Page:The Complete Poetical Works of John Milton.djvu/325

 SAMSON AGONISTES

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��The story of Samson was, as has been before stated (introductory biography, p. xxxi.), one of those to which Milton gave attention after his return from Italy, while he was in search of a subject for a great epic or drama. At that time, apparently, he considered it little, since the jottings are unaccompanied by any hints as to treat- ment. He did, however, look at five phases of Samson's history, as is indicated by the note: "Samson Pursophorus, or Hybristes, or Samson Marrying, or Ramath-Lechi, Judges xv., Dagonalia, Judges xvi." Sam- son Pursophorus, or the Bearer of the Fire- brand, would have dealt with the hero's exploit of firing the corn ; Samson Hy- bristes, or the Violent, with his bearing away of the gates of Gaza, or some similar action of disdain for his Philistine foes; Samson Marrying, with his earlier life, and his marriage with the woman of Timnath; Ramath-Lechi, with his slaughter of the Philistines at Lehi; Dagonalia, with his destruction of the temple and his death. When, about 1667, Milton's mind again recurred to this subject, he saw a double reason for choosing the last of these epi- sodes. Samson's story, continued to its last stage, offered a striking parallelism with his own; and besides this personal reason for the selection, there was the ob- vious artistic one, that the last subject held in solution the other four. Besides being in itself a unified action, with a magnifi- cent climax, and hence naturally adapted to dramatic treatment, it also carried along with it a great fund of previous story, to be drawn upon at the dramatist's will for the purpose of enriching the rather meagre

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��action with semi-narrative episodes. The exact nature of the drama which Milton proposed to write made this circumstance one of vital importance.

Even in the days of Comus, even when praising Jonson's learned sock and Shake- speare's wild wood-notes, Milton seems never to have had a real sympathy for the English stage. Since that time, the stage had degenerated rapidly, until the closing of the theatres in 1642 by decree of the Long Parliament. When they reopened at the Restoration it was to produce a spe- cies of cynical comedy even more hateful to the Puritan sense than the morbid trage- dies of Ford upon which they had closed. Never in sympathy with the type of drama to which he found the stage pledged, Mil- ton was now removed by all conceivable motives from the desire to produce an act- ing play. He was left free, therefore, from the restrictions of stage-craft; and he took advantage of that freedom to give his work a kind of interest inadmissible except in the closet-drama, but often very effective there. To the purely dramatic episode of Samson's death he added, by way of remi- niscence on Samson's part or on the part of the Chorus, the epic material which lay in Samson's life up to the time of his fall- ing prisoner to the Philistines. Almost every episode of that life, from his birth onward, is touched upon; and the immedi- ate action goes on against a background of past events which add incalculably to its dignity and pathos. The meagreness of its action has been frequently objected to in Samson Agonistes the objection leaves out of account the peculiar type of drama which it represents. We have said that Paradise Regained is a kind of disguised

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