Page:The Complete Poetical Works of John Milton.djvu/326

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��SAMSON AGONISTES

��drama, a dramatic epic; it is equally true that Samson Agonistes holds in solution a large amount of narrative not directly con- nected with the development, but serving to light up the hero's character, that it is, in other words, a kind of epical drama. The mighty central figure is made to loom before our imagination not only by the pure dramatist's device of appropriate ac- tion, but by the narrative poet's one might almost say the novelist's devices of cumulative incident, illustration, and comment.

So much for Milton's selection of the closet over the stage drama. His selec- tion of the classic form over the romantic was inevitable. In the first place, the trage- dies of Greece and Rome did not lie under the stigma of disgrace with which Puritan- ism had marked the modern play; at least it was possible for Milton to shed over the ancient forms of tragedy the hallowing association of such names as Plutarch, St. Paul, and Gregory Nazianzen, though perhaps the elaborateness of his apology proves that he did not consider himself, even when following in the footsteps of Sophocles, safe from the attacks of zeal- ous brethren. His original bias toward the classic form, shown in the drafts of plays which he made in 1640-41, had naturally strengthened with age. The turbulence and vividness of romantic drama could only be distasteful to the blind, defeated man of sixty; but into the suppression, the low-keyed passion, of ancient tragedy, he could throw the daily accents of his own heart. Goethe, reading Samson Agonistes in his old age, could find no words adequate to praise it. It is, indeed, as Dr. Garnett observes, an old man's play. The grim- ness, the grey imminence of Fate, which lies upon ancient tragedy even in its lighter moods, is here reenforced by the mood of a mind fallen upon evil days, when the pitcher is about to be broken at the foun- tain.

With regard to the famous " three uni-

��ties " of Aristotelian criticism, Milton allows himself no liberties; so far, at least, as two of them are concerned, there can be no question. " Unity of time " prescribes that the events of a play should cover a space of not more than twenty-four hours; the action of Samson Agonistes begins at sun- rise, and ends about noon, covering, there- fore, six or eight hours at the most. "Unity of place" is as strictly observed, since the whole action passes in front of the prison at Gaza. " Unity of action " prescribes that the action shall be " com- plete and single" (irpais /Ja re at c(A.7j). This of course excludes at once the un- derplot of the Elizabethans, an accessory which Milton unequivocally condemns as " the poet's error of intermixing comic stuff with tragic sadness and gravity, or introducing trivial and vulgar persons; which by all judicious hath been accounted absurd, and brought in without discretion, corruptly to gratify the people." It does not exclude episodical material, provided that such material ie organically connected with the development of the climax, to- ward which classical tragedy was expected to move unswervingly from the beginning. In this particular, Samson Agonistes has not escaped criticism; consideration of the points involved will be taken up in the analysis of the play below.

The chorus of Samson is structurally different from the choruses of classical tragedy. Milton describes it as "mono- strophic or, rather, apolelymenon, without regard had to strophe, antistrophe, and epode, which were a kind of stanzas framed only for the music, then used with the Chorus that sung; not essential to the poem, and therefore not material." By discarding the division into balanced strophe and antistrophe, and substituting instead a form of verse entirely unhampered even by rhyme or by fixed line-length, Milton has abandoned the letter in order to follow the spirit of the classic chorus; for the free- dom of the form allows the Chorus to con-

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