Samson Agonistes

By John Milton

Characters

For the characterisation in Samson Agonistes Milton places the greatest emphasis on Samson. The title of the tragedy leads the reader to expect this. Milton is from the outset concerned to explore the arduous spiritual inner struggle that Samson has to overcome to strengthen his faith in God and realise his vocation so familiar to contemporary Protestants.

The most notable point about Milton's characterisation in Samson Agonistes is its Hebraism. Milton has paid close attention to the precepts of ancient Greek tragedy in the structure of his play, but his characters are drawn from the Old Testament, particularly the Book of Judges. Samson, Manoa and Dalila are taken from Judges.

The Chorus and the Messenger were important elements for the compositional harmony of the Greek tragedy, but Milton makes them Hebraic. The Chorus is comprised of Danites, the tribe and district of Dan to which Samson and Manoa belonged (Judges 13:2). Milton appears to have invented the Philistian character Harapha for the temptation of Samson in the Gaza prison-house. The deployment of the Messenger in the fifth act was an established classical tradition in tragedy. Traditionally the role of the messenger was to reveal to the other characters and the audience the fate of the hero off-stage.


Samson

Critics have long attempted to understand Milton's characterisation of Samson. It is apparent that Milton made some notable alterations to the Samson story of the Old Testament, but also that the poet inherited a tradition that had elevated Samson's deeds in pursuit of his calling above other aspects of his life.

Why Milton made or accepted Samson as a tragic hero is rooted in the early modern Samson tradition. By the seventeenth century the earlier feats of the Danite hero had commonly been subordinated to attention surrounding the latter part of his life. Hence attention focused on Samson the blind prisoner, servant of Jehovah and bane of the Philistines, deliverer of his people.

Some of Milton's contemporaries had written of the tragic features of the latter part of Samson's life. Furthermore the conception of the nature of Samson's tragedy had changed by Milton's time, no longer the medieval and Renaissance conception - i.e. only caused by the treachery of Dalila - it had more become a tragedy or failure of calling. Samson's fall and misery in the prison at Gaza became internalised, the physical aspects of his fall subordinated to the spiritual - his innermost despair and anguish, and his blindness (which during the seventeenth century was thought of as spiritually symbolic). One contemporary spoke of Samson 'sitting in the irksome prison in paine of body, but greater of mind'.

Hence it has been noted by critics that even before the earliest possible date Milton could have composed the tragedy, there had already developed an extensive Samson literary tradition. There are records of non-dramatic tragedies and were a number of tragic dramas written in Latin and vernacular languages during the Renaissance. That is not to say that these works directly influenced Milton's tragedy; rather it exemplifies that by the poet's time Samson had been treated as a tragic hero.

However, there is little in the pre-Miltonic literary treatments of the Samson story to support or parallel the spiritual and psychological complexity of Milton's Samson. In Judges 13-16 he is presented as no more than a boisterous Israelite shôphet of vast and primitive energy. Although Josephus attempted to ennoble this Hebrew ruffian to make him more acceptable to Roman readers, the Samson of the Jewish Antiquities remained a hero of strength, a hero of action. In the medieval analogues of Chaucer, Lydgate and Gower, and also in the anonymous fourteenth-century Cursor Mundi, Samson continued to be remarkable for his physical strength rather than his strength of mind. It was not until the Renaissance, with Marcus Andreas Wunstius's Simson, Tragoedia Sacra and Joost van den Vondel's dramatisation of the subject in Samson, of Heilige Wraeck, Treurspel that a conscious attempt to depict the spiritual growth of the protagonist emerged; yet neither Wunstius nor Vondel can be said to explore in any depth the dramatic potential inherent in Samson's inner development in anything close to the same way as Milton does.

Milton subordinated Samson's earlier exploits at the expense of an emphasis on his later deeds. It is apparent that Milton wanted to present his readers with a mature and tragic Samson. There is no mention of the episode with the foxes; and only fleeting reference to Samson's riddle (ll.1016-17; 1064). Many critics have felt that Milton selected from the Book of Judges only those features of the hero that would ennoble him and render him a fit subject for tragedy. However, this has been doubted more recently - as the emphasis Milton puts on the later Samson is entirely in accord with the Samson tradition that had developed.

Milton is interested in the spiritual struggle that Samson undergoes during the course of the tragedy. The poet, himself of strong 'puritan' confessional persuasion, was interested in the relationship of God and man, coming to terms with God's ways, and fulfilling one's calling or vocation. Samson's life illustrates that even the most godly of men cannot expect divine intervention to resolve matters between humans, even if the issues concerned are directly related to divine will. God has provided sufficient revelation of his will, and man must suffice with this. This is a poignant message for Milton's own times: after the failure of the republican experiment and the godly reformation by 1660, many puritans were disillusioned about the fate of the 'good old cause' and its political and religious values under a restored Stuart monarchy. Milton strongly believed in martyrdom, not of the kind that Samson chooses, but that of Christ. Cromwell had illustrated the futility of trying to impose political and religious arrangements intended to preserve the liberty of the people if the people were not receptive to them. That was, Milton concludes in the Readie and Easie Way to Establish a Commonwealth, the heart of the problem behind the failure of the Parliamentary cause to create a firm foundation of its power and principles during the 1650s.

The Samson story illustrates the struggle to come to terms with God's ways and with the fate of God's chosen people. Many of Milton's contemporaries were undergoing the same 'agon' as Samson during the late 1650s and 1660s. There is a belief among more recent critics that Milton's poetical works of the 1660s and 1670s can be taken together and interpreted to divulge ideas the poet had with regard to the political and religious environment under Charles II. This places Samson in the context of Milton's other major 'characters', Adam and Christ.

Milton's version of the Samson story makes for a Christian tragedy in the eyes of many critics. The work adheres to the rules of Greek tragedy, with Hebraic elements (particularly characterisation), but has a Christian message.


Dalila

Milton's characterisation of Dalila in Samson Agonistes is one of the poet's finest literary creations. Critics have differed in their interpretations of Dalila; many have found much in the poet's characterisation of Dalila in support of the view of Milton's misogyny.

Dalila is by no means a 'lady': she is an enemy of virtue, a 'viper', a 'serpent', the wife who betrayed the secret of Samson's God-given strength to the enemies of His chosen people. Dalila is the principal cause of the 'agonistes' that Samson manages to overcome during the course of the tragedy. Samson himself labels her 'That specious monster, my accomplished snare' (l.230). The most resounding denunciation of Dalila comes from the Chorus: 'wisest men | Have erred, and by bad women been deceived; | And shall again' (ll.210-12). Milton's contemporaries would have been able to rouse a host of 'wicked' women whose deceit and betrayal had brought the downfall of good men. The context of this was always sexual; women such as Dalila, Eve, Helen of Troy, Salome and Jezebel, were usually given the vast and powerful sensuality and erotic appetite. The Chorus asks:

'Is it for that such outward ornament
Was lavished on their sex, that inward gifts
Were left for haste unfinished, judgement scant,
Capacity not raised to apprehend
Of value what is best
In choice, but oftest to affect the wrong?' (ll.1025-30)

It is the great betrayal of the wife's foremost marital duty, loyalty to the husband, that the Chorus so vehemently denounces in Dalila.

'Seeming at first all heavenly under virgin veil,
Soft, modest, meek, demure,
Once joined, the contrary she proves, a thorn
Intestine, far within defenisve arms
A cleaving mischief, in his way to virtue
Adverse and turbulent, or by her charms
Draws him awry enslaved
With dotage, and his sense depraved
To folly and shameful deeds which ruin ends.' (ll.1035-43)

Milton is stressing here the intimacy of marriage. As in Paradise Lost, marriage is for Milton a shared spiritual journey, in which the partners are expected to work in harmony - 'What pilot so expert but needs must wreck | Embarked with such a steers-mate at the helm?' (ll.1044-5). During the seventeenth century marriage was gradually becoming recognised as more than a means of preserving or advancing a dynasty, or legitimising lustful encounter. The value of love in marriage was increasingly becoming recognised and appreciated during Milton's lifetime. It is one of the principal themes of the poet's divorce tracts of the 1640s. Marriage is seen here as a spiritual union; procreation is secondary, something that develops out of love itself. Hence Milton's justification for divorce - once the harmony between the two souls is lost the union is no longer divinely sanctioned, and thus no earthly pronouncement can preserve it. Dalila has broken the basis of marriage, trust between partners, and her betrayal of Samson's secret contravened the foremost duty and first loyalty of the wife. Milton's divorce tracts, composed 1643-45, offered a profound challenge to religious, legal, and cultural principles governing marriage. The Church of England proclaimed that valid marriages are indissoluble, save for the spiritually authorized ground of adultery (rooted in Matthew 19:3-11) and sometimes impotence. English law did not permit remarriage after such divorce, though some Continental Protestant nations did and many reformed theologians approved it for the innocent party. Both ecclesiastical law and English law recognized that some conditions - including impotence as a condition preceding the marriage, lack of free consent on either side, close kinship - violated the very nature of marriage; any seeming marriage contracted in such circumstances was no marriage and the parties could remarry. Milton urged Parliament to enact a reform virtually unheard of in his day: divorce for incompatibility, with right of remarriage for both parties. He argues his case by re-ordering the usual ends of marriage to place companionship above procreation or relief of lust (which is based on Genesis 2:18-24); other arguments are that Moses allowed divorce and remarriage to the Jews on such grounds (Deuteronomy 24:1-2) and that the overarching principle of Charity in the New Testament demands a nonliteralistic interpretation of the apparent revocation of that permission by Jesus in Matthew 19. Most remarkable are the eloquent passages describing the human misery caused by the present divorce laws - an appeal to human experience as a guide to the interpretation of scripture.

Dalila threatens the natural order and established structure of power. Like Milton's own world, the world we are thrown into in Samson Agonistes, power is dominated by men. Dalila, with her captivation over Samson had overturned this established power structure, posing a threat to order. She had managed to lure Samson into pleasure by 'venereal trains'. Her temptation attempts to play on Samson's vulnerability to her sexuality. Throughout Samson laments the mental weakness, or 'impotence of mind', that allowed Dalila to deceive him, his own inability to prevent his surrender to her sexuality. He could not prevent himself from becoming 'O'vercome with importunity and tears' (l.51). Initially Samson begins to question God for allowing him to have such a 'servile mind' (l.412) while he is 'in body strong' (l.52). However he comes to realise that it is his own 'weakness' (ll. 50, 235, 834) that allowed him to become 'yoked' and enslaved by Dalila. We meet him at Gaza imprisoned and enslaved by the Philistines, fitting punishment for his fall from God.

So what of Milton the misogynist? Samson is responsible for his own sin - Milton's belief in the Arminian doctrine of Free Will is operative, meaning that Samson himself, not God or Dalila, determined his fate. Undeniably Milton presents Dalila as dangerous and treacherous, but it is Samson's inability to resist that caused his fall. This is expected since he is the central figure of the tragedy. Dalila is, in her own right, a complex figure. Though in the plot of the tragedy her role is to serve as temptation to test Samson's faith, her object in visiting him in the prison is difficult to determine. Feminist critics have been quick to draw attention to the discussion between Samson and the Chorus after Dalila's temptation; and there is an account of marriage as a power struggle, in which men uphold vigilant policing to maintain their position. Dalila's last speech (ll.980-84) is one of Milton's greatest. It is imbued with tragic irony, as in a matter of hours there none of the countrymen she betrayed Samson for will remain. Milton allocated Dalila less than 300 lines; this compression makes for one of Milton's most complex and powerful characters.