ABSTRACT

John Milton seems to have designed the narrative precisely in order to problematize the structured life, as the confirmation of the providential plan governing the isolated episodes of Samson’s life is suspended until the crisis of retrospective validation in the temple. There is good prima-facie evidence for situating Samson as an intervention into this history in the very fact that contextual decodings of the narrative have invariably sought out a context in which a life-narrative is at issue. To read Samson Agonistes in its moment is to understand first, its discordant relation to the normative vocational narrative of the bourgeois Protestant, and second, its capacity to circulate and to give pleasure, within a social order exalting at every level the principle of production. The narrative that enacts the transformation has its historical moment on the threshold of the new order; no other story will do.