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  • "What Once I Was, and What Am Now":Narrative and Identity Constructions in Samson Agonistes
  • Miranda Garno Nesler (bio)

Like Milton's epic poems Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, Samson Agonistes is a complex narrative that never provides a single, coherent portrayal of its characters or events. Indeed, Samson throws into question whether single, coherent individuals and histories actually exist. Though the text, to some degree, revolves around events that have already occurred, it is not a story that thrives on what narratologist Uri Margolin terms "certainty or factivity" (143). Instead, the closet drama produces layer upon layer of confusion, positioning the narrative genres of autobiography and epic in opposition not only to each other, but also to the carnivalesque; such drastic and insistent opposition fractures the reader's experience of Samson as well as Samson's relationship to the past. As the text relies on a narrative with no physical action, it forces readers to focus on questions of self-construction and the creation of community history—the very issues that dominate conversations and conflict within the closet drama. Because Samson is narrative-driven, as opposed to character-driven, readers can benefit from considering the text through narrative theory; though narratology traditionally deals with the novel, the closet drama has numerous, important traits that narrative theory is not only concerned with, but can also help clarify and bring to the surface.1

As a closet drama, Samson privileges text above performance—indeed, [End Page 1] like other closet dramas it is a text created for readers and not for performance purposes. During a time when religious and political figures increasingly condemned the theatrical as a source of rebellion (against gender norms and against monarchy, in particular), closet drama provided a 'safe' and moral alternative for writers wanting to create some form of dramatic representation. Existing somewhere between drama and poetry, closet drama creates what Elizabeth Sauer has termed "an elite readership," one whose experience of the text becomes internalized and personal rather than external and communal (202). Further, it allows the reader to approach the dramatic in a non-threatening form that, through a lack of visual cross-dressing, presents gender as a strict binary.2 Despite closet drama's separation from both poetry and drama, critics of early modern literature have traditionally attempted to treat Milton's composition as one or the other. However, just as James T. Nardin reminds us that we should not treat drama as closet drama—ignoring dramatic elements that create a play as a thing to be watched—we should also remember to avoid treating closet drama, a genre related to drama only through the use of character cues, as drama. Dramatic paradigms do not account for the this particular text's absolute lack of action—as, indeed, Samson's entire story unfolds in one place, merely consists of speeches and historical accounts passed between characters, and presents only narrative versions of the events that occur off-page. Critics, arguing that this closet drama merely possesses an exposition and a climax, have been unsure of how to deal with Samson's 'missing middle.'3

Samson, a text obsessed with the conflicting relationships between individual and communal narratives, cries out for narratological readings. Internally, Milton strips away action to bring focus to the multiple character voices that layer over and weave into each other, binding the characters' narratives and pushing them toward crisis. However, in reading Samson one is also aware that there exist multiple sources constructing the closet drama itself. Milton destabilizes the text by creating a story that is markedly different from its sources. While he draws from Greek tragedy and from the Book of Judges, Milton alters narrative details in each to provide a greater sense of the instability and urgency that Samson's opacity creates for the communities around him.4 Unlike the Judges account, Milton's version of the Samson story lacks an omniscient voice that might provide certainty about Samson's link to God, or that could authoritatively [End Page 2] limit history to a single and indisputable set of events. God makes no appearance in the text, and readers are left with three discrete, imperfect views on...

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