Between Two Pillars: The Hero's Plight in Samson Agonistes and Paradise Regained (review)

Since the tercentenary of Milton's 1671 poetic volume, Paradise Regain'd and Samson Agonistes have been read with an inquisitional rigor, one consequence of which is that these poems have now been nudged out of catechistical closets of interpretation and pushed beyond the walkways of traditional Christian thinking. More emphatically than Paradise Lost, they are the products of a poet who regarded himself as belonging to a sect of one and his poems, put in dialectical relationship not only with one another but with their scriptural source books, as evidence of ongoing revelation. Milton's poems are rivals of interpretive traditions, not their conduits, and if there is worry (on Joseph G. Mayer's part) over the veracity of counterinterpretive traditions, especially for the Samson story, he can turn from literary criticism to biblical commentary, where he will hear again that "there are two lines of approach: those who see in Samson a religious hero with tragic elements, and others who make an essentially negative evaluation of him, as an example not to be imitated, the opposite of the true hero" (J. Alberto Scoggin, Judges: A Commentary [1981], 258). The question is not whether there are rival traditions of interpretation but, rather, with which of them (and in what ways) Samson Agonistes affiliates.

That said, Mayer takes his place in what is now a long line of critics who read PARADISE REGAIN'D . . . To which is added SAMSON AGONISTES dialectically (I have deliberately preserved the inflections of Milton's title page, which Mayer eschews). What is at play inside these poems is at play between them. Of those two propositions, Mayer provides ample, indeed exhaustive, demonstration even as he inverts the title-page inflections given to Milton's poems: "Samson Agonistes is the principal subject of study" (1); "[t]he shorter study of Paradise Regained . . . corroborates this interpretation of Samson Agonistes" (3). The interpretive glare of this book falls upon "the phenomenon of doubleness" (10), what Mayer describes as "a concurrence of opposing views" (16); and the critic's job, as Mayer practices it, involves the work of mediation between the regenerists and the revisionists who sometimes challenge the former, but until Mayer (he would have us believe) neither comprehensively nor very convincingly. The revisionists thus deposed, Mayer fastens attention to the regenerists — their misreadings, their fallacies, their "failings" (67; cf. 38) — with an emerging knowledge that Milton's writings often dismantle the interpretive traditions they seem to embrace and resist the theories they would explain, as well as the schools of criticism that would contain them.

Mayer's critique becomes frayed, though, in the very moment that "recently" is dated "1987" ([sic]; read "1986"), within a book published in 2004 (see 1, 264),and when two of the chief representatives of the regenerist school of criticism, Christopher Hill and Mary Ann Radzinowicz, are mysteriously missing from the bibliography (hence from the critical dialogue of this book). Just as surprisingly, the same point is to be made about "recent" criticism by the chief challengers of the same school, John Shawcross and Joseph Wittreich, both of whose books (of the current century) preceded Mayer's into print, in one case by four years, in the other by two. Bibliographies, by definition, require supplementation. But in this instance, the nature of the omissions and sheer number of them point toward neglect, and those omissions start with the second edition of John Carey's Milton: Complete Shorter Poems (1997). Can a book complain "that existing criticism" of Samson Agonistes "has failed to discover its overall conception" (vi) when John T. Shawcross's The Uncertain World of "Samson Agonistes" (2000) goes uncited, its insights unprocessed, not to mention the same author's Paradise Regain'd: Worthy T'Have Not Remain'd So Long Unsung (1988)? Ditto for the work of Sharon Achinstien, Joan M...