Single Imperfection: Milton, Marriage, and Friendship

5. Heroic Divorce and Heroic Solitude

FIVE Heroic Divorce and Heroic Solitude In the treatment of Samson Agonistes that follows, I want to focus on two things. Milton chose a Hebrew hero for this strictly neoclassical tragic poem, and, even though it required taking significant liberties with his biblical source, he made that hero a married man. Hebrew heroes were not unheard of in Renaissance literature, but they were usually dramatically Hellenized; married heroes were even rarer. It was commonplace, of course, for classical, even biblical, heroes to have a partner; David Halperin refers to such pairs as “Heroes and Their Pals.”1 Gilgamesh and Enkidu, Achilles and Patroclus, David and Jonathan are all familiar examples of heroic friendships. Clearly, friendship, not marriage, was regarded as the proper relationship for a hero. Marriages, like those of Heracles to Megara and, later, Deianeira, normally meant trouble for heroes. Though the two features under analysis here — Hebraic hero and married hero — are deeply interconnected, I will discuss them separately at first. Jeffrey S. Shoulson quite properly reminds us of the long tradition of Hellenizing Samson into a kind of Hebrew Heracles.2 Josephus concludes his Samson story by urging his readers to 157 158 Single Imperfection admire the hero for his classical virtues, not his dedication to God or to Israel: “And it is but right to admire the man for his valour, his strength, and the grandeur of his end, as also for the wrath which he cherished to the last against his enemies. That he let himself be ensnared by a woman must be imputed to human nature, which succumbs to sins; but testimony is due to him for his surpassing excellence in all the rest.”3 Courage, strength, magnanimity are the virtues hailed by classical culture, and even the failings Josephus lists — Achilles-style wrath and giving in to sexual temptations — are the failings typical of classical heroes.4 Hellenizing biblical heroes was as important to Renaissance humanism as christening selected patriarchs and prophets was to medieval Christianity.5 Perhaps the most graphic example of Hellenizing a Hebrew hero is Michelangelo’s David — the king of Israel sporting a foreskin! Milton’s Samson receives no such treatment. Though the poem is insistently classical in form, it focuses on Samson as an Israelite, a promised deliverer, and, significantly, as circumcised. The poem pays persistent attention to his and his tribe’s circumcision and the Philistines’ lack thereof. The Chorus refers metonymically to Samson’s Philistine victims as “A thousand foreskins” (144). Samson twice refers to Philistines as “the uncircumcis’d” (260, 640), which the Chorus further glosses as “Idolatrous, uncircumcis’d, unclean” (1364). Milton’s Samson not only bears the outward sign of the covenant, he is also, unlike Josephus’s Samson (or the Bible’s for that matter), keenly concerned with details of the law. He married Dalila because he “thought it lawful from my former act” (231); he refuses to attend Dagon’s festival because “Our law forbids” (1320); and he proves himself a skilled casuist, almost a proleptic Talmudist, throughout the play.6 Marriage or No Marriage Milton was familiar with Hellenized Samsons, and he deliberately took another tack. His Samson stands midway between the first Adam who resigned his manhood and the second Adam who restores fallen manhood by being (problematically enough) God. With Samson, Milton imagines a fallen man’s best possible attempt at shedding the old Adam’s “effeminate slackness” and reclaiming original manliness. For Samson to qualify for this role, he must do at least one thing Adam could not — divorce his unfit wife.7 And since Milton based his arguments for divorce in large part upon ancient Hebrew law, his Samson must know the scriptures and the law. Milton reimagines the Bible’s Delilah as a perfect example of an unfit wife, unfit not because of adultery, the only sense of “uncleanness ” allowed by canon law as grounds for divorce, but because she was no meet help to Samson. In Paradise Lost, the epic narrator likens both Adam and Eve, newly fallen and arising bleary-eyed from postcoital slumber, to “Herculean Samson” rising newly shorn from “the Harlot-lap / Of Philistean Dalilah” (9.1060–61), but there is nothing in Samson Agonistes to suggest that Dalila is a whore, or even sexually promiscuous. The Delilah of Judges might be called a harlot but not so the Dalila of Milton’s Samson...