Samson Agonistes

Just a quick one to excuse the gap in entries. In part it's due to a very bad case of 'flu that left me unable to do much in the way of anything. However, I did manage to meet with my supervisor last week and she told me that I'm going to have to read what I've always feared reading: Milton.

I read Samson Agonistes and sections of Paradise Lost during my undergraduate days but it never stuck with me and consequently much of what I'm reading now feels as though I'm reading it with fresh eyes. How does one read Milton for the first time? What's striking me most of all is Milton's devotion to the classical in his discussion of Biblical figures, which nicely reflects contemporary debates about classical vs. Biblical education. After all, could a Christian country rightly heroify classical figures? Even leaving aside issues regarding the non-Christian's soul, classical culture simply, and necessarily, had a different set of morals to seventeenth-century Christan culture.


Bearing this in mind, I think that Milton's framing of the Biblical story of Samson as a Greek tragedy is highly interesting. One is left with a feeling that Samson's life has been wasted, rather than filled with admiration for his defeat of the Philistines. His destruction of the temple is not a glorious victory but rather the last act of a man on the brink of defeat.


Reading Milton has also made me consider the inevitable "fatal flaw" of all heroes, the thing about them that makes them imperfect in some way and often leads to their downfall. Achilles had his heel; Lancelot had his love for Guinevere; Othello had his jealousy; Hamlet had his procrastinationary nature. Leading on from this, I was reminded of Charles I's conviction of the divine right of king's in the following lines from SA:

I might begin Israel's deliverance,
The work to which I was divinely called. (225-6)

I am not sure how intentional this was on Milton's part. Traditionally Samson's Achilles heel has been his inability to see the treachery of Delilah. In SA Samson's physical blindness has a direct parallel with his emotional blindness. However, less obviously, the theme of Samson's pride also runs throughout the play. God gave Samson his strength in his hair, he tells us, to remind him of the "lightness" of his power, and he is punished when he takes it for granted - but perhaps he is still not entirely cured of his vanity.