Shifting Contexts: Reinterpreting Samson Agonistes

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Preface I Shifting Contexts II Shifting Contexts Medieval & Renaissance Literary Studies General Editor: Albert C. Labriola Advisory Editor: Foster Provost Editorial Board: Judith H. Anderson Diana Treviño Benet Donald Cheney Ann Baynes Coiro Mary T. Crane Patrick Cullen A. C. Hamilton Margaret P. Hannay A. Kent Hieatt William B. Hunter Michael Lieb Thomas P. Roche Jr. Mary Beth Rose John M. Steadman Humphrey Tonkin Susanne Woods DUQUESNE UNIVERSITY PRESS Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Shifting Contexts Reinterpreting Samson Agonistes Joseph Wittreich IV Shifting Contexts Copyright © 2002 Duquesne University Press All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced, in any manner whatsoever, except in the case of short quotations for use in critical articles or reviews, without the written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Wittreich, Joseph Anthony. Shifting contexts: reinterpreting Samson Agonistes / Joseph Wittreich. p. cm. — (Medieval and Renaissance literary studies) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8207-0331-1 (hardcover) 1. Milton, John, 1608–1674. Samson Agonistes. 2. Samson (Biblical judge) — In literature. 3. Judges in literature. 4. Bible — In literature. I. Title. II. Series. PR3566 .W56 2002 822'.4 — dc21 2002001653 First eBook edition, 2011 ISBN 978-0-8207-0526-2 Preface V for Stuart Curran “things through thee take nobler form” — Ralph Waldo Emerson VI Shifting Contexts the story survives its immediate occasion and the loss of some of the senses it originally carried. It enters a future wherein it bears a burden of meanings not necessarily independent of the old, but more accessible and more necessary. Such, at any rate, is the history of interpretation not unduly constricted by an institutional scholarship so repressive as to propose for its sole hermeneutic aim the “single correct interpretation.” — Frank Kermode the Hebrews will write their own version of Samson’s story. In that version, he will be the innocent hand of God’s vengeance, and I will be a lying, avaricious seducer; at best a tool for fulfilling the words of their prophets. Truth may be written by poets, but history is written by the victors. And it looks like the Hebrews are going to win this one. — Dorothy Bryant’s Delilah But there are evidently for Milton other bonds with other texts and other traditions; there are other cultural systems to which he seems sometimes to be no less engaged. . . . In the end what we have is a case of “radical translation,” of a brave attempt to “resituate the text within an alien conceptual framework.” — Harold Fisch ...