Shifting Contexts: Reinterpreting Samson Agonistes

Notes

287 NOTES Notes to Preface 1. The worry over the relation of poetry and theory, though it may seem peculiar to our own time, goes back at least two centuries to a critic for whom Milton’s reconstitution of tragedy is an issue; see, e.g., John Penn, Letters on the Drama (London, 1796), 30. 2. See, respectively, Stanley Fish, How Milton Works (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001); Barbara Lewalski, The Life of John Milton (Malden, Mass. and Oxford: Blackwell, 2000); John T. Shawcross, The Uncertain World of “Samson Agonistes” (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2001); and Derek N. C. Wood, “Exiled from Light”: Divine Law, Morality, and Violence in Milton’s “Samson Agonistes” (Buffalo, Toronto, and London: University of Toronto Press, 2001). 3. See F. Michael Krouse, Milton’s Samson and the Christian Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press for the University of Cincinnati Press, 1949). 4. See Robert Sanderson, XXXIV Sermons . . . Whereunto, Is Now Added a Sermon [Ad Clerum], Printed by a Correct Copy under the Authors Own Hand, 5th ed. rev. (London, 1671), where the point, once made on the title page, is underscored in some copies on its verso, “Now published in his own copy.” See also James Ussher, A Body of Divinity, or the Summe and Substance of Christian Religion, 3rd ed. (London, 1640), title-page notation; and cf. James Ussher, A Body of Divinity, Of the Summe and Substance of Christs Religion, 6th ed. (London, 1670), title-page notation. 5. See the trilogy of children’s science fiction, His Dark Materials, by Philip Pullman, especially the third book of the series, The Amber Spyglass (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000). 6. John Carey, Milton (London: Evans Brothers, 1969), [7]. 288 Notes to Pages xiii–xix 7. See both William Riley Parker, Milton’s Debt to Greek Tragedy in “Samson Agonistes” (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1937), and Samuel S. Stollman, “Milton’s Samson and the Jewish Tradition,” Milton Studies 3 (1971): 185–200. 8. Jeffrey Shoulson, Milton and the Rabbis: Hebraism, Hellenism, and Christianity (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 2001), 244–45. 9. Lewalski, The Life of John Milton, 523–24. 10. See John Trapp, Theologica Theologiae, The True Treasure; or a Treasury of Holy Truths (London, 1641), 115; John Weemes, The Christian Synagogue (London, 1623), 30–37, 49; Richard Simon, A Critical History of the Old Testament, tr. Richard Hampden (London, 1682), pt. 2, 31; and Simon Patrick, A Discourse about Tradition Shewing What Is Meant by It (London, 1683), 36. 11. See George Whitehead and William Penn, “Concerning the Scriptures ,” in A Serious Apology for the Principles and Practices of the People Call’d Quakers (London, 1671), 50. 12. Archibald Lovell, “The Translatour to the Reader,” in Richard Simon, The Critical History of the Religions and Customs of the Eastern Nations (London, 1685), A2. 13. See John Owen, Certain Treatises (London, 1649), A3. 14. See Simon Patrick, A Discourse about Tradition, 10 (also 11), 32, 33. 15. See Dayton Haskin, Milton’s Burden of Interpretation (Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), xv; see also xvi; and both J. B. Sanson de Pongerville and Louis Raymond de Véricour in Harry Redman Jr., Major French Milton Critics of the Nineteenth Century (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1994), 185, 107. 16. Thomas M. Gorman, “The Reach of Human Sense: Surplus and Absence in Samson Agonistes,” Milton Studies, 39 (2000): 193, 200, 194. 17. See James Holstun, Ehud’s Dagger: Class Struggle in the English Revolution (London and New York: Verso, 2000), 345. 18. See Toni Morrison, Paradise (New York and Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), 18, 87. 19. See Walter Raleigh, Milton (1900; reprint, New York: Benjamin Blom, 1967), 85. 20. See Shawcross, The Uncertain World of “Samson Agonistes,” 100, 93, 95; see also 85. 21. See J. Martin Evans, The Miltonic Moment (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998), 117–32; Phillip J. Gallagher, Milton, the Bible, and Misogyny, ed. Eugene R. Cunnar and Gail L. Mortimer (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 1990), 131–70; Anthony Low, “Samson Agonistes and the ‘Pioneers of Aphasia’,” Milton Quarterly 25 (December 1991): 143–48; and Alan Rudrum, “Discerning the Spirit in Samson Agonistes,” in “All in All”: Unity, Diversity, and the Miltonic Perspective, ed. Charles W. Durham and Kristin A. Pruitt (Selinsgrove, Pa.: Susquehanna University Press, and London: Associated University Presses, 1999), 245–46, 249, 254. 22. I borrow...