‘Exiled from Light’: Divine Law, Morality and Violence in Milton's ‘Samson Agonistes’ by Derek N.C. Wood (review)

390 letters in canada 2001 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 response to his bastardy. There is also a wearying amount of paraphrase along with a good deal of unsupportable speculation about the characters (for example, do Goneril and Regan know in advance who Cordelia=s husband is to be? How could we know?). Nobody would disagree that Lear comes, through his suffering, to a greater insight about this great stage of fools, but one may doubt the claim that the play presents >a portrayal of the birth of philosophy,= particularly since Lear=s penultimate vision, of himself and Cordelia like birds in a cage, God=s spies, is such a foolish illusion in the circumstances. And when Craig finally divulges the key to the play, it will open almost any door: the play is >Shakespeare=s most powerful illustration of the appearance-reality problem.= Much briefer accounts of Othello, The Winter=s Tale, and Measure for Measure occupy the last chapter, together with a discussion of Plato=s attack on poetry and its inapplicability to Shakespeare. I have ignored almost completely the 124 pages of endnotes, many of them peripheral or irrelevant. Rigorous editing was needed here! The book=s centre, really, is the discussions of Macbeth and King Lear, and I regret to report that I found these unsatisfactory. (ALAN SOMERSET) Derek N.C. Wood. >Exiled from Light=: Divine Law, Morality and Violence in Milton=s >Samson Agonistes= University of Toronto Press. xxii, 248. $55.00 The chief difficulty with Samson Agonistes is Samson=s final slaughter of the Philistines. When Samson pulls down the temple of Dagon, does he act in accordance with God=s will or does he indulge in a pointless act of murderous suicide? This question, which has long divided critics, has assumed new moral urgency after the terrible events of 11 September 2001. Most Miltonists have tried to reconcile Samson=s violence with Christian morality, but some notable voices (William Empson, Irene Samuel, John Carey, Joseph Wittreich) have insisted that Samson=s final act is ethically horrible. Derek N.C. Wood, who repeatedly describes Samson as >brutal,= shares the latter view. Wood=s aim is to rescue Milton from Samson=s brutality. His chief obstacle is Hebrews 11:32, which names Samson as a hero of faith. For many Miltonists, that is enough to settle the question of Milton=s intentions. Wood tries to get around the problem by pointing out that Hebrews 11 does not exalt Samson as a hero of Christian faith. On the contrary, St Paul >insists on the difference between these heroes of old, and us.= Paul=s point in Hebrews is that God has >provided some better thing for us.= Wood identifies this >better thing= as charity. Samson=s tragedy is that he knows nothing of Christ. He is true to his lights, but is >exiled from xxxxxxx humanities 391 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 light.= Samson when he utters these words is ostensibly referring to his physical blindness, but Wood thinks that his words have a deeper meaning. Samson=s true blindness, he argues, is spiritual, not physical: >Unseeing, unknowing, he can only cry out hopelessly for the light.= Wood differs from Samuel, Empson, Carey, and Wittreich in one key respect. Where those critics boldly read against the grain, Wood prefers to invoke >the hermeneutics of uncertainty.= He argues that Samson Agonistes is deliberately and pointedly ambiguous. The word >indeterminacy= runs like a refrain through these pages. Wood=s prose is usually clear and eloquent, but it sometimes lapses into obfuscation, as when we are told that >Samson Agonistes is about the nature of reading itself and it is about the meaning of meaning.= Statements like this detract from the book=s real strength, which is its moral fervour. Moral fervour is too valuable an asset to be squandered on verbose evasions. But Wood has some real triumphs. He is most convincing when he reminds us that Samson is modelled on Greek tragedy, a genre that famously gives voice to both sides of an ethical issue. With justice, Wood chides >orthodox= Miltonists for their ignorance of...