ABSTRACT

Students open Samson Agonistes (SA), Milton’s closet drama of 1671, expecting dusty and untopical stuff. Instead, they get an Aristotelian tragedy about pre-Davidic Israel. The play is a retelling of Judges 16:23-31, in which the defeated and blinded Samson takes revenge on his Philistine captors. He does so spectacularly (in both senses of that word), pulling down the building in which he has been performing feats of strength. “So the dead which he slew at his death were more than they which he slew in his life,” says Judges (16:30); “o dearly-bought revenge, yet glorious!” comments Milton’s Chorus.1 Because he acted on a Philistine feast-day, Samson killed “Lords, Ladies, Captains, Councellors, or Priests ... not only / of this but each Philistian City round” (1654-1656). All died “while thir hearts were jocund and sublime, / Drunk with Idolatry, drunk with Wine” (1670-1671). only the “vulgar” survived – and those only because they “stood without,” too poor to enter the theatre (1660). The Chorus apostrophizes: “Living or dying thou hast fulfill’d / The work for which thou wast foretold / To Israel” (1662-1664). Samson’s father Manoa concurs, saying of his son’s death that “nothing is here for tears, nothing to wail ... nothing but well and fair, / And what may quiet us in a death so noble.”