A Shipwreck of Faith: Hazardous Voyages and Contested Representations in Milton’s Samson Agonistes

Abstract

In 1642, Milton wrote that enter contemporary debates about church government would be to imbark in a of noises and hoars disputes.1 Milton saw the hazards of joining debates about right religious practice as akin setting sail in a stormy sea; like Paul and other New Testament authors, he connects faith in religious truth - a truth about which one can rarely be certain - the danger of the voyage, and considers himself (or his text) a vessel for divine will.2 Milton would continue find maritime metaphors useful in both his prose and his poetry.3 In Milton's work, the pilot is a figure who enters a contested, watery space; he navigates debates about religious practice, competition and unrest in a troubled marriage, and a chaotic world where maintaining one's faith is like navigating dangerous seas.In Samson Agonistes (1671), Milton foregrounds the marital and epistemological problems that pilots encounter by figuring both Samson and Dalila in maritime terms and by illustrating their struggles shape their own representations. Milton uses Samson's shipwreck - for which Samson blames himself, Dalila, and God - focus our attention on Samson's difficulty in navigating his relation God, and on the hazards of interpreting divine will. Milton sets Samson's version of the from the Book of Judges next those of several others: Dalila, Manoa, the Chorus, and other characters present interpretations of their own and Samson's acts. Milton's maritime metaphors alert his the troubl'd sea of texts that make the project of biblical interpretation dangerous and competitive. His drama resists a coherent, singular retelling of the story from Judges 13-16 because such a coherence would fail represent the kind of struggle that encounter when they attempt interpret God's will and navigate a complex world.In what Alan Rudrum has punningly called the ' Agon over Samson critics have vigorously debated how read the ending of the These critics fall broadly into two camps that Rudrum calls traditional - those who read Samson as a heroic, divinely motivated liberator of his people - and revisionist - those who read Samson as a false hero and perpetrator of a violent massacre.4 Recently, critics have begun consider alternatives reading the play from either of these standpoints.5 In her essay Discontents with the Drama of Regeneration, Elizabeth Sauer contends that, in reading Samson Agonistes, readers confront their blindness. Regenerationist interpretations give way the elusive motives for Samson's final act - an act that leaves the in play. Without entirely disallowing Samson's regeneration, Sauer recasts it as just one of various truths that Milton leaves open at the end of the In confronting their blindness, take up the position inhabited by Milton's characters, and indeed by living persons, wherein they cannot know the full moral ramifications of any act they see.6 I will argue that refocus on the maritime imagery of Milton's drama is refocus on this quality of unknowability; Milton figures his characters in maritime terms precisely foreground the uncertainty of the interpretive voyage on which embark as we make our way through Samson's story.Apart from entrance as the ship / of Tarsus,7 the maritime imagery in Milton's drama has been little examined. In 1959, Barbara Lewalski highlighted Milton's representations of his characters and their emotions as ships and tempests, and opened intriguing venues for new scholarship.8 And yet, the topic seemingly attracted no interest until John Guillory, in Dalila's House: Samson Agonistes and the Sexual Division of Labor (1986), compared entrance the description of Cleopatra on her barge in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra (c. 1608). In his essay Guillory explores the sexual and political implications of Milton's move describe both Samson and Dalila in maritime terms, and argues that because of this narrative doubling . …