, John C. Ulreich finds comfort in what appears to be a change Milton made in his source: his Samson 'conspicuously does not pray, like the Old Testament Samson, to be "avenged of the Philistines'" ('Beyond' 290). Carole S. Kessner believes that Milton 'consciously eliminates the biblical reference to personal revenge' (256; emphasis added). This is because, this writer argues, revenge 'would be absolutely antithetical to Samson's moral progress in the drama.' Why do we need to assume that there has to be moral progress? Why should we suppress whatever in the text appears to conflict with that preconception? We often find readers making assumptions about Milton's intentions and then reading the text or supplying a context in the light of those inten-

Fictional Consciousness and the Author's Voice 51

tions. Philip J. Gallagher finds in Milton's 'compositional strategy' a 'deliberate and systematic rehabilitative effort' to cleanse the morality of this dubious hero ('Role' 274). That is true up to a point but it remains a brutal and uncharitable morality. Many writers treat Milton as if he were a twentieth-century historical novelist, reasonably free to make his own comment through a management of the fiction, working with almost totally flexible characters and events, working on a tabula rasa if he chooses to. The conventions of Renaissance poetic invention work differently, particularly if the source text is scriptural. There is a vast difference between imitating a Homeric or Euripidean model on the one hand and dramatizing the word of God on the other. As he fictionalizes his brief biblical pre-text, Milton is fairly free to 'invent' as he 'imitates,' making fictional additions which are acceptable if they do not conflict with what the Old Testament text says; for example, Manoa's ransom, Dalila's marital status, the messenger, or the Chorus. However, what he leaves unmentioned must be what the Bible says it was. He writes for an audience that knows the detail of the original better, probably, than an ancient Greek audience knew the details of their old stories. This is Holy Writ. Milton can fill out, colour, shadow the world and the personalities the sacred text gives us. His own text confirms this, with echoes and emphases. The Bible says that Samson fell in love with a woman named Delilah, who lived in the valley of Sorek. Milton's fiction that she becomes his wife does not contradict Judges but follows naturally from Samson's other attempt at marriage. The name 'Delilah' could mean 'devotee' or 'worshipper.' It is not even clear that she was a Philistine; she could well have been an Israelite woman. Milton constructs a more fully realized fictional character but does not contradict the biblical account. His fictional treatment of Dalila is the subject of chapter 6 and the fictional Harapha's important function in the structure of the play is discussed in chapter 8. If we may return to the fictional messenger in the play, we see the fiction requires that he cannot, obviously, know the text of Samson's silent prayer with its death-wish and its focus on revenge, as the divinely inspired narrator in the biblical original could. Samson's prayer must be silent in the fictional drama to entrap as many of his prey as possible. Why should he shout out his prayer to his victims? Milton's audience knows Judges, as he knows they do. The silent prayer must be what the sacred text insists it is: 'O Lord GOD, remember me, I pray thee and strengthen me, I pray thee, only this once, O God, that I may be at

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once revenged of the Philistines for my two eyes ... Let me die with the Philistines' (16:28-30). In Milton's Junius Tremellius text: 'Invocans vero Schimschon dicebat; Domine Jehovi, recordare mei obsecro & confirma me obsecro tantum hac vice, O Deus, ut sumam de Pelischthaeis ultionem semel propter ambos oculos meos ... moriar ego cum Pelischthaeis.' The prayer is not suppressed. Milton does not hint at the gentler modern reading that many critics and modern theologians prefer. As Samson prays, Milton echoes the 'eyes' in Judges: with 'eyes fast fixed' (1637). Why draw attention to these unseeing eyes? One suggestion is that Samson's eyes were not gouged out. Another possibility is that this is a trope. As we read of the 'eyes,' the word reminds us with horror that the eyes have been plucked out. At the same moment we recall the prayer in Judges which associates his lost eyes with his imminent revenge. Notice that the very first words of the Chorus on hearing this are to celebrate his 'dearly-bought revenge' as being 'glorious' (1660), while Manoa's first words brush aside lamentation because Samson is '[f]ully revenged' (1712). As John F. Andrews notes, five of the six mentions of revenge occur in the last three hundred lines (94-5). What Andrews tells us about Elizabethan revulsion for revenge, its blasphemous nature and its satanic echoes, is very relevant to our understanding of Samson. His victory is not presented in the fiction as symbolic, spiritual, or inward: the play insists on evaluating it in terms of the number of the Philistine dead. The roles of Manoa and the Chorus are central to this question. I mentioned in chapter 1 that there have been increasing doubts and uncertainties about the weight we should give to their judgments. What, for instance, are we to make of their opinions expressed in the exodosl1+Are they right and should a seventeenth-century wayfaring Christian discover in Samson's experience 'the calm of understanding, the "peace of thought" which Adam knows on the hill' (Rajan,+++ofty 144)? 'Nothing is here for tears ... nothing but well and fair, / And what may quiet us in a death so noble' (1721-4). Is this a 'call of hope to the defeated' (Hill,++++++1) to 'inflame their breasts / To matchless valour, and adventures high'? (1739^0). Although some readers have abandoned the attempt to interpret the kommos,that is, the closing lines in the play, as an 'ideologically correct' description of the action, many continue to interpret it this way in spite of strains and inconsistencies in their readings. For instance, Manoa is frequently seen as having limited understanding, being spiritually blind, being a false redeemer, attempting to thwart God. In fact, Manoa has

Fictional Consciousness and the Author's Voice 53

been seen most frequently as a 'temptation' Samson must resist and reject. The Chorus is often presented as obtuse, inconsistent, or theologically inept. Daniel Lochman is hesitant about the 'hopeful claims made by Manoa and the Chorus' (213).2 Andrews notes their 'limited understanding' (95) and John Huntley finds them 'shallow' and 'selfserving/ indulging in an 'opaque though noble fabric of platitudes' (137). C.A. Patrides points out their 'insensitivity/ their 'vulgarity/ and their 'patently mistaken view of divine providence++++++++243Yet, often, these discredited characters are taken at their word in their concluding evaluations. They are treated as if they have attained understanding or spiritual enlightenment by the end of the action, as if theirs is a 'correct' Christian assessment of all that has gone before, as if all readers should find peace and consolation in this exemplum of Christian heroism. So, for Andrews, the calm of mind is 'our own,' i.e., the readers' (96). Northrop Frye dismisses much of the Chorus commentary throughout the action as 'doggerel,' but although 'they never fully understand the meaning of the events they are involved in,' he feels they 'are carried along by the action to genuine profundity and eloquence at the end' (159). It follows, from such a reading, that the kommos is taken to be Milton's own comment on the completed action. For Radzinowicz the 'lofty' words of Manoa's last speech belong 'to the voice which in the last of the three movements of Lycidas offered similar assurance and consolation' ('Distinctive' 260). However, it is very difficult to find in the text any sign of increasing understanding or insight in these characters. Radzinowicz considers that the Danites move only in the last fourteen lines through stages of psalmic understanding to a 'public recognition of the exemplary value of Samson's life' (Toward SA 222; see 215-26). This is true only if we assume they have suddenly started seeing things correctly, but there is no point in the text at which we can see this happen. It is more likely that Milton's fictional characterization is consistent and that their final judgments are as limited as their earlier ones. The references in the last seven lines are to characters in the play - to Samson ('the faithful champion' [1751]), or to the Philistines ('Gaza .../And all that band them' [1752-3]) - so that '[h]is servants' (1755) clearly refers to themselves, the departing Danites, not seventeenth-century Christians. Their tone is, indeed, psalmic, which is very appropriate for Old Testament speakers pondering the ways of God,3 but that does not mean that they have read the encoded signs rightly as true Christian experience. It is worth comparing the end of+++++++++++lytaemestra speaks the last

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words. After years of nurturing her hatred, she has sated it in an orgiastic act of vengeance. The role of the Chorus is different here from Milton's: it is contradictory and disturbing, but the queen's final words are calm, peaceful, and confident. She justifies her vengeance, promises to end the violence and bring good order to the house of Atreus. She speaks her opinion, not the opinion of Aeschylus. The sense of closure is false as it is in+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ what lies ahead ironically undercuts the words of the speakers. In truth, there is nothing in the text to suggest a significant development in the Danites' understanding of events. It is not a Christian understanding. Throughout the play, the author has been at pains to present these as characters who are wrong, factually, psychologically, and theologically. They are troubled by uncertainties and self-contradictions. They are pietistic, misogynistic, querulous, and banal. Their understandings are imperfect. All this the critics cited have variously shown. Joan Bennett shows how different the Chorus is in mind and spirit from Samson: 'the Chorus embodies a mentality found in all ages and all too common, in Milton's view, among Christians of his own day'+++++++120). They are 'servants under bondage ... incapable of faith' (124); their vision is 'carnal' (126); theirs is a 'self-absolving legalism' (129), a 'blinded piety' (137), and an uncomprehending 'fideism' (138). Even if Samson really has, as we are often told, passed through the stages of regeneration or spiritual growth or victory over temptation, there is no sign that the Danites have recognized in him any sign of spiritual development or that they have participated themselves in any such change. What, in fact, do they perceive? What happens to them? All that has changed by the end of the play is that they have heard that their man has inflicted another massive and horrible act of destruction on their hated overlords. They interpret this as well they might: they are delighted with a primitive vengeful delight. The dramatist has fashioned from the beginning fictional personalities whose perceptions are morally erroneous, that is by the standards of those referred to in Hebrews who have received the promises: '[t]hese all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off (11:13). This dramatic mechanism undercuts their moral and theological inferences to the very end. The meaning of Samson's achievement is ambiguous if it is celebrated by characters who we know are mistaken and whose judgment is clouded.4 It is worth asking what is the 'close' the Chorus celebrates and what its meaning is in a Christian context. Although Samson's destruction of

Fictional Consciousness and the Author's Voice 55

the Philistines has been read as typical of Christ's Last Judgment, there is no indication in the text that the Chorus has any awareness of a larger context. Nor is there any indication that this is how the reader should understand it. There are no markers. The 'close' for them is simply the end of the action. Samson's life is closed and the contest with the Philistines is supposed, wrongly, to have been closed. In these closures, the Chorus believe they have seen revealed the 'best' (1745) that 'highest wisdom' (1747) has to offer: heroic revenge with which God allows Samson nobly to end '[a] life heroic' (1711), and 'ruin' (1684) for the Philistines with 'years of mourning' (1712) to close the racial contest with honour this time for the Israelites. Understanding in the minds of Manoa and the Chorus is once again the limited understanding that precedes the coming of Christ. The consciousness of the dramatic characters is consistent and it is a fictional construction. Irony is the instrument with which Milton makes this clear. He, like his readers, knows there will be no 'close' as yet to Philistine oppression of the Jews. Again intertextual syllepsis is the mode Milton uses, the kind of syllepsis that was discussed in the last chapter. 'Close' has a set of intertextual referents for the Christian reader that it does not have for the Chorus. To the Christian historian, like Milton, the true 'close' is the eschaton, the final event. Adam's angel guide measures 'this transient world, the race of time,/Till time stand fixed: beyond is all abyss' (PL 12.554-5). Then, 'thy saviour and thy Lord' (544) will come revealed in glory, to dissolve Satan and all his perverted world. Milton closes book 1 of Christian Doctrine with an analysis of the end of the world (see CP 6:614-33). The number of the chapters, significantly, is thirty-three. This is the 'fulfilment/ 'consummation/ 'end' (CP 6:614-15). The last day will close like a trap upon all those who live on the surface of the whole earth. Then, indeed, will 'the unsearchable dispose+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ upon the things hidden in darkness' (CP6:623). 'Then at last the end will come' (626). 'Time will be no more' (628). About this universal ending, it really is true to say, as the Danites do, 'All is best .../And ever best found in the close' (1745-8). The Danites' incomprehension is ironical, as their use of language is sy Hep tic. The end of Christ's reign 'will not be one of dissolution but of perfection and consummation' (CP 6:627). For the righteous, '[c]omplete glorification consists in eternal and utterly happy life, arising from the sight of God' (630). None of these meanings, familiar to the mind of a Christian such as Milton, appears from the textual evidence to be present in the con-

56 'Exiled from Light'

sciousness of the Danites. They misconceive or see through a glass darkly. They cannot do otherwise. They are even more benighted than those in the Letter to Hebrews who, like Samson, 'having received a good report through faith, received not the promise' (11:39). It is not the author who steps on stage for a concluding assessment of what has happened. The last words of the play are as consistently fictional as all that has gone before. Michael Spiller suggests that Manoa and the Chorus speak 'in an authorized fashion' and that Milton through them is 'indicating to his readers how they should respond' (129). But his suggestion that, as in some Greek tragedies, 'the voice that is speaking when a play ends does tend to acquire a certain authority' (123) is not convincingly demonstrated. One can never assume, anyway, that Milton is following the customary procedure of any other writer. He may at any time be innovating in some personal unique way. Here, then, Milton is writing fiction. The characters are fictional, as is the representation of the pre-Christian world in which they live. We know that Manoa is wrong as he confidently predicts that Philistia will fall and that '[h]onour' and 'freedom' (1715) will be given to the Danites. Milton could easily have avoided this compelling irony without losing a triumphant or a peaceful ending, if the irony had been irrelevant. He knows, as poor Manoa does not, that what lies ahead for Israel is a terrible period of violence, anarchy, and misery, following Samson's bloody action. Manoa, like Clytaemestra in the Agamemnon, hopes pathetically that an act of murder will bring to an end the cycles of bloodshed and violence and revenge, masking that fragile hope as a brave confidence. It cannot. A different vision and a new covenant are needed to do that. Milton's voice does not intervene to make either comment. Perhaps there is another level of irony undercutting the Chorus's optimism: when the angel of Revelation 'seals' the one hundred and forty-four thousand who will be saved at the real 'close/ the tribe of Dan will be omitted. There are related murmurs in Christian tradition about the Antichrist's coming from the tribe of Dan. Yet perhaps the most bitter irony is still to be mentioned. It should be considered by those who see the play as a subtle but defiant statement of hope by an undaunted revolutionary, still confident that the Puritan Good Old Cause can prevail, rejecting 'quietism,' still dreaming of a violent cleansing of England (for instance, Hill,+++++39; Jose 135). The contrary may be argued: that the play presents the profoundest doubts about the effectiveness of violence and the achievement of the revolutionaries. There is that postscript in Judges 21, repeated from Judges 17,18, and

Fictional Consciousness and the Author's Voice 57

19. Its attempt to explain the miserable aftermath to Samson's magistracy would not have given much comfort to the revolutionaries. The reason for all that misery was that '[i]n those days there was no king in Israel: every man did+that which was right in his own eyes' (Judges 21:25; emphasis added). The ominous words are stated four times and conclude the book. The Cambridge Commentary makes the point clear: 'It is clearly from the hand of a monarchist, and looks forward with hope and anticipation to the establishment of the monarchy in Israel... and so the institution of monarchy emerged. It was an idealistic dream that kingship would prove the solution to Israel's social and religious ills' (Martin 226). Samson's violent measures, his attempt to establish the dominion of Israel by bloodshed, led not to deliverance but to the establishment of the monarchy in the hope of relief from anarchy and unrest. The parallel with the events of 1659-60 must have been a bitter one for a supporter of the Good Old Cause to dwell upon. The fictional characters of Manoa and the Chorus, as Milton fashioned them, reveal an understanding of events that is as limited at the end as it is throughout the play. Their Old Testament mentalities are ignorant of truths that will be revealed in time and through Christ's presence in history. Samson, too, praying for 'speedy death, / The close of all my miseries' (650-1), shares the limitations of a similar Old Testament consciousness. He does not see, as regenerate Adam is led to see, that death is 'the gate of life' (PL 12.571). Adam is taught also what the true close is when all really will be for the best. Till then the world will continue, 'to good malignant, to bad men benign' (12.538). The+++++++++++of the best-known passages in the play, perhaps in English poetry. It is a coda, chanted in a mood of near reverie, a mood of reassurance and profound satisfaction at victory narrowly snatched out of defeat. It is a psalmic statement of undisturbed faith, a moment of balanced stasis. If we allow ourselves to surrender to the mood, it might seem almost pedantic to question what was meant by 'passion spent/ the last words of the play, a condition almost universally assumed to be desirable. Radzinowicz's suggestion helps to locate a problem: 'Milton aims at moderative, not extirpative catharsis, and his tragedy moderates passions' ('Distinctive' 277). But if 'spent' means anything it means extirpated rather than moderated. If Jacqueline DiSalvo is right that this is a highly encoded poem (228), we should be especially careful about its conclusions. Milton often insists that the passions are created by God and we need not 'empty out' or 'expell quite' our predominating passions, but that

58 'Exiled from Light'

'each radicall humour and passion wrought upon and corrected as it ought, might be made the proper mould and foundation of every mans peculiar guifts, and vertues' (CP 1.900; see Arthos, 'Passions'). His objection to the litany as a way of praying to God was that it was 'leane and dry, of affections empty and unmoving, of passion, or any heigth whereto the soule might soar upon the wings of zeale, destitute and barren' (939). In Areopagitica he asks, 'Wherefore did he creat passions within us, pleasures round about us, but that these rightly temper'd are the very ingredients of vertu?' and immediately afterwards says that it is the misuse of reason to 'wander beyond all limit and satiety' (CP 2.527-8). Satan thinks spent passion, 'satiate fury,' may explain why their angry victor is not pursuing the fallen angels still (PL 1.179). He is wrong; he misconceives the ways of God - not that the Danites are satanic, but they are wrong, they are un-Christian, they misconceive. How different the sated loathing of the Danites is from Christ's 'unappalled ... calm and sinless peace'+++++.425)! The 'calm mood' of Adam, resolved to sin and stoically resigned to punishment, is quite different also from Christ's perfect calm (PL 9.920); so is the 'outward calm' of Satan (PL 4.120). None of these experiences is identical with that of the Chorus, but these are intertextual warnings to be careful in decoding this complex moment. The Chorus congratulate themselves on their 'new acquist / Of true experience' (1755-6), but why are they credited with truly interpreting experience when their perceptions are so flawed and underscored with irony? In unquestioning wish-fulfilment, they have concluded that Samson was 'self-killed / Not willingly' (1664-5), although he had told them just before leaving that death was 'the best' he could desire (1264). The Danites have been accused of blasphemy for seeing Samson as being 'tangled in the fold, / Of dire necessity' (1665-6). Their theology is almost as dubious as that of the devils whose 'stubborn patience' (PL 2.569) is founded in an ideology of '[fjixed fate' (560) and 'chance' (551) and 'doom' (550). Also dubious are Manoa's concerns with monuments and laurels, with legends and traditions. The 'carnal supportment of tradition' is a guide consistently despised by Milton (CP 1:827). Irony breathes out of almost every word in the kommos. Even as they say the plans of highest wisdom are 'unsearchable' (1746), the Chorus presumptuously search and ignorantly gloss what each detail of those plans means. Joan Bennett argues that '[a] belief in God's inscrutability is in effect a denial of God's justice' ('Reading' 232). We must hesitate to agree with this, recalling instead how Milton lashed out violently at

Fictional Consciousness and the Author's Voice 59

those who dared to analyse the workings of the mind of God, in these lines from++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ God with more humility than he is usually given credit for: 'he, who without warrant but his own fantastic surmize, takes upon him perpetually to unfold the secret and unsearchable Mysteries of high Providence, is likely for the most part to mistake and slander them; and approaches to the madness of those reprobate thoughts, that would wrest the Sword of Justice out of Gods hand, and imploy it more justly in thir own conceit' (CP 3:564). In Christian Doctrine, Milton concludes: 'It follows, finally, that we must call God WONDERFUL and INCOMPREHENSIBLE/ and he speaks of God's will as 'absolute and ... inscrutable' (CP 6:152,176). The Chorus, then, do not appear to understand their own formulaic statement about the inscrutability of God's ways. If the irony undercutting their words does not help us decode the limitations of Samson's companions, Manoa's incorrect predictions about 'honour' and 'freedom' for Israel and 'eternal fame' for his house should make these limitations clear. As we have seen, it is the nature of the real 'close' that the Chorus fails to comprehend. The Judaic speakers imagine that this is an important and triumphant chapter in Israel's history, and cannot see it as the small step it really is on the road of God's history. In the last lines, the poet has beautifully imitated an Old Testament spirit, a mood of tribal exultation in a bloody slaughter of the enemy, a deep relief at a sign of God's apparent satisfaction with his people. It is difficult also to agree with John Arthos that 'there is such compassion in it, such awe, and such charity' ('Passions' 221). There is nothing in the text to confirm that it is the voice of Milton that has pre-empted the voices of the fictional characters except the splendid resonance and contentment, and those are qualities that are freely available to speakers whose understanding of heroism is pre-Christian. The question that will be looked at closely in later chapters is whether Samson's own consciousness is not essentially the same in kind as that of the other Israelites, a suggestion strongly rejected by Joan Bennett in the works cited. The text of Hebrews has been used to underpin the suggestion that Samson 'received the grace earned by ... the Son' (Low, Blaze 182) and that the 'merits of Christ might be extended back in time' (181). Yet, it is the difference between the Law and the Gospel that the Epistle to Hebrews insists on as it works out the meaning of what faith is. The two poems published in the 1671 volume seem fashioned to reveal that difference.

Chapter Four

Tragedy: Theory, Form, and Meaning

The maiming of Kitty seemed a particularly outrageous accident. It was like the maiming of a child. Kitty represented for Anthony everything that was generous, innocent, unsuspicious, trusting. He was particularly fond of her because she so little resembled the Christian patterns of virtue he had been reared to admire. She was a living proof of the possibility of good nature. There wasn't even any point in testing her good nature, if that had been God's plan, for, as her letter indicated, there was no possibility of her failing the test. God had wasted his time, maiming Kitty. Margaret Drabble,+The Ice Age 7

In the last two chapters, we looked at what is involved in a reading of Milton's play. We considered first how his careful allusive and sylleptic manipulation of language directs us towards meaning and, in the next chapter, we saw how his management of the fiction does this. Now, we will approach his meaning through his management of tragic form. Milton refers to Aristotle's++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Of Education,+and elsewhere, and, therefore, understandably, his tragedy has often been described in the light of the Greek philosopher's theory, or what has survived of it. Some of the commentary that has resulted has been seriously out of touch with Aristotle's argument and also with those versions of it that were current in Milton's day. Since the early years of the nineteenth century there has been a thoroughgoing reconsideration of the++++++and of the meaning of some of its most familiar terms. Many of these terms had developed meanings over the previous three hundred years that they could not possibly have had for Aristotle or even for the early modern Europeans who translated and

Tragedy: Theory, Form, and Meaning 61

glossed Aristotle and grafted his ideas, and their own versions of them, into modern poetic theory and practice. The history of the distortion of Aristotle's meaning is long and fascinating. It throws light on important aporias, limitations, blind spots, intellectual biases, and even simple ignorance in the history of thought in Western Europe. Misunderstandings of Aristotle have been widely disseminated in our educational system and, subsequently, these pseudoAristotelian ideas have shaped not only critical theory but creative art itself. For instance, a neoclassical theorist who believed that++amartia meant 'tragic flaw' to Aristotle might condemn a tragic 'hero' who did not have such a flaw or invent a flaw that the Greek might not have had in mind. Notably, many neoclassical tragedians and critics strained to observe the three Unities Aristotle was supposed to have insisted on but did not. For our purposes, it is clear that a mistaken reading of Aristotle is likely to affect one's reading of Milton's play, if one believes that Milton respected and was influenced by the+++++++++++++++++++++++++ the play would probably attempt to locate the pathos, the hamartia, the possible peripeteia and anagnorisis, and it might try to describe the causes of pity and terror, eleos and phobos. Given the current lack of agreement about the play, there would inevitably be disagreement about what constituted its Aristotelian features. A reader who considers that Samson's morality is satanic must have a different idea of the protagonist's hamartia from that of a reader who thinks that Samson is the triumphant champion of God. And never have readings of the play been so full of contradictions and doubts as they are now. I have suggested above that Samson's final achievement was not satanic: he was, according to the Word of God, a hero of faith, but his morality was fashioned in the darkness under the Law, and Milton's text, for all its indirection, does not obscure what in that morality is ugly and un-Christian. Samson too was denied the promise, while suffering humanity awaited the Incarnation of Christ. It seems clear that Milton is working with as much detachment as any Renaissance maker of fiction. As we saw earlier, according to Milton, we must understand that the voice of a fictional dramatic personage cannot be assumed to be the voice of the author. Few readers, however, have resisted the understandable temptation to identify Milton to some extent with this 'hero,' who is himself a blind, stubborn, defeated revolutionary and clearly in favour of divorce. So, Jacqueline DiSalvo recently assumed that 'Milton's and

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Samson's political goals' are identical, and this is the foundation for her argument that Milton 'represents revolutionary virtues as a hypermasculinity' threatened by feminine and maternal principles (213, 214). I have suggested that Milton empties his own voice out of the drama and avoids personal comment. The reader must supply the exegesis as Milton's Christian reader, alone, must interpret Scripture. If we do not begin reading predetermined to see this or that action of Samson's as admirable, or regenerative, or as a model of saintliness, we will find that the play is far closer to Aristotle's conception of tragedy than traditional, orthodox readings suggest. This avoids many of the strains we have been forced to accept in orthodox attempts to explain the causes of pity and fear in+++++++he nature of the tragic protagonist, the hamartia, the pathos, and the peripeteia. Students of Milton's work in the last half-century have often used terms that they believed they were drawing from the++++++but which are mistranslations. They do not embody Aristotelian concepts either as modern classical scholars understand them or as Milton would have found them translated, analysed, and discussed by the Italian scholars he respected. Modern classical scholarship and a reading of those Italians helps us to recognize a Milton who is a sensitive but extremely inventive Aristotelian, and also a Christian syncretist. We may consider first some problems that orthodox interpretations create for those who believe that Milton allowed himself to be influenced by Aristotle's theory of tragedy. Milton's preface records his agreement with Aristotle, that 'raising pity and fear, or terror' (343) is central to the function of tragedy, the+++++++++++++++++++++++++ (Po 6.1449b27). Here is Pazzi's sixteenth-century translation of Aristotle: Tragoedia est imitatio actionis illustris, absolutae, magnitudinem habe[n]tis, sermone suaui, separatim singulis generibus in partibus agentibus, non per enarrationem, per misericordiam uero atque terrorem perturbationes huiusmodi purgans' (9v). This is Else's translation of the Greek original: Tragedy, then, is an imitation of an action which is serious, | complete, and has bulk, in speech that has been made attractive, using each of its species separately in the parts of the play; with persons performing the action rather than through narrative [[carrying to completion, through a course of events involving pity and fear, the purification of those painful or fatal acts which have that quality]]' (Else, Argument 221; Po 6.49b24-8). And this is Leon Golden's: Tragedy is, then, an imitation of a noble and complete action, having

Tragedy: Theory, Form, and Meaning 63

the proper magnitude; it employs language that has been artistically enhanced by each of the kinds of linguistic adornment, applied separately in the various parts of the play; it is presented in dramatic, not narrative form, and achieves, through the representation of pitiable and fearful incidents, the catharsis of such pitiable and fearful incidents' (11). Of course, in orthodox readings of Milton's play, Samson's final destructive action is more or less a triumphant Christian victory for the regenerate champion of God. Mary Ann Radzinowicz suggests that 'in His free agent, Samson, He manifests the renewal of freedom to all men ... the good mind and the good will issue into an exemplary act which teaches how God gives freedom'++++++++++346). For whom, then, are we to feel pity? For Samson, the short shock of death in the service of God is nothing fearful compared to the brooding terror of the outcast lying in the dust of Gaza, mangled in his 'apprehensive tenderest parts' (SA 624). Rather, it is an ecstasy of positive achievement after the hated Dalila and Harapha, following his cruelly critical father and friends, had brought his anger to the boil but had stayed maddeningly out of reach. Less still can we feel pity if this is a divine reward for a process of penitent regeneration. If the play ends in triumph and success for Samson, it does not turn on that fall from good fortune to bad which Aristotle considered an essential feature of the best-constructed plot (Po 53al5). Nor do we feel fear at the spectacle of someone like ourselves suffering undeservedly (Po 53a4-8). If we locate Samson's fall in his capture, his loss of sight, and his enslavement at the mill, he evokes sympathy, in Aristotle's reasoning, but not pity and fear because he deserves to fall having sinned through disobedience towards God and by uxoriousness and garrulity (Po 53a2-3). Few readers have been prepared to contemplate the possibility that Samson's end is not a triumph, and this sometimes results in considerable awkwardness. M.E. Grenander says of Samson's death, 'There is nothing tragic in it, nor does it involve suffering ... [it is] part of the emotional release of the play' (388). Even W.R. Parker cannot give us a satisfactory Aristotelian solution, suggesting vaguely that we feel pity for Samson's 'glorious past,' and fear in 'the last portion of the play++++++++0). This is not h eleos and phobos work as far as Aristotle was concerned. Martin Mueller, recognizing that we cannot feel pity and terror for a champion who is rejoicing at being readmitted to God's service, and knowing very well what Aristotle suggested, feels compelled to treat Manoa as the tragic hero and heap on to his shoulders the Aristotelian

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apparatus appropriate to a 'hero' (Pathos 170-4). There have also been attempts to see the play as comedic, and Samson as a comic hero, since a successful Christian champion could be neither tragic nor pitiful (see Damico; Low, Blaze 158-62). Daniel C. Boughner discovered a vein of comedy in Milton's play but then curiously went on to criticize Milton for failing to be very funny (306). Yet, Milton, in his prefatory remarks to the play, vehemently denounces the corrupt and absurd 'error of intermixing comic stuff with tragic sadness and gravity.' So we really should not complain if his tragedy is not very comic, and we should use the term 'comedic' of his work with some caution. A similar problem relates to the pathos that Aristotle defines in chapter 11 of the+Poetics (52bll-13). Its importance is crucial: 'the action bringing pain or destruction is essential to tragedy' (Rees,+++++++++++++++++++++++ 'the one thing absolutely essential to a tragedy was a+++++of heroic quality and scope' (Origin 88).l In his earlier commentary, Else insists, '[i]t is clear that Aristotle thought the++++++he basic, indispensable "part" of the tragic plot.' In his translation, 'the+++++s an act which is destructive to life or painful, such as killings, paroxysms of pain, woundings' (Argument 229, 356).++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Philistines is exactly that and could clearly be considered the pathos, the tragic act. However, this has not found favour with many who have written about the play. Grenander does not consider that Samson's death is involved in the pathos and prefers the idea that his 'internal suffering is the Tragic Incident' (386). This is not quite what Aristotle seems to have understood as a pathos. Oedipus's pathos was not his mental anguish but his killing of his father, Laius;3 in the case of Herakles, it was his killing of his wife and sons, not the misery that followed when his madness passed away. A pathos is something done, not a state or a condition (see Rees, 'Pathos' 15). It is true that the intention to commit the act is sufficient, as when Taurian Iphigeneia intends to kill Orestes in Euripides' play, or when mother and son plan in ignorance to kill each other in his Ion. In Milton's play, as B.R. Rees insists, Samson's 'pathos is his final, destructive action' (Aristotle's Theory 15). It is the Christian regenerative reading that makes it difficult for most scholars to accept the slaughter on Dagon's feast-day as the pathos.4 If Samson is regenerate, triumphant, and favoured by God, it is hard to consider his death tragic or even to believe that he suffered in any real sense in the moment of martyrdom. There is another problem. Aristotle is quite clear about the kind of act that can move an audience to pity and terror. If the destructive act is done by an enemy to an enemy there

Tragedy: Theory, Form, and Meaning 65

is nothing pathetic in either the deed or the intention. The important thing for Aristotle is that there must be a context of relationship. The act of destruction must involve philoi, that is, 'dear ones' or 'close blood relatives' (Else,++++++++++++see 412-39). This would seem to be quit irrelevant to the narrative here. Obviously, there is no destruction of kin in+++++++ will try to show that Samson's destruction of the Philistines is a pathos that a Christian reader can fairly consider 'Aristotelian,' but this must wait for discussion later. There are one or two other problems, but this should be enough to suggest how out of touch with Aristotle's dramatic theory Milton's practice is believed to be, even by those who call it 'Aristotelian/ Some of his supposedly un-Aristotelian ideas and practices are thought to be the result of Horatian influence and neoclassical distortions introduced by the Italians, helped by a typically Renaissance habit of syncretism. Thus, Milton's rendering of catharsis is said variously to be a blending of homeopathic medicine and Puritan theology, mixing purgatio, lustratio, expiatio, humours adust, sin, conversion, regeneration, grace, and Christian peace. It has come to be thought of as some sort of vaguely 'good' state-of-being in Christian terms. So, we now have a vision of Milton as someone who adapted Aristotle in a confused and erratic or at least in a highly idiosyncratic way. This seems out of tune with the respect approaching veneration Milton expressed for the philosopher who is 'our chief instructer in the Universities' (CP 7:448) and whose+++++++e infused with 'sublime art' (CP 2:404). Many scholars before and since Ruth Mohl would agree with her opinion that Milton's 'preoccupation with Aristotle was a fundamental, lifelong pursuit' (39). Milton was a meticulous, precise scholar, not someone who vaguely romanticized the classical past, the glory that was Greece and that sort of thing. W.R. Parker considered that Milton followed Aristotle because Aristotle had so effectively 'summed up what had previously been thought and done+++++69) and W.B. Hunter has shown how Milton entered into the very spirit of the Greek philosopher, adapting his terms subtly to explain such Christian theological concepts as the persons of the Trinity. (Bright Essence 15-25). It is in this spirit, it seems to me, profoundly knowledgeable and yet original and innovative, that Milton adapts Aristotelian poetic theory to view Samson's morality from a Christian perspective. We have had difficulty in recognizing this because we have approached the play with preconceptions about the kind of hero Samson is and about what his achievement means.

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Samson's morality is un-Christian and, even in terms of his own limited social economy, unproductive; that is, he cannot get even temporal deliverance for himself or his people by a massive act of slaughter, let alone achieve what Milton understood by Christian liberty (CP 1:422). To recall what has been said earlier, the characters in this play all exemplify the darkened moral consciousness of fallen Man under the Law, misconceiving heroism, liberty, and redemption, construing these and other concepts in a sense that is literal and limited by their ignorance of Christ. They are ignorant of what Milton wrote about in A Treatise of Civil Power: 'the divine excellence of his spiritual... kingdom, able without worldly force to subdue all the powers and kingdoms of this world, which are upheld by outward force only' (CP 7:255). It is that ignorance in Samson that is his real hamartia and as such it is essentially Aristotelian. Aristotle's use of the term 'hamartia' has resulted in more misunderstanding than any other critical term he uses except for 'catharsis.' When James Holly Hanford said in 1925 that Samson's was 'the most dignified of all tragic faults - rebellious pride' ('Samson Agonistes' 183), he was perhaps unaware of the work that had already been done to discount that old moralistic reading of Aristotle's term. At the end of the century, although classical scholarship has moved on, many learned Milton scholars still seem to cling to the Victorian misunderstanding of the word. One critic tells us that most readers consider 'Samson's hamartia was pride, or hubris' but that he considers it was 'the sin of presumption' (J.S. Hill 154).5 Radzinowicz says that its meaning in the Poetics ranges from 'passion or violence affecting other human beings to rashness, negligence, or blundering in relation to supernatural beings'+++++++++0). As Else notes, 'the prevailing conception of hamartia among laymen and scholars in other fields is still that of the "moral flaw," which was dominant down through the nineteenth century' (379n; emphasis added). An exception in the field of English literary scholarship is George Whalley. He is emphatic: 'the notion of+++++++as a tragic or fatal "flaw" is completely wrong-headed in Aristotelian terms, and ... to insist upon such a notion erodes the austere purity of Aristotle's view of tragedy. If the protagonist had by nature a "flaw" that steered him more or less inevitably into a fatal situation, he would be a mechanism and predictable to us, incapable of inducing terror or recognition; he would be repulsive or pathetic merely' (27). The idea that Aristotle said the hero has a 'tragic flaw' evokes this response from E.R. Dodds:

Tragedy: Theory, Form, and Meaning 67

'Aristotle does not say so; it is only the perversity of moralizing critics that has misinterpreted him as saying so' (39). The best corrective to the idea that Aristotle had in mind some sort of flaw or moral failing is Jan Maarten Bremer's full and authoritative analysis of the contextual and philological evidence. His statistics and his arguments need not be repeated now, but here is his concluding summary of his work: it is justified to define hamartia in Poetics 1453 a 10/15 as 'tragic error', i.e. a wrong action committed in ignorance of its nature, effect etc., which is the starting point of a causally connected train of events ending in disaster. Hamarti+++++++++++++++i.e. a moral weakness, a defect of character which enlarges itself in its successive stages till it issues in crime; nor is hamartia+++++++++++++++++++i.e. the state brought about by sinning, an inner attitude which stems from the wicked action, and a kind of burden from which one is relieved only by adequate punishment. (63)

The 'error/ then, is not a moral or psychological flaw, a defect of personality, but 'a wrong action committed in ignorance of its [true] nature, [or] effect/ In Euripides' Bacchae, Agaue's eyes roll and her mouth foams as she tears off her son's limbs. She is ignorant of the horror of what she has done, even when she enters carrying the bloody head of Pentheus. Else cites 'Thyestes' fearful banquet on the flesh of his sons' as 'a hamartia in Aristotle's sense' (Argument 395), and sees hamartia and recognition as 'interdependent parts of the best tragic plot'; the chief reason why this has not been previously noticed is 'the myopia with which the sequence of Aristotle's argument has been regarded, so that++++++++++++was thought of as a part of the hero's ter' when it is really 'a part of the plot' (385). In sixteenth-century Italian translations of Aristotle and commentaries, which Milton was able to consult, we find support for the reading preferred by modern classical scholars. Alessandro Pazzi translates Poetics+1453a7-ll: 'Is autem erit, qui nee uirtute, nee iustitia antecellat, minimeq[ue] per uitiu[m], prauitat£'ue, in ipsam infelicitatem lapsus fuerit, ueru[m] humano quodam errore, ex magna quidem existimatione, atque felicitate' (f. 14).6 Else translates the reference to hamartia as 'because of some mistake' (376), Pazzi's 'humano quodam errore/ A few lines later, Pazzi reads that the shift should be 'ex felicitate ad miseria[m], errore sane non leui, minime vero per dedecus, ex illo quidem uirorum, de quo dictum est, genere' (53al5-17)7 In the beauti-

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ful edition of his 1548 Commentary, Francesco Robortello uses Pazzi's translation, with a few small changes. In the vernacular in 1588, lason Denores writes that the tragic 'tramutation dalla felicita aH'infelicita' should befall a character 'illustre tra buona, & cattiua, & che trapassi dall'uno stato all'altro per certi errori humani' (f. 44-44v).8 And to make quite clear that the error is not to be thought of as moral or sinful in the Christian sense, he goes on to say 'questa attion horribile, & miserabile; 6 si commetta tutta uia per ignoranza; ouero sia per commettersi non sapendola, & poi saputa non si commetta' (f. 47).9 Denores is evidently anxious to make his point clear! A great deal of learned commentary is available by the seventeenth century to direct a student of Aristotle to read hamartia as 'ignorance' or 'error committed in ignorance' rather than as 'sin' or 'tragic flaw.'10 However, Bremer notices two important developments for the history of ideas. Some Italians who correctly translate the Greek question Aristotle's judgment, arguing that he is wrong to exclude the guilty error or sin, since many Greek tragedies are constructed around evil or immoral acts which Aristotle appears to ignore. Castelvetro and Beni disagree with Aristotle, but they do not misunderstand him. Milton was free to follow the Stagirite or the preferences of a 'puny/ modern intellect. Others do, indeed, seem to misunderstand the Greek, as Vettori does, arguing from the Problems to criticize Oedipus's rashness, and translating 1453al6 with 'propter peccatum magnum' (124). Bremer traces back to this point a misreading that will develop into a vast, far-reaching misconception: 'So for the first time+++++++++ related to (identified with?) "fatal passion"' (69; see also 70-1). He sees in this reading the beginnings of a tendency 'to imagine that Aristotle was here saying that in a tragedy there ought to be a proper moral correlation between guilt and consequent disaster' (195). Such an idea was very congenial to the Christian morality of the early modern European readers of Aristotle. By the time of Dacier, Mesnadiere, and Rymer, it would harden into a belief in 'poetic justice,' and later, with the German philosophers, into the theory of 'tragische Schuld.' Of this 'notion that the poet has a moral duty to represent the world as a place where the good are always rewarded and the bad are always punished,' Dodds has this comment: 'I need not say that this puerile idea is completely foreign to Aristotle and to the practice of the Greek dramatists ... [but] it would appear that it still lingers on in some youthful minds like a cobweb in an unswept room' (40). None of these later developments resemble the prevailing opinion in critical literature available to Milton.

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Even if translations of the key passage and suggestions that mislead can be found in the sixteenth century, many passages in other parts of the+++++++++++reinforce the sense that is once again preferred toda these serve to clarify the meaning of hamartia. In Vettori's own commentary, this is the translation of 53a8-ll: 'neque propter vitium & prauitatem mutatur, caditq[u]e in res aduersas, sed propter errorem quendam, hominum, qui sunt in magna existimatione & abundantia omnium bonorum' (123).n Piccolomini will provide the last of many possible examples. The tragic action is done 'non per malitia, & maluagia volonta, ma piu tosto per imprudentia, & per qualche sco[n]siderato errore' (195).12 The point is even clearer when he explains how the best anagnorisis lies in the recognition of the hamartia: 'miglior sarebbe ancora, quando la persona eseguisse la cosa non conoscendo: & poi doppo il fatto riconoscesse il tutto percioche in tal caso il fatto non harebbe dello scellerato' (214).13 Now, as A.W.H. Adkins says, if hamartia means a mistake of fact 'no theory of tragedy based on a moral flaw in the hero need look to Aristotle for support' (101). This pretty well covers the vast majority of interpretations of+++++++ver published and certainly those put out in the last half-century or so which see Samson as being punished for his sin, then rising from despair to Christian fortitude, or moving through some sort of process of regeneration, or overcoming a series of temptations, or rejecting pride, garrulity, lust, 'effeminacy,' or whatever. If we look instead at the sense in which Samson has been shown to be ignorant, his hamartia is entirely Aristotelian but profoundly Christian at the same time. Samson's ignorance is his ignorance under the Law of the morality of the New Testament. This is profoundly emphasized by the presence of the Christ-hero in the other poem in the 1671 volume. In his ignorance, the Old Testament warrior commits a number of errors. Milton adapts an Aristotelian term and naturalizes it in a Christian ethos. This metamorphosis recalls Milton's adaptation of Aristotle's 'ousia' to make a Christian theological distinction between 'essence' and 'substance' (see Hunter, Essence 15-25). By that Christian ethic, Samson, by his massacre of the Philistines, can be considered guilty of 'a wrong action committed in ignorance of its nature,' Bremer's words for hamartia. He is also guilty when he brutally rejects the penitence of Dalila and her cry for forgiveness (see chapter 6, below). Samson is ignorant of the new covenant, ignorant of the example of Christ, perfect and to be imitated. Life under the Law was a 'state of rigor' to which force was not unbefitting, as we shall see

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later. As he interprets his duty to God, nothing could be further from his heart than 'the sense of charitie' that Milton considered natural to the Christian dispensation and remote from human consciousness under the Law (CP 7:259). D.W. Lucas defines hamartia as the 'lack of the knowledge which is needed if right decisions are to be taken+(Aristotle 302). Samson, who is so unreservedly committed to 'inexpiable hate' (SA 839), cannot know that '[w]ho so hateth his brother is a murderer' (CP 2:470), and he is ignorant of the new covenant's universal human brotherhood. 'Who knows not that there is a mutual bond of amity and brother-hood between man and man over all the World?' (CP 3:214). There are two important reservations or qualifications that modern classical scholars have made with respect to hamartia but both can be incorporated into the Christian reading that is being suggested here. G.F. Else argues that the hamartia should involve philoi: 'the finest mistake for the purposes of tragedy, like its correlate the finest recognition, will have to do with the identity of a "dear" person, that is, a blood relative, and will accordingly lead to or threaten to lead to his being slain or wounded. As a component or cause of the complex plot, such a hamartia is inherently fitted to arouse our pity - and our "fear", that is, our horror that a man should have killed or be about to kill a "dear one"' (383). Else's conclusion has not been universally accepted (see Halliwell 131-4), though R.D. Dawe and others who have objected to it do not seem to have noticed an important part of his argument (see Argument 391-8; compare Dawe 91). The ancient Greek insistence on the importance of blood kinship is not likely to have been of any importance to Milton as he fashioned his Christian tragedy. The conception of a universal human bond in charity, a world-wide system of relationship between human neighbours, is the closest a Christian ethos comes to the ancient tribal commitment to blood relationship which was still so important in fifth-century Athens. Of this Christian ethos, Samson would have been ignorant under the Law of Israel, the chosen nation. Even the Philistines are+++++under the new covenant with its new conception of 'brother-hood between man and man over all the World' (CP 3:214). In darkness under the Law, Samson was ignorant of this, for 'then was the state of rigor ... now is the state of grace' (CP 7:258). Blood relationship did not have the awesome importance to the seventeenth-century Protestant that it did for a fifth-century Athenian, but 'relationship' mattered. Marriage was important and it created responsibilities not only to one's wife but also to her relatives, as Milton

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must have reflected when Mary Powell's family took financial advantage of the restored son-in-law and eventually came to live with him. Is it possible that Milton made Dalila a Philistine and Samson's wife to establish a relationship between him and those he was to kill?14 Mary Powell's family were monarchists, the contemporary Philistines, and they left their home in Forest Hill to take refuge with Charles's forces in Oxford. It seems Milton believed his wife had been lured away from him by her mother and family. Milton felt a sense of duty to those he was connected with through Mary Powell, not only housing the family when they left Oxford, but helping them financially after the death of Mary's father. His marriage allows Samson to say to Harapha: 'Among the daughters of the Philistines /1 chose a wife, which argued me no foe;/And in your city held my nuptial feast' (1192-4). Certainly he himself claims that the marriage dissolved the state of enmity between him and her people. Milton's fiction establishes relationship with the Philistines where there was none in Judges. Interestingly, there is a Christian version of yet another aspect of hamartia that has been noted by Dawe and Bremer. Trying to explain why Aristotle has so little to say of the obviously important role of the gods in fifth-century tragedy, Dawe concludes that the old concept of ate+has, by Aristotle's time, been subsumed into the philosopher's conception of hamartia. So, he explains, 'an error of judgement is something which can be either entirely the responsibility of the man who makes it, or can be something induced, normally by the gods putting a man in such a position that he has little choice but to make a decision that will later recoil on him with disastrous, and above all disproportionate, consequences' (94-5). Herakles' massacre of his wife and children is a terrible instance of this in Euripides' tragedy. In his Bacchae, Agaue is maddened by the power of Dionysos as she tears her son's body to pieces. Bremer states,+++++++++++++are correlative: a man "blinded" by divine interference (6e66ev) does wrong and brings ruin upon himself and others' (196). Can there be any Christian version of this? Milton did believe that God could send good temptations in the way of the free-willed Christian. He also believed God could harden the heart of the sinner. We see this in Satan. The spiral of evil-doing and increasingly merited punishment is not impossibly remote from the Greek concept, dissimilar though the theological systems are. However, at the very heart of Milton's tragic vision is a thoroughly Christian conception that is a metamorphosis of this Greek idea. It is the sense of the mystery of the divine

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ordering of the universe, 'the unsearchable dispose'+++1746) of omniscience and omnipotence shaping post-Adamic history and containing in its pattern the lives of all human beings, for all their free will. Samson's ethic of violence is repellent and inimical to the ethic proclaimed by Christ in his words and in his life, but Samson is dropped into a world and a dispensation shaped by an Almighty God. Before he is born, it is made clear that a dimly perceived framework has been structured around him, and that his life is part of a purpose which will not be explained to him. What Samson did in conscience was part of God's plan. In some mysterious way, everything is part of God's plan. The mystery is how evil can fit into it, and that was a question that fascinated the poet. Yet, the Danite's terrible act of carnal violence was not only self-destructive but also failed to deliver God's people on earth from the power of the unrighteous. Samson believed faithfully that he was serving God as Agaue believed she was serving Dionysos when she made her terrible mistake. Defeated Puritans in 1671 knew that their cause had been right and yet their failure was ordained as part of God's larger mysterious plan. Caught up in the fury of righteousness, they had killed and had given up their dead. The biblical Samson had often been cited as a hero and model for them. Did they not fear those deaths might be as futile as Samson's in achieving liberty for God's people? Barbara Lewalski comes to the conclusion that this tragedy invites 'a complex and subtle assessment of the uses of the past' ('Milton'sSamson' 247). To readers who had just lived through an attempt at political deliverance which had been violent and futile, and who could count and remember the dead, the sorrow must have been poignant and very personal. Now, they could only concede that God's plans in which they had played their part were incomprehensible. Samson's experience mirrored their own. How could he be blamed? He had agonized over the encoded signs that he felt were ethical guides and wondered if the motions that roused him were divine. He could not even be certain that those 'motions' did not originate in his own proud drive for vengeance. He had been wrong before, as he knew very well. The play shows him painfully and bitterly reassessing his past. The terror of Samson's last moments, discounted by so many who focus on the triumph of his victory in the temple, is clear in Judges. Would he face a contented God or the horror of a soul dead in one doom with the Philistines? Samson is to be pitied. His terror is to be shared by the audience or reader. 'There is only one kind of terror/ says D.W. Lucas, 'that a theatre audience can feel, the terror which they

Tragedy: Theory, Form, and Meaning 73

share with those who in the play are aware of their own impending doom' ('Pity' 56). And as Else says, 'we feel horror because of the nature of the deed, and pity because it is executed or planned in ignorance' (Argument 383n). The main pathos, then, is not Samson's death (see Mueller, 'Pathos' 170). It is the monstrous destructive act perpetrated on the Philistines, in tribal hostility and in ignorance of any higher bond uniting human being with human being in charity. "The ultimate root of the tragic is ignorance/ writes Else, 'with the proviso that the ignorance must have led or threatened to lead to an act which runs counter to man's deepest moral instincts' (Argument 420). Milton's Christianity was nothing if it was not a guide and a realization of his deepest moral instincts. What is not clear is whether all the acts causing pain or suffering can be considered pathe. The main pathos or 'tragic deed' is involved in the process of hamartia and recognition, but must we exclude the suicide of Jocasta and the blinding of Oedipus from the tragic action and the resulting pity and terror? Whalley translates: 'A pathos is a murderous or cruel transaction, such as killings - [taken as] real - and atrocious pain and woundings and all that sort of thing' (91). In a note, he argues that the 'crucial event is to be seen both as suffered and as inflicted' (90). The great pathos takes place in the temple, but in all the episodes on that fatal day, in all his transactions with dear ones and others, Samson inflicts or intends to inflict pain. Even in his stubborn refusal to satisfy his father's loving desire to comfort him and ease his condition, Samson hurts and disappoints. The most profound sorrow is inflicted on Dalila, and he certainly wishes to cause woundings and that sort of thing on her and Harapha, could he but reach them. This will be dealt with when Dalila is discussed in chapter 6, and in chapter 8 when the structure of the play is examined. If it is true, as Rees says, that Aristotle has 'had more bastard opinions fathered upon him than any other writer of influence'+(Aristotle's Theory 1), then catharsis is among the most seductive of his ideas. Perhaps it was inevitable that the finest tragedy written in English on the Greek model would beget its full share of the kind of opinion Rees refers to. Catharsis is surprisingly often said by critics of Milton to have occurred on stage rather than as part of the experience of the audience or reader. Samson is frequently assumed to have had a catharsis and so, often, are Manoa and the Chorus. At least, no one has yet suggested that Dalila and Harapha experience catharsis, although they were probably purged quite comprehensively at the theatre. Manoa and the Cho-

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rus are sometimes spoken of as a kind of audience who watch a tragedy played out before them, and then Manoa's purgation has itself been treated as 'a little drama of its own' in a perfect inversion of what Aristotle seems to have suggested (Mueller, 'Pathos' 169). The catharsis has most often been located in Samson himself. It has been said, for example, that what has been purged in Samson is remorse (Radzinowicz, 'Distinctive' 254) or, perhaps, his 'old and torn identity' (Christopher, 'Homeopathic' 373). Catharsis is frequently equated with regeneration and sometimes with redemption (Hawkins 219). It has been considered a 'theme' (Radzinowicz, 'Distinctive' 277), or a 'principle of structure' (Hawkins 223), or 'a state of equilibrium achieved at the end of the work' (Mueller+++++++173), and also as 'the image of God's providence, his mercy and justice combined' (Radzinowicz, 'Distinctive' 253). Radzinowicz suggests that 'God has behaved toward Samson like an Aristotelian tragic poet ... life is the tragedy He records from human history; He designs the tragedy to effect the purgation' (Toward SA 107). Here the events of life itself are seen as bringing about the dramatic catharsis. Critics of Samson have felt free to use the terminology of the Poetics in a highly inventive, undisciplined, imprecise process of elaboration, weaving Aristotle's concepts into other ideas like motifs in complex and highly original designs. It will help us to get back to what Aristotle really did say if we listen to the calm common sense of D.W. Lucas, who inquires into the workings of pity and terror in Aristotle's discussion: 'our knowledge that we are seeing a play and not a piece of life affects our feelings' ('Pity' 56). If Milton believed that catharsis was some sort of emotional or spiritual or paideutic cleansing or purgation, it must come about in the spectators at a dramatic representation+of events, not in the participants in the tragic events themselves and not as a result of seeing some reallife sorrow or pain. Milton insists in his epigraph to the 1671 edition that it is the mimesis, the 'imitatio actionis seriae,' that has the power he describes in his preface and that carries with it its tempering delight. The sight of real bloodshed or misery is what the fictionalized characters in the play experience. The delight caused by dramatic representation, he goes on to say, is 'stirred up by reading or seeing those passions well imitated' (emphasis added). That is what the observer at a dramatic presentation experiences. Seekers after mere horror, writes Else, are 'at fault because their effect is not produced by imitation+n the proper sense (that is, the representation of human action, character, and "thought")'+++++++++10).

Tragedy: Theory, Form, and Meaning 75 The great Renaissance puzzlement about what exactly Aristotle meant by 'mimesis/ forcibly expressed by Francesco Patrizi and by many other great Renaissance commentators, did not prevent those theorists from distinguishing between the effect of an event in life and the effect of its fictional representation.15 That much Aristotle himself had made quite clear: 'TO re yap [jLi(jLeio~Oat, av^vrov rote avdpcoirois EK iraidaiv sort Kal TovTCf) 8ia(f>epovo~i r&v a\\a)v £