Chapter 1 - The World of Samson Agonistes

Summary

AS a result of recent feminist critical movements, the two important female characters in John Milton’s major poems have come under particular scrutiny, with an accompanying reassessment of Milton himself as male author. These fictionalizations are Eve in Paradise Lost, a portrayal of the female progenitor of human life in the Bible, generally believed to have had real existence, and Dalila in Samson Agonistes, a rendition of Delilah in the biblical story found in Judges. She and the Samson story are treated as truly historical because they are biblical, by some people as actual persons in every detail. But the points of tangency between these two female literary personages are slight and their differences at least those one always finds between individuals. The new critical scrutiny has also involved revisions of Samson as symbol during the mid-seventeenth century, within the dramatic poem, and for a political present. The privileging of the feminine discourse and the political issues has, unfortunately, disengaged parts of the poem from the whole and has frequently ignored the literary nature of the work. The study here presented reviews much that has gone before in the reading of the dramatic poem but extends and amplifies and reinterprets that commentary, and offers an approach to the text that reifies both the world of the poem and the uncertainties of the world of the poem as not only reader-available but writer-created.

In the dramatic poem we see Milton expanding the bare biblical story of Samson’s work at a grist mill as the captive of his tribe’s enemies, the Philistines, and his being galvanized into the Great Deliverer it had been prophesied he would be when he pulls down the pillars of the Philistine temple, killing the lords and aristocracy gathered therein. Whether he is indeed through his action the Great Deliverer and how one understands the person Samson at this momentous event are questions that have arisen for readers of Milton’s text, a text thus seen as recounting the Bible story but subverting it through analysis into a questioning not only of whether such action accomplishes delivery and exemplifies championship, but also of motivation and the possibility of renovation.