Samson's Middle: Aristotle and Dr. Johnson

Abstract

“All [Milton's] originality,” wrote Professor A. S. P. Woodhouse recently, “—and it is great—is revealed in his adaptation of traditional poetic forms, never in wilful departure from them ....” Yet the student who assumes that Samson Agonistes is a classical tragedy, and attempts to follow the suggestion made by William Riley Parker and F. Michael Krouse that it be studied in the light of Aristotle's Poetics, cracks his head immediately against the stone wall of Samuel Johnson's resounding dictum, that while it has a beginning and an end which Aristotle himself would have approved, Samson has no middle. Since Johnson's time, a host of critics have ranged themselves on one side or the other of the argument concerning Samson's allegedly absent middle. Krouse added to the controversy an illuminating survey of seventeenth-century and earlier conceptions of the biblical story. Parker's special contribution was to measure Milton's play against classical Greek tragedies. Both, however, suggested the possibility of further analysis in terms of the Poetics.