Exiled from Light: Divine Law, Morality, and Violence in Milton’s Samson Agonistes by Derek N. C. Wood

Abstract

ESC 28, 2002 Derek N. C. Wood. Exiled from Light: Divine Law, Morality, and Violence in M ilton’s Samson Agonistes. Toronto: Univer­ sity of Toronto Press, 2001. xxii, 248. $55.00 cloth. In Exiled From Light, Derek Wood challenges the dominant critical interpretation of Samson as a saintly Christian hero and proposes instead a Samson who embodies the limitations of an Old Testament consciousness: rigorous, incomplete, liter­ alistic, and uncomprehending, fashioned by the old Mosaic Law, without the amelioration of C hrist’s charity and forgiveness. A type of Christ, but lacking knowledge of Christ’s image, Sam­ son acts out a savage, pre-Christian morality, formed in the law and disciplined slavishly and childishly to its carnal imperatives. Lacking in the Christian liberty that only Christ’s coming could initiate, Samson, for all his faith, stumbles blindly through the fallen world, and Wood sets out to show how M ilton’s dark emphases in this tragedy present Samson “as a profoundly am­ biguous example for Christian imitation” (xxii). To argue this, however, is to go against a long and lively in­ terpretive tradition dom inated by the view of Samson as saintly hero and only occasionally challenged by reminders of his mur­ derous brutality and blind revenge. Wood tackles the interpre­ tive problem of bringing these widely divergent traditions into focus in a series of chapters that expose the pervasive critical uncertainty about almost every aspect of the drama. Chapter 1, for example, is relentless in its uncovering of patterns of bias and distortion in the criticism. These include, among others, failure to give due weight to textual evidence (by crude bio­ graphical interpretation, by identifying M ilton’s point of view with one of the play’s characters, and by presuming to know the intentions of M ilton and even God); failure to give due weight to contextual evidence; and failure to conduct contextual readings without im porting evidence or submitting the play to various patterns and schematizations that determine meaning. Chap­ ter 2 makes a case, based on intertextual connections between this dram a and M ilton’s other writings, for M ilton’s “calculated indirection” (37) in this dram a and suggests that meaning is deeply ambiguous as it resides in the “cracks and interstices” of the intertext. The drama, Wood concludes, is about the na­ ture of reading itself, and meaning of meaning (45). Chapter 3 730 REVIEWS offers an extended reminder and demonstration that the play is fictional, an imitation (47), and that readers are not to be lulled by the false sense of closure provided by the Chorus’s final speeches, especially since the limited nature of their vision has been amply demonstrated throughout. Chapter 4 grounds Sam­ son Agonistes in a thorough understanding of Aristotle’s theory of tragedy that draws on early modern European commentaries as well as contemporary re-evaluations of Aristotle’s Poetics to clarify M ilton’s approach. Chapter 5 pits the two Samsons — hero of faith and exile from light — against one another. W ood’s aim in doing so is to put to rest readings that stress regener­ ation by reading the dram a against the central model, Christ, whose heroism in Paradise Regained is the true model of faith and action. Chapter 6 uses the principles and reading strate­ gies developed in the preceding chapters to re-evaluate the role of Dalila in the drama; Wood argues that largely hostile in­ terpretations of her character most clearly illustrate the flawed interpretive practices he has been describing, and that M ilton’s other writings show how capable he was of readings strikingly independent of the “widespread and stereotypic” (117). Chap­ ter 7 examines the crucial moment of the “rousing motions” ; it recognizes its pivotal status for any interpretation of the play and concludes finally that the meaning of Samson’s last action is inscrutable. Chapter 8 then looks at interpretive explanations of the structure of Samson Agonistes and concludes, in an in­ sightful application of Aristotle to the play, that the play is the tragedy of fallen humanity and its stunted and darkened moral consciousness under the law. Chapter 9 ends the discussion by placing...