Milton Scholarship and theAgonoverSamson Agonistes1

Abstract

Milton's “dramatic poem”Samson Agonistes has been justly described as a “major site of contestation within Milton studies.” The contest referred to concerns the status of Samson: is he a true or a false hero; should the reader approve or abhor his final act? The traditional view is that Samson, through a process of repentance and renewal of spirit charted through the poem's major episodes, becomes enabled for the role to which he had been dedicated by angelic promise, that he “should Israel from Philistian yoke deliver” (line 39). The revisionist view is that Samson is a false hero, intended by Milton to be contrasted with the true heroism of the Son in Paradise Regained. The critical argument has been more urgently interesting because within the lifetimes of today's critics, it has been impossible to discuss Samson Agonistes without an awareness of “terrorists” and “freedom fighters.” In this paper I chart the course of this controversy from 1969, with occasional references to earlier work, to 2001 and conclude that the revisionist case has never been convincingly argued. Revisionist critics fail to observe E. D. Hirsch's important distinction between a work's meaning and the significance that work might have for them as twentieth-century readers. Reading their own values back into Milton's work, they have denied the Samson of the poem his biblical role as justified freedom fighter, and re-labelled him as a terrorist. Such readings derive their plausibility from the fact that Samson Agonistes is the major poem of Milton's we must try to understand without the prompting of a narrative voice. I agree with those critics who take the view that the meaning of Samson Agonistes is both in principle and in fact recoverable, from an examination of the work itself and of its context within Milton's developing thought.