Milton and the Grounds of Contention

7. Choice and Election in Samson Agonistes

174 Woods 174 7 • Choice and Election in Samson Agonistes Susanne Woods Joseph Wittreich, in the most comprehensive reading thus far of Samson Agonistes’s context and critics, presents us with a fallible and unregenerate Samson who defies efforts to turn him into Samson Triumphantes. In Wittreich’s reading, Milton embraces contemporary commentary and “prophesyings” about the Samson legend which emphasize the difficulties and ambiguities of Samson’s character.1 Barbara Lewalski, in her recent critical biography of Milton, respects Wittreich’s approach but sees Samson learning from his tragic situation and his encounters in the course of the drama, and understanding, at last, his tragic destiny. In Lewalski’s reading, Samson has to learn to get it right, but he does in the end, and in the process “judges” and teaches the Chorus who represents the Hebrew people.2 Both critics view Samson in relation to its publication with Paradise Regained, with Lewalski’s Samson a public hero in contrast to the private Jesus of the preceding poem and Wittreich’s Samson modeling interior struggle in contrast to Jesus’ assured vision. For these learned and sophisticated Choice and Election in “Samson Agonistes” 175 readers, if Samson is a Christian hero he is not simply a regenerate messenger of God but a complex figure whose marriages may have owed as much to human lust as divine direction, and whose brutality and desire for revenge will not fall neatly into orthodox typology. He is a divinely gifted man who is influenced by a fallen nature and has made some terrible choices. The Wittreich and Lewalski readings, I believe, show that Milton achieved exactly what he wanted: two members of his fittest audience choose their differing, individual readings with full attention to the poem’s context. In the course of the dramatic poem, Samson’s choices create the very calling for which he is presumed to be born; what he elects affirms his election. Samson, though blind and enslaved, is an example of freedom in a providential world. Similarly, Milton’s readers, though limited by the linguistic and cultural contexts they confront, are invited to enact their own freedom in their interpretive choices, to find their own relationships to Milton’s liberal God. In this essay I want to explore two related premises: that Samson is preeminently about choice, and that Milton invites readers to make choices as part of their own calling to understand and enact God’s word. Milton’s preface, “Of that Sort of Dramatic Poem which is Call’d Tragedy,” draws attention to his choice of genre even as it modifies generic expectations. The preface suggests that the reader’s involvement is central to the purposes of Milton’s poem, as he gives primary place to tragedy’s ability to raise “pity and fear, or terror, to purge the mind of those and such like passions” (573). Unlike Aristotle, whom he purports to follow, Milton only secondarily centers his tragedy on plot, which he lumps with “style and uniformitie” to offer an example of authorial choice: “Plot, whether intricate or explicit, . . . is nothing indeed but such economy or disposition of the fable as may stand best with verisimilitude and decorum.” Here, too, Milton’s knowing reader is invited to 176 Woods participate, to decide on that verisimilitude and decorum, as “they only will best judge who are not unacquainted with Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, the three Tragic Poets unequall’d yet by any, and the best rule to all who endeavour to write Tragedy” (574). Samson’s entrance begins with choice and chance, which the drama will reveal as the interplay of reason and Providence. As Christopher Hill notes, Samson’s opening echoes and extends the conclusion of Paradise Lost, where the delicate integration of a providential guide and a world all before them where to choose defines the human condition Adam and Eve confront at their exit from Paradise.3 Samson, pertinent son of those first parents, needs the “guiding hand” to lead him to the bank where he may find “choice of sun or shade” (1, 3). The respite from his prison labor, where even the air is “imprison’d also,” brings him “The breath of Heav’n fresh-blowing, pure and sweet,” allowing him to “feel amends” though at first he is able to think only of his fall and blindness (8–10). Samson’s first speeches...