ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the intertextuality from Paradise Lost "in ways that open up, rather than delimit, the discursive space it inhabits." It is concerned with the simile that compares the waking of Samson "from the Harlot-lap / of Philistean Dalilah" with the waking of post-lapsarian Adam and Eve from "Earth's freshest softest lap": Samson "Shorn of his strength. The chapter seeks to establish "the complex network of signs into which the simile has inserted itself" in order to "explain why the simile might be incapable of communicating" the non-misogynistic theological message of its Protestant context. Read against this topos, the Samson simile's "laps" obviously lose their character as neutral ground, the solid basis of a poetic theology elaborating an unproblematically egalitarian downfall. Yet while symbolically and to some degree threateningly female, "Earth's freshest softest lap" and its counterpart "Dalilah's harlot-lap" do not in them-selves call into question the innocence of Paradise Lost's heroine, Eve.
