Samson's Death by Theater and Milton's Art of Dying *

Dennis Kezar

In everything else there may be sham: the fine reasonings of philosophy may be a mere pose in us; or else our trials, by not testing us to the quick, give us a chance to keep our face always composed. But in the last scene, between death and ourselves, there is no more pretending . . . In judging the life of another, I always observe how it ended . . . all the other actions of our life must be tried and tested by this last act.

Montaigne, Essais ¹

To die is to be counterfeit.

Falstaff, 1 Henry IV ²

Breath inward comforts to his heart, and affoord him the power of giving such outward testimonies thereof, as all that are about him may derive comforts from thence, and have this edification, even in this dissolution . . .

John Donne, Devotion 17 ³

O, Death's a great disguiser.

Vincentio, Measure for Measure ⁴

In a highly theatrical culture that also invests a great deal of ideological energy in questions of soteriology, one is not surprised to find death privileged as a uniquely authentic and revelatory drama: a faithful picture of "that within" somehow past "show" and unobscured by "actions that a man might play." ⁵ But the very inescapability of theater in the Renaissance creates problems of authenticity for the actors of this drama and interpretive anxieties for its spectators. On a stage inhabited by the likes of Falstaff and the first Thane of Cawdor (the latter dying "As one that had been studied in his death"), nothing guarantees that a man will perform his last act with any more authenticity or biographical integrity than mark his countless preceding acts. ⁶ [End Page 295] Mortal drama does not necessarily provide transparency; its actors might counterfeit and its spectators misconstrue. In Robert Browning's "Fra Lippo Lippi," the medieval advice to the painter may echo with a consummation still devoutly wished in the early modern period: "Give us no more body than shows soul!" ⁷ But to such a representational theory we must add the interpretive doubts (here voiced by Macbeth's Duncan) produced by Renaissance theatricality itself: "There's no art / To find the mind's construction in the face." ⁸

In an effort to keep the theater of death epistemologically viable, the Renaissance did in fact offer many forms of such an art, providing self-representational ground rules for the dying actor and hermeneutic guidelines for the living spectators. Casuistical tracts, consolatory treatises, heavily glossed accounts of the deaths of martyrs and reprobates, and especially the ars moriendi or art of dying literature that provided the period with its ultimate conduct books--all provided theatrical conventions whereby the dying could present themselves as interpretively accessible to the living. For reasons I shall try to make clear, the theatrical conventions of the Renaissance art of dying must be adduced to Milton's interpretively vexed play if we are to appreciate the historicity of Samson Agonistes's representation of both dying and the hermeneutics of dying. First, though, I wish to explain why this essay begins by rehearsing the faith and skepticism invited by the Renaissance theater of death and its utterly displayed, yet utterly inscrutable, subject. Recalling this epistemological tension can help us understand not only Milton's dramatic transactions with seventeenth-century history, but also the central debate shaping Samson Agonistes's recent and still unfolding critical history.

To a degree unmatched by any other Renaissance play, the critical history of Samson Agonistes records a preoccupation with the interpretation of its hero's death. Manoa's crucial question, "How died he?" speaks at some level for every interpretation of the play. ⁹ But if, as I will argue, Milton achieved this interpretive focus by deliberately designing the play to be recognizable as an art of dying, it is less clear that his text presents what the Chorus calls "self-satisfying solution" (SA, 306). After all, Samson Agonistes proves fatal to those spectators who directly witness the event defined as the play's central interpretive moment. Countless passages, moreover, remind us of the eye's vulnerability and epistemological limitations:

         why was the sight
To such a tender ball as the eye confined? [End Page 296]
So obvious and so easy to be quenched,
And not as feeling through all parts diffused,
That she might look at will through every pore?

(SA, 93-97)

If the play reminds us of the interpreter's liability to aporia, moreover, it also challenges us with the impossibility of representing a subject as inward as the human soul: "For inward light alas / Puts forth no visual beam" (SA, 162-63). The solutions that have been offered to such challenges define the two broad interpretive categories under which much of the play's criticism falls: one asserts that Samson Agonistes represents more than meets the eye; the other claims that in Milton's play what we see is what we get. The former assumption underlies the more traditional regenerationist and typological readings of Samson Agonistes, which invoke the protagonist's deepening insight and the play's biblio-historical foresight, respectively, as heuristic guides to dramatic structure and imagery. The latter informs more recent skeptical or revisionist readings of Samson Agonistes, which assert the total unreliability of all its characterological perspectives; the causal indeterminacy that renders Samson's words, actions, and "rousing motions" (SA, 1382) radically inscrutable; and the essential ambiguity of all things visible in a play that converts all interpretation into groundless speculation, a play that leaves us feeling as though we have watched Hamlet in the dark. The former allows us confidently to read Samson's death as a proto-martyr's definitive act; the latter accepts our inability ever to pronounce with confidence on this performance.

Illuminating as the exchange between these scholarly semichoruses continues to be, it also tends to prescribe and limit the terms of our discussion of Samson Agonistes, often eliding the prior question of Milton's purpose in simultaneously inviting us to interpret an act of dying, and presenting us with an apparent "absence of . . . intelligibility that . . . disables us at what is supposed to be its climactic moment." ¹⁰ Thus Barbara Kiefer Lewalski calls for our cards upfront: "anyone who would join--or rejoin--this critical debate at this juncture should declare his or her assumptions at the outset." ¹¹ Before joining "this critical debate," I want to ask how and why Milton might have produced it. Both the regenerationist and skeptical analyses of the events culminating in Samson's death represent symptoms of an undiagnosed crisis--the crisis of soteriology that makes the interpretation of his death such an imperative.

This diagnosis will involve two steps. First, I will try to contextualize Milton's play within a set of literary conventions and cultural practices [End Page 297] specifically devoted to the representation and evaluation of death in the Renaissance. In the diverse ars moriendi literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, we find the roles of dying actors and living spectators, the rules for the theater of death, most clearly and self-consciously defined; and it is with reference to some specific cases of the Protestant art of dying that we can provide some overlooked generic contexts, perhaps even some intertextual coordinates, for Samson Agonistes. ¹² One consequence of this alignment will be a clarification of several conventions by which the play invites a regenerationist reading. Secondly, however, I will argue that the increased scrutiny, even satire, to which the ars moriendi conventions were subjected in the late English Renaissance can help to explain the ambiguity with which these conventions appear in Milton's text. The skeptical response to Samson Agonistes need not be a postmodern phenomenon; rather, it can and should be historicized with reference to the representational and interpretive problems posed by the Renaissance ars moriendi--and posed, as we shall see, by Milton himself in his skeptical response to that royal art of dying, Eikon Basilike. But first we must recognize the ways in which Samson Agonistes asks to be read as an art of dying, for it is only by recognizing those conventions which the play ultimately complicates that we can coordinate our entrenched regenerationist/skeptical debate with Milton's history.

"To visitants a gaze": Reading Samson Conventionally

In his famous complaint that Milton's play "must be allowed to want a middle, since nothing passes between the first act and the last, that either hastens or delays the death of Samson," Dr. Johnson provided regenerationist readers of Samson Agonistes with a point of contention and skeptics with a point d'appui. ¹³ The play's wanting middle has thus become an inherited crux; "the death of Samson" continues to strike many as an apparent non sequitur or mystery of motivation. When the play is read against the ars moriendi conventions it seems crafted to evoke, however, Johnson's Aristotelian objection proves an analytical red herring. For the arts of dying familiar to the Renaissance reader were concerned from the first with ending, almost exclusively beginning in extremis. Limited in scope to "the fifth act" of a central figure's life--beyond which (to quote Milton's remarks on tragedy that preface the play) "the whole drama" was "not produced"--the art of dying's mimetic emphasis on "the passions well imitated" designated the busy deathbed as the focus of activity and interpretive attention, represented the dying man as the observed of all observers, and defined those attending him as [End Page 298] participants in a Visitatio infirmi. ¹⁴ In such works, the causality Johnson considers dramatically essential might apply to the dying man's final choices and his corresponding spiritual conversion, or to the life--preceding the represented action--that necessitates and informs his repentance. But death itself, in the ars moriendi (as in a morality play such as Everyman, similarly liable to Johnson's complaint), was less an effect than an imminence or dramatic donnée; the object of the dying man's choice was not life or death, but how to die well; the plot consisted of choosing this good death, the denouement of its achievement, and verification by spectators. ¹⁵

From this generic point of view Stanley Fish's startling claim that Samson's death is "the best of all possible things, the thing everyone in the play most desires" proves both appropriate and illuminating: Milton's drama is indeed a mortality play, a play that requires Samson's death as it seeks to ascribe to him a narratable life. ¹⁶ For the characters who attempt to witness his dying and provide this narrative, interpretation takes a peculiar form of anatomy; the Danites seem to desire "no more of body than shows soul." Such observations must be referred to the ars moriendi tradition, however, if they are to distinguish between the remarkably idiosyncratic and the conventional. Before dwelling upon what seems strange to us in Milton's play, we should consider what would have been familiar for his contemporary audience.

The seventeenth-century reader of Samson Agonistes might have recognized several resemblances to the earliest xylographic arts of dying--pre-Reformation works that remained extant in Protestant England. Indeed "the dying one," one of several possible Renaissance readings of Samson's epithet, suggests "Moriens," the participial name ascribed to the protagonist of the first ars moriendi block books and tracts. ¹⁷ And though the image of a man attacked by a series of temptations and comforted by a series of inspirations is a literary device as old as the Book of Job, it was the ars moriendi that located this agon specifically at the deathbed--in a few instances representing even the dying man's wife as an instrument of temptation. ¹⁸ The recumbent figure of Samson--"afflicted" by Harapha and Dalila, and administered "Counsel or consolation" (SA, 183) by the Danites--vaguely conjures the stage picture of Moriens, lying below a diabolic and angelic contest for his soul. But the externalized psychomachia of the late medieval arts of dying is hardly the most apposite model for Milton's interior drama.

A closer analogue appears in those Protestant artes moriendi responsive to the Reformation's critique of such ceremonial dying. Despite the fact that this critique, as David W. Atkinson has observed, sought to [End Page 299] deemphasize the ritualized hora mortis as determinate of a man's spiritual status, it nevertheless developed--under the influence of Calvinism--its own set of formalized criteria for judging the election or reprobation of a dying man. ¹⁹ Samson, whose fear and fate is to lie "to visitants a gaze" (SA, 567), becomes the object of an interpretive scrutiny remarkably similar to that directed toward "the morphology of conversion" in such post-Reformation works. ²⁰ We can understand the interpretive frenzy surrounding Samson's body as it approaches the "double darkness" (SA, 593) of death, in fact, as an exercise in the hermeneutics of election--an exercise that becomes all the more clear when we compare Samson Agonistes with the most popular art of dying in the English Renaissance.

Thomas Becon's The Sick Man's Salve (1561)--a Calvinist closet drama concerned, like Foxe's Acts and Monuments (1563), with teaching Protestants how to interpret the semiotics of election at the moment of death--reveals some of the strongest affinities between Samson Agonistes and the ars moriendi tradition. ²¹ Becon's dramatic treatise begins with a group of Puritan burghers (Philemon, Eusebius, Theophile, and Christopher) preparing to visit a biblically named Moriens (Epaphroditus). ²² Like Samson, Epaphroditus initially laments his condition in a foregrounded complaint while his approaching visitants discuss his case among themselves in a parodos. Concluding his soliloquy with a catalogue of physical ailments that includes his wasted strength and failing eyesight, Epaphroditus asks, "What other thing am I than a dead corpse breathing?" (SMS, 94). Near the end of his own Jobean soliloquy, Samson declares himself "a living death," a self-sepulchred "moving grave" awaiting only the "privilege of death and burial" (SA, 100, 102, 104). (Indeed, the submerged literalism of this self-identification may lend special point to Harapha's insult that the "assassinated" Samson "has need much washing to be touched" [SA, 1107], since such ablution--as Manoa later makes clear [SA, 1725-28] --is best performed with the body still warm.) ²³ A brief bout of aphasia grips both Epaphroditus and Samson when they are joined by their visitants. ²⁴ The prostrate figure of Epaphroditus, who "cannot hold up [his] head for weakness" (SMS, 94), resembles Samson lying "at random," "With languished head unpropped" (SA, 119); Epaphroditus complains that "The sorrows of death have compassed me round" (SMS, 159), while Samson enjoins his friends to see "How many evils have enclosed me round" (SA, 194); and both sprawled spectacles elicit elegiac commonplaces from startled witnesses who have known these men in better times: "What a sudden change is this! . . . O what a change [End Page 300] is this, yea, and that within two days," declares Philemon as he beholds his "neighbor's agony" (SMS, 94-95); "O change beyond report, thought, or belief!" (SA, 117) cries the Chorus of Samson's "friends and neighbours" over his dejected body--a prologue to Manoa's "O miserable change! is this the man . . .?"(SA, 340). Becon's comforters conceive Epaphroditus's case as a predictive reflection of their own: "For in you, as in a clear mirror, we behold ourselves, and see what shall become of us hereafter" (SMS, 185). Milton's Chorus similarly describes Samson as a "mirror of our fickle state" (SA, 164).

Such rhetoric and imagery may be as ubiquitous as the ubi sunt? and de casibus traditions from which both authors draw; and the Danites' lamentation may at the most obvious level bewail Samson's fall from national heroism into blindness and servile captivity, not his approaching death. But like Epaphroditus, who feels within himself "present tokens of death" as his "body grows weaker and weaker" (SMS, 185), Samson's physical suffering portends a literal death well before he makes his end in the Philistine theater:

So much I feel my genial spirits droop,
My hopes all flat, nature within me seems
In all her functions weary of herself;
My race of glory run, and race of shame,
And I shall shortly be with them that rest.

(SA, 594-98)

As Adam and Eve are forced, at the Expulsion, to determine "where to choose / Their place of rest" Samson's entire drama moves him toward the choice of a final resting place (PL, 12.646-47). Where to die and how--that is the question. Where and how can Samson "quit himself like Samson" and heroically finish "A life heroic" (SA, 1709-11)--constructing the tautologies necessary for a coherent subject of death? "Bed-rid" and "unemployed" at his earthly father's house (SA, 579-80); folded within the annihilating "leisure and domestic ease" of Dalila's "widowed bed" (SA, 917, 806); or "dispense[d] with" by God "For some important" though undisclosed "cause" (SA, 1377, 1379)? Such paralyzing uncertainties and their attendant doubt and despair constitute the central passion that Johnson mistook for the omitted middle action of Samson Agonistes. Later in this essay we will consider Samson's final response to this passion--his "resolution" to "go along" with the Officer to the Dagonalia (SA, 1410, 1384)--as consonant with the one "great act" (SA, 1389) required of the subject of the ars moriendi. But first we must recognize that this passional aspect of Samson's agony designates [End Page 301] him as a Moriens, a dying man, and thus a spectacular object of intense interpretive interest to the Renaissance reader. Further reference to Becon's work reveals the roles played by spectators in the Puritan art of dying--conventional roles approximated by those who attend and scrutinize Samson's drama.

For both Epaphroditus and Samson, physical suffering signals a more fundamental and "more intense" crisis of conscience that their visitants attempt to address. Philemon invokes the "God of all consolation" as Epaphroditus's "grievously vexed, troubled, and disquieted conscience" creates "a very hell within [his] breast" (SMS, 156); reminding him of the divinely proffered "salve against this plague" (SMS, 106), Philemon counsels a "quiet conscience" for Epaphroditus's deliverance "out of this agony" (SMS, 160). Like Milton's Satan--whose conscience much more literally and irredeemably locates "Hell within him" through "the bitter memory / Of what he was, what is" (PL, 4.20, 24-25)--Samson's malady moves inward as he contemplates "what once I was, and what am now" (SA, 22):

O that torment should not be confined
To the body's wounds and sores
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
But must secret passage find
To the inmost mind,
There exercise all his fierce accidents,
And on her purest spirits prey,
As on entrails, joints, and limbs,
With answerable pains, but more intense,
Though void of corporal sense
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Thoughts my tormentors armed with deadly stings
Mangle my apprehensive tenderest parts.

(SA, 606-7, 610-16, 623-24)

With characteristic incrementality, the Chorus proposes to comfort Samson by finding the same "secret passage" gained by his torment:

We come thy friends and neighbours not unknown
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
To visit or bewail thee, or if better,
Counsel or consolation we may bring,
Salve to thy sores, apt words have power to 'suage
The tumours of a troubled mind,
And are as balm to festered wounds.

(SA, 180, 182-86) [End Page 302]

Applying the medicinal metaphor of Becon's treatise (and of its many obvious imitations, such as William Perkins's The Salve for a Sicke Man [1595]), the Danites seek to minister not to a body, finally, but to a mind.

For Epaphroditus and Samson, consolation takes the form of a narrative reconciliation of past and present--two states separated by a disjunctive "change" (seemingly "beyond report, thought, or belief") that threatens to throw their lives into unintelligibility. Of course in theory those branches of Protestantism most opposed to mediation urged that the patient, in such cases, minister to himself. But in practice the Puritan way of death (and Calvinist soteriology) demanded public intelligibility, if not of an "unsearchable" God, then at least of His ways to dying members of the "solemnly elected" (SA, 1746, 678). However dubious doctrine rendered assurance, however private and inscrutable the terms of salvation were conceived, both the "internal peace" of the dying man and the "calm of mind" (SA, 1344, 1758) of those attending his death depended upon representing the spiritual condition of God's secretary as an open secret. ²⁵ Thus the Puritan "salve" that replaces Catholic extreme unction operates not as a salvific agent, but as an interpretive solvent. Thus healing takes the form of revealing; consolation becomes a mode of spectatorship, a surrogate performance for the divine witness who observes the formal logic and generic expectation of the Puritan ars moriendi: "Of a good life cometh a good end" (SMS, 99). Thus the spectator becomes an interpreter of the past life of the dying man, an analyst of his present state of mind, and a judge of the signs accompanying his death--asking eschatological versions of the question so crucial to, and put so bluntly by, Manoa: "How died he? death to life is crown or shame" (SA, 1579).

Camille Wells Slights has extensively and persuasively demonstrated that "in subject matter, structure, and language," the dynamic between Samson and his visitants "strongly resembles the prose cases of conscience in which English clergymen analyzed the workings of the Christian conscience"; and though her reading of Samson Agonistes does not consider the ars moriendi tradition, she suggestively illustrates the influence, on Milton's play, of Protestant casuistical authors who also contributed importantly to this tradition in England. ²⁶ In fact a work like Becon's reveals the special pertinence of the ars moriendi to Samson's case, and can provide a partial solution to the problem Slights encounters in trying to contextualize Samson Agonistes within a casuistical tradition less directly concerned with dying.

Much of The Sick Man's Salve falls within the casuistical program Slights identifies in Milton's play--the program of rehearsing the past [End Page 303] actions and present situation of a troubled man in an effort to detect a comforting and unifying pattern, vindicating evidence for his case of conscience. Philemon and his cohorts, for instance, discover "sure tokens" and "manifest arguments" for Epaphroditus's godliness by recounting his faithful participation as a churchman. Excusing his lack of good works, however, they "certify" his conscience by finding in his biography "evident testimony" of his election (SMS, 172, 185); and they alleviate his concern that he has "many times grievously offended the Lord . . . and broken his holy commandments" by judging that "This is no let unto your salvation" (SMS, 168). In Slight's analysis, the Chorus and Manoa participate in a similar process as they "tell and retell their versions of Samson's marriages, his exploits as a champion of Israel, and his bondage," helping the Nazarite negotiate the strictures of "legal debt" (SA, 313) and the contingencies of his own case. ²⁷ The Chorus's exculpatory pronouncement on Samson's conduct with the Philistines, "Thou never wast remiss, I bear thee witness" (SA, 239), thus begins an exegetical narrative that concludes with the announcement that God "to his faithful champion hath in place / Bore witness gloriously" (SA, 1751-52). But Slights concedes that the evidentiary, indeed legalistic, method of the traditional case of conscience does not adequately explain the ambiguity of Samson's "rousing motions" (the skeptics' trump):

Traditionally [in prose cases of conscience], the movement from general law to particular action proceeded by logical demonstration. In Milton's poetic drama, the transition is more complex, since the resolution of particular cases of conscience combines with the psychological recovery of the conscience, processes the casuists treat separately. After all of Samson's vocal debates and self-analysis, silence envelopes the crucial moments of his last decisions. He enunciates the concept of freedom from the letter of the law before he decides to accompany the officer, but the actual process of applying the concept to his own situation defies analysis. The "rousing motions" signal his breakthrough, but the respective roles of reason and divine grace remain mysterious. ²⁸

Though this passage appears in an essay that contributes strongly to the regenerationist reading of the play, its implications differ only in degree from Fish's willful suspension of belief: "there is no way to be confident those motions correspond to some communication that is occurring between [Samson] and God." ²⁹ While it is questionable whether the "confidence" Fish problematizes (by finding Samson's "rousing motions" indeterminate) can ever be fully enjoyed by a spectator, the ars moriendi offered conventions--with which I want to supplement Slights's reading--for witnessing such ambiguous movements with faith. [End Page 304]

An irony of many Protestant arts of dying is that, like many casuistical works, they seek to provide general rules while at the same time recognizing their potential inapplicability to specific cases. In one of its more reflective moments, Milton's Chorus similarly questions not only the utility of its own "apt words," but also the efficacy of the literary tradition that included the ars moriendi:

Many are the sayings of the wise
In ancient and in modern books enrolled;
Extolling patience as the truest fortitude;
And to the bearing well of all calamities,
All chances incident to man's frail life
Consolatories writ
With studied argument, and much persuasion sought
Lenient of grief and anxious thought,
But with the afflicted in his pangs their sound
Little prevails, or rather seems a tune,
Harsh, and of dissonant mood from his complaint

(SA, 652-62)

These lines introduce a choral meditation uncharacteristic for its theological doubt and for its sympathy with Samson's suffering; and its singularity may also be felt as a gentle anachronism (one wonders what "ancient" and "modern books" the Danites might consult in the dust and heat of the Old Testament). ³⁰ But the Chorus's historical perspective would certainly have been familiar to the Renaissance student of humanist consolation literature, for whom classical models were frequently assimilated with modern. ³¹ Moreover, the Chorus's shifted psychological perspective--from rigorist, formulaic comfort to a less restrained expression of shared grief--parallels a movement G. W. Pigman has traced in the elegies and consolatories of the English Renaissance. ³² Indeed, the Chorus's surprising critique of proverbial consolation in this passage might have struck the seventeenth-century student of the ars moriendi as entirely contemporary: in his "modern" Rule and Exercises of Holy Dying (1651), Jeremy Taylor observed that "Men that are in health are severe exactors of patience at the hands of them that are sicke, and they usually judge it not by terms of relation, between God and the suffering man; but between him and the friends that stand by the bed-side." Noting the dissonance often produced by too much "studied argument" in such cases, Taylor counsels against burdening a dying man's last hour with "knotty discourses of philosophy," recognizing with sympathy that, in extremis, "a Syllogisme makes our head ake." ³³ [End Page 305]

But Taylor's insight here is theological and epistemological as well: he realizes that the dying man moves beyond the register and "relation" of human intercession, beyond the probative logic of casuistry, beyond the realm of empiricism. Samson's Chorus similarly delimits its own effective and cognitive threshold by declaring the afflicted man remediless unless he experience a comfort necessarily inaccessible to spectators,

Unless he feel within
Some source of consolation from above;
Secret refreshings

(SA, 663-65)

In a passage with obvious relevance to Milton's play, Becon's work also reveals the limits of its own consolatory and interpretive program. Responding to a long homiletic performance by Philemon, Epaphroditus relates the passage of an event unwitnessed by any other character in the closet drama, an event whose cause and significance the dying man only intimates:

In the time of this your godly communication had with me, (the Lord my God be thanked for it!) I felt the heaviness, trouble, and disquietness of my conscience by little and little go away, and certain sweet motions of true and inward joy to arise in my heart. (SMS, 161)

It is after a long and far from clearly resolved casuistical debate over the Mosaic law and individual action, an exchange concluded with the Chorus protesting its diagnostic and prognostic incapacity ("How thou wilt here come off surmounts my reach" [SA, 1380]), that the object of interpretive comfort becomes the interpreting comforter in Samson Agonistes:

Be of good courage, I begin to feel
Some rousing motions in me which dispose
To something extraordinary my thoughts.

(SA, 1381-83)

Like Epaphroditus's "certain sweet motions," Samson's "rousing motions" are not a product or discovery of the human dialogue, the trial of interpretation, that they interrupt; nor are they an effect of the conscience or consciousness (the "thoughts") they influence. ³⁴ Tangible only to the sick men for whom so much analytical salve is spilt, they inhabit the interpretive blind spot of the ars moriendi, the private relation "between God" (the unmoved mover) "and the suffering man."

For a genre devoted to the "resolution" of such uncertainties through [End Page 306] discursive performance and revelatory spectacle, a conduct literature concerned with literally going through the motions of death, this invisibility may indeed seem to threaten impasse; and one may hear the frustration of Milton's Chorus (and not a few Miltonists) in George Herbert's complaint of his library's referential inadequacy at a similar moment: "Now I am here, what thou wilt do with me / None of my books will show." ³⁵ The period between Samson's "resolution" to depart (SA, 1390, 1410) and the Hebrew messenger's report of his death (SA, 1570)--the period during which the spectacle of collective interpretation moves completely beyond their view--does dislocate the Chorus and Manoa from their prescribed literary roles: the uncharacteristic speculations ascribed to the Danites in the omissa (SA, 1527-35, 1537), and the effects of this decontextualized passage itself, may reflect a disjointed narrative framework unable to assimilate the "noise" (SA, 1508) issued from the theater. ³⁶ But with the messenger's account of the "horrid spectacle" (SA, 1542) that is Samson's final act, the Chorus and Manoa regain both their interpretive "courage" and their purchase on the conventions of the ars moriendi. Indeed, they enter a mode of interpretation with which works such as Becon's stopped the gap created by the dying man's inaccessible inwardness: glossing the theatrical gestures of death in an effort at psychological and formal closure, an effort to comfort not the departed, but the surviving interpretive community.

The relation between the removed, news-starved Hebrews and their eyewitness messenger suggestively resembles that which William Haller has demonstrated between the author of Acts and Monuments and his historical sources: like Foxe, the Hebrews seek to translate a primary account into "a coherent narrative with a single sustained point of view," to integrate an independent document into a pre-existing literary form. ³⁷ Manoa's plans to "fetch" his son's mangled body home for burial, in fact, may suggest in their evocation of the martyrologist's famous title a desire to appropriate Samson generically:

        there will I build him
A monument, and plant it round with shade
Of laurel ever green, and branching palm,
With all his trophies hung, and acts enrolled
In copious legend

(SA, 1733-37, my emphasis)

The Chorus's concluding declaration similarly attempts to entomb the remnants of history within a monumental teleology, to subordinate tragic action to the providential rubric of the art of dying: [End Page 307]

All is best, though we oft doubt,
What the unsearchable dispose
Of highest wisdom brings about,
And ever best found in the close
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
His servants he with new acquist
Of true experience from this great event
With peace and consolation hath dismissed,
And calm of mind all passion spent.

(SA, 1745-48, 1755-58)

This closure may indeed seem to strain against the messenger's relatively objective report--which describes with "particular and distinct" detail the visual scene in the theater, but it leaves unglossed the import of Samson's meditation (SA, 1635-37) and the significance of his last words (SA, 1640-45). Only on the topic of Samson's doubtful death does the messenger contribute an evaluative note (SA, 1657), joining the play's Argument (SA, 79) and the Chorus's judgment (SA, 1664-68) in deeming it accidental. ³⁸ Otherwise, however, ambiguous gestures ("his arms on those two massy pillars," "with head a while inclined / And eyes fast fixed he stood, as one who prayed" [SA, 1633, 1636-37]) are left to speak for themselves, and to be spoken for by removed exegetes who try to stabilize the messenger's simile.

Such gestures are of course a staple in Foxe's retrospective analysis, which encloses the various dramas of history within the parentheses of Protestant England. ³⁹ But simple gestures also figure crucially in the ars moriendi, marking the moment when the dying man is converted entirely into a textual body and inscribed with imputed meaning, when the impulse to see and open up to show is replaced by a desire to close off and bury. In The Sick Man's Salve--a book first published by the future publisher of Acts and Monuments, a book whose author would become a character in Foxe's work--the mere report of Epaphroditus's last vague act (a raised hand) provides all the "outward sign and token" of his "faith and godly departure" (SMS, 189) required by Philemon. ⁴⁰ If, after the messenger's account, Manoa makes an interpretive leap by declaring that "Nothing is here for tears" since Samson died "With God not parted from him, as was feared" (SA, 1721, 1719), it is a leap familiar in such earlier texts. If, as Fish claims, the first untenably regenerationist reading of the play is that of Manoa and the Chorus--whose obituary consolidation and "peace and consolation" (SA, 1757) are constructed upon unsatisfactory evidence--Philemon's concluding provision "for the comely furniture of the burial," and his thanksgiving for the "everlasting [End Page 308] consolation" with which he and his friends depart, seem similarly suspect (SMS, 191). ⁴¹

Both closet dramas involve epistemological categories--the search for "ocular proof" and "auricular assurance"--much debated in Renaissance law, theater, and theology; but neither proves that a play (even one "never intended" for "the stage") is the thing for catching consciences or certifying godliness. ⁴² Neither offers any perspicacious or unambiguous revelation beyond the skepticism Manoa terms "fear." The preceding juxtapositions have shown only that Milton's characters operate within literary conventions inherited from the Protestant ars moriendi, conventions thus far unnoticed in criticism of the play. It remains to ask, however, what these conventions might have meant to the seventeenth-century author of Samson Agonistes, and why Milton might foster doubt in his audience whereas Becon clearly expects unironic communication between author, speaker (Philemon is both his pseudonym and chief raissoneur), and reader.

"Some Great Act": Reading Samson Skeptically

If Samson's epithet suggests "dying man," it also suggests "actor"; and indeed it was the conception of the dying man as actor that both pervaded the Renaissance art of dying and exposed it to anti-theatrical criticism. ⁴³ As Richard Macksey has observed, the ars moriendi is a genre that problematizes the authenticity of dying by codifying it as an iterable art, that blurs the historicity of a dying man's last actions and utterances by conferring upon them a transhistorical and "transtextual" status. ⁴⁴ Even the famous lines ascribed to Julius Caesar by Shakespeare, though they idealize an unrehearsed death, fall within the tradition of the Stoic contemplatio mortis--thereby preparing the Renaissance audience for his imminent assassination:

Cowards die many times before their deaths;
The valiant never taste of death but once. ⁴⁵

To Caesar's sharp distinction between a cowardly anticipation of death and a valiant, definitive encounter with it, however, the Renaissance responded with a self-conscious confusion of life and death. That confusion made explicit the latent tension (between agency and subjectedness, disingenuousness and authenticity) in the phrase "art of dying." We see this confusion in the Samson-like "living death" and "moving grave" of John Donne's final portrait, commissioned by a living poet proleptically wrapped in his winding sheet, "graving all his life." ⁴⁶ [End Page 309] We hear this confusion most clearly in Henry Vaughan's apparent rejoinder to Caesar, which defined holy dying as rehearsed, even pre-hearsed:

But the good man lies
Entombed many days before he dies. ⁴⁷

Donne's self-presentation, of course, had precedents not only in the death-in-life trope of Renaissance anamorphic painting, but also in late medieval tomb sculpture, which frequently juxtaposed living and dead figures, producing the visual effect of a moving grave; similarly, Vaughan's devotionalism echoes familiar memento mori and contemptus mundi themes. ⁴⁸ But a distinctive aspect of the Renaissance art of dying was its conflation with the obligations of the living, a conflation suggested by Adam's growing recognition of his fallen condition as "A long day's dying" (PL, 10.964), and by the De Doctrina Christiana's delineation of the several degrees of dying that precede physical death. ⁴⁹

One consequence of the increasingly vague relation between the ars moriendi and the ars vivendi was that dying, like so much else in early modern life, became a dramatically scripted affair--predicated upon earlier textual performances. It was upon the idea of a transhistorical and intertextual "register, with commentary, of diverse deaths" that Montaigne edified "the house of death" ("the continual work of our life"). ⁵⁰ This domicile, the last object of Renaissance self-fashioning, was thus also a fabric of constant imitation and referentiality--a theater in which the lines of earlier authors could be roughly appropriated, repeatedly practiced and delivered.

Indeed, one reply to the question left forcefully unanswered by skeptical readings of Samson Agonistes--How does Samson get from his initial decision not to accompany the Philistine officer to his sudden and apparently unmotivated resolution to follow him to the temple?--is that Milton's hero is prompted by such an anthologized script. ⁵¹ As I have argued elsewhere, the perplexing progression of Samson's utterances, from "I cannot come" to "I will not come" to "I with this messenger will go along" (SA, 1321, 1332, 1343, 1384), in fact echoes the verbal gradations of Shakespeare's Caesar in his response to a remarkably similar dramatic situation. ⁵² Such resemblances, however, can amplify skepticism: the attribution of Samson's final decision to "some important cause," for instance, appears even less determinate when compared with Caesar's simple explanation for his actions, "The cause is in my will"; and while the regenerationist reader might observe in this contrast [End Page 310] evidence of Samson's kenosis, it must be admitted that this process by definition (and particularly so in Samson's case) is difficult to ascribe to a speech act. ⁵³ Such subtle and relatively minor lexical correspondences can alert us to the evaluative difficulties presented by the establishment of a kind of curriculum mortis in the Renaissance. We need not apply the total skepticism of Patricia Parker--who finds Hamlet's "There's a divinity that shapes our ends" speech merely "a source of metaphors for dramatic structure, detached from belief or homiletic piety"--to acknowledge the elusive nature of allusion at such moments. ⁵⁴ How does one assess a verbal performance in which the constitution and revelation of selfhood consists of convention, in which claims of theological insight are phrased in the conned quotations of an actor preparing institutionally for the "great act" of death? Caesar, after all, can be played by anybody, as Polonius (who accounts himself "a good actor") suggests in his own prologue to death. ⁵⁵

For Ben Jonson--arguably the English playwright most sympathetic to anti-theatrical skepticism--the response to the potential hypokrisis of the art of dying, like his more general response to the pervasive histrionics of his culture, seems to have been satire. Volpone, for instance, can be read as a generic farce of the ars moriendi tradition, exposing in its vulpine title character and his central prop (a faux deathbed) the easily abused nexus between dying and acting. Much more specifically, Eastward Hoe's Quicksilver serves as a focal point for the skeptical reevaluation of two texts we have already associated with Samson Agonistes. But first this protean player--who delights in nothing more than "revel[ing] it in his prodigal similitude"--explicitly transforms the Samson story itself into a model of theatrical dissembling by investing himself, in an elaborate costuming scene, with the role of a reprobate Machiavellian hero:

I now am free; and now will justify
My trunks and punks: Avaunt dull flat-cap then,
Via, the curtain that shadowed Borgia;
There lie thou husk of my envassaled state.
I Samson now, have burst the Philistines' bands,
And in thy lap my lovely Dalila,
I'e lie and snore out my enfranchised state. ⁵⁶

Even for Quicksilver, this self-identification may seem bizarre. And yet his caricature of Samson as both riddling actor and uxorious sybarite merely burlesques the biographical ambiguity--the motivational opacity and dubious "marriage-choices" (SA, 420)--that puzzles Milton's [End Page 311] Danites as they attempt to believe that what Samson earlier "motioned" was "of God" (SA, 222). Quicksilver's parody sanctions a reading of the Samson story that Milton's characters are at pains to dismiss, the skeptical reading of Samson as an agonist (or actor) in a drama neither divine nor heroic. ⁵⁷ In his implausible fifth-act conversion, moreover, Quicksilver demonstrates how easily regeneration can be conned by such an actor if versed in the appropriate scripts and prepared to go through the right motions.

As related by a single eyewitness Quicksilver (now resembling Samson in his imprisoned, barbered state) proves a gifted student of Protestant dying, practiced in the art of mimetic conversion:

I never heard his like! He has cut his hair too. He is so well
given, and has such good gifts! He can tell you, almost all
the stories of the Book of Martyrs, and speak you all the
Sick Man's Salve without book.

(EH, 5.2.55-8)

Though Quicksilver (unlike Volpone) is not obviously revealed as an absolute fraud at the end of his play, and though its collaborative authorship complicates the interpretation of Eastward Hoe, a skeptical reading of this passage is certainly warranted by Jonson's treatment--elsewhere in his drama--of the feigned repentance of a theatrical pseudo-martyr. ⁵⁸ In Epicoene, for example, Lady Haughty proposes remedying Morose's malady with the textbooks that reformed Trusty's parents, provoking a Jonsonian riposte from Truewit:

Haughty. And one of 'hem, I know not which, was cured
        with the Sick Man's Salve, and the other with
        Greene's Groats-worth of Wit.
Truewit. A very cheap cure, madam. ⁵⁹

That the deathbed performance of one of Jonson's dramaturgical predecessors should here by treated as interchangeable with the belittled Sick Man's Salve, that a character like Quicksilver can nimbly shift from playing a debauched Samson to reciting the culturally dog-eared scripts of Becon and Foxe, suggests the skepticism with which such a legacy might be received. In Jonson's drama, the Renaissance house of death is shown to be a tiring house of "prodigal similitude"; what Freud described as the human capacity to confront dying with "the plurality of lives which we need" is exposed as role playing, the rote performance of precedent parts. ⁶⁰ [End Page 312]

After Jonson, one finds few critiques of the Renaissance's theatricalization of dying that isolate individual ars moriendi texts so specifically (though Acts and Monuments receives skeptical glances from several sides, including Milton's). ⁶¹ But Jonson's parodic invocation of the methods and authorities of the art of dying adumbrates a strategy Milton would put to polemic effect later in the seventeenth century. In what David Loewenstein has described as an "anti-theatrical" response to Charles's self-fashioned martyrdom in Eikon Basilike, Milton's Eikonoklastes represents the king as a kind of Quicksilver--stage-managing the fifth act of his life with the same hypocrisy that characterized his reign. ⁶² While readers tend to agree on the general deconstructive tactics of this response, however, the relation between Eikonoklastes and the iconic and theatrical tendencies in Milton's subsequent art has received less critical consensus. For Ernest Gilman, an earlier tension between Milton's iconoclastic left hand and poetic right was fully resolved by the composition of Samson Agonistes--"a 'blind' tragedy that culminates in the destruction of a theater." ⁶³ For Richard Helgerson, Milton's explosion of Charles's auto-iconography cleared the way for the poet's surreptitious appropriation of the king's self-presentational method. ⁶⁴

And yet the conception of Samson as a complete theatroclast--though employed by anti-theatrical writers such as William Prynne--does not respond to the theatricality of Milton's Samson, which Mary Ann Radzinowicz and Laura Lunger Knoppers have connected with the spectacular representation of Foxean martyrology. ⁶⁵ While Helgerson's intriguing thesis accounts for this theatricality, it does not allow for the possibility that in Samson Agonistes Milton continued the skeptical program begun in Eikonoklastes--that the play subjects to scrutiny (even as it dramatizes) the very process by which Charles fashioned himself into a martyr. The appeal of this possibility lies not only in the startling representational similarities between Charles's and Samson's agonies, but also in the fact that Milton's play calls into doubt the same theatrics of dying that his tract interrogates systematically. Recognizing the ars moriendi conventions in "The King's Book," and the complex nature of Milton's response to them, will help us understand the space between Chorus and author in Samson Agonistes as the skeptical distance required by this earlier critical encounter with the art of dying. Indeed, by reading Charles's literary and iconic representation of his agony as a "great show of piety," Milton conceded the semiotic and spectacular ambiguity that all dramatizations of death--including his own portrayal of Samson's "great act"--entail. ⁶⁶ [End Page 313]

To read Eikon Basilike through Samson Agonistes is to realize that much of the play's rhetoric and imagery was preempted by "The Portraiture of His Sacred Majesty in His Solitudes and Sufferings." ⁶⁷ Of course many of the general resemblances between the king's embattled situation and that of the betrayed, imprisoned Samson were analogies conferred by history. ⁶⁸ But the unsettling correspondence of the two texts can be ascribed not only to Charles's exploitation of the Judges narrative for his own storytelling, but also to Milton's apparent captivation--in his depiction of Samson--by the king's language. Nowhere is this captivation more apparent than those passages of Eikon Basilike in which Charles explicitly compares himself with the Old Testament hero.

In the eleventh chapter, for instance, the king justifies his rejection of the nineteen Parliamentary propositions of 1642 by invoking the same "conscience" with which Milton's Samson qualifies his response to the Philistine officer:

They cannot ask more than I can give, may I but reserve to myself the incommunicable jewel of my conscience and not be forced to part with that whose loss nothing can repair or requite . . . how can they think I can consent to [the propositions], who know they are such as are inconsistent with being either a king or a good Christian? My yielding so much as I have already makes some men confident I will deny nothing.

The love I have of my people's peace hath, indeed, great influence upon me; but the love of truth and inward peace hath more. Should I grant some things they require, I should not so much weaken my outward state of a king as wound that inward quiet of my conscience . . . But to bind myself to a general and implicit consent to whatever they shall desire or propound . . . were such a latitude of blind obedience . . . This were as if Samson should have consented not only to bind his own hands and cut off his hair but to put out his eyes, that the Philistines might with the more safety mock and abuse him; which they chose rather to do than quite to destroy him when he was become so tame an object and fit occasion for their sport and scorn . . . But they would have me trust to their moderation and abandon mine own discretion; that so I might verify what representations some have made of me to the world that I am fitter to be their pupil than their prince

(EB, 53-54, my emphases)

Urged to comply with the Philistine proposition by both the threatening officer and his increasingly timorous "people," Milton's Samson similarly refuses to provide "sport with blind activity" for those who hold him "in their civil power" (SA, 1328, 1367):

Myself? my conscience and internal peace.
Can they think me so broken, so debased [End Page 314]
With corporal servitude, that my mind ever
Will condescend to such absurd commands?
Although their drudge, to be their fool and jester
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
But who constrains me to the temple of Dagon,
Not dragging? the Philistian lords command,
Commands are no constraints. If I obey them,
I do it freely; venturing to displease
God for the fear of man.

(SA, 1334-38, 1370-74)

Like the Miltonic Samson, of course, the Samsonian Charles is in no political position to maintain this defiant posture. Indeed, Eikon Basilike--with its emblematic frontispiece alluding to Christ's agony and contemplatio mortis in Gethsemane--is composed under the sign of his imminent death. ⁶⁹ But Charles's strategy in the face of this "power resistless" is, like Samson's, to supplant a Dagonalian theater designed to validate his own subjection by rendering him a "scorn and gaze" ("that so I might verify what representations some have made of me") with a theatrical display that will confound his captors. ⁷⁰ And thus while John Cook, a lawyer for the prosecution, could triumphantly describe Charles's trial and execution as "the most Comprehensive, Impartial and Glorious piece of Justice that ever was acted and Executed upon the Theatre of England," the king himself took the stage determined to play another part:

Here I am sure to be conqueror if God will give me such a measure of constancy as to fear him more than man and to love the inward peace of my conscience before any outward tranquility. ⁷¹ (EB, 38)

Like Samson, Charles recognizes the danger of "venturing to displease / God for the fear of man" (SA, 1373-74) during his fifth act performance; for Charles, moreover, the transformation of Parliament's carefully stage-managed demystification of kingship into the "tragic scaffold" of the Restoration cause involves playing a "royal actor" martyred by regicide--a part, rehearsed by the conventions of the ars moriendi, that further aligns him with Milton's Samson. ⁷²

"Meditations upon Death," the final chapter of the King's Book, claims as its titular occasion Parliament's vote of nonaddress and Charles's subsequent "closer imprisonment" in Carisbrooke Castle (EB, 168). Like Milton's Samson, Charles represents himself as burdened by an enemy's yoke, bearing "the heavy load of other men's ambitions, fears, jealousies, and cruel passions" (EB, 169); he laments that his [End Page 315] service has rendered him a moving grave, "only the husk and shell" of life (EB, 169); and like Samson, who describes his evident extinction as a darkness "amid the blaze of noon, / Irrecoverably dark, total eclipse / Without all hope of day!" (SA, 80-82), he anticipates death as "an eclipse which oft happeneth as well in clear as cloudy days" (EB, 172).

Charles's second and final explicit self-identification with the biblical Samson in Eikon Basilike, moreover, stakes even more deeply such prior claims to Milton's linguistic and representational ground. Fashioning himself as a kind of Charles Agonistes in the "Meditations upon Death," the king declares himself inspired by

that heroic greatness of spirit which becomes a Christian in the patient and generous sustaining those afflictions which as shadows necessarily attend us while we are in this body . . . whose total absence is best recompensed with the dew of heaven.

The assaults of affliction may be terrible like Samson's lion, but they yield much sweetness to those that dare to encounter and overcome them.

(EB, 173, my emphases)

Applauding Samson's audacious repulse of Harapha, Milton's Chorus similarly proclaims their "afflicted" hero endued "With plain heroic magnitude of mind" (SA, 1279)--finding in his "patience" evidence of "Some source of consolation from above; / Secret refreshings" that have restored his strength with "celestial vigour" (SA, 1280). Like Milton's Samson, finally, Charles intimates a privileged "converse with God" that directs him to comply with his captors in the service of an ulterior political and religious end. Preparing to depart for the scaffold "under God's sole custody and disposal," the king comforts his sympathizers by presaging a catastrophe for their enemies that will be both apocalyptic and architectural:

The punishment of the more insolent and obstinate may be . . . in such a method of divine justice as is not ordinary; the earth of the lowest and meanest people opening upon them and swallowing them up in a just disdain of their ill-gotten and worse-used authority, upon whose support and strength they chiefly depended for their building and establishing their designs against me, the church, and state.

(EB, 177-78, my emphasis)

Milton's Samson encourages his Chorus by hinting at "something extraordinary" to which his rousing motions dispose his "thoughts"; he observes that God may "dispense with" him "in temples at idolatrous [End Page 316] rites / For some important cause"; and he appropriates the Philistine theater as the scene of his own "remarkable" "great act" (SA, 1388, 1389). Charles encourages his Royalist readers by describing his execution as the work of God's "disposal," its meaning to be revealed in some future political cause; and he appropriates Parliament's ideological theater by pulling down the pillars of the regicides' political support, subverting their perspectival management with his own spectacular performance.

As we have seen, one important function of the ars moriendi is to consolidate the interpretive energies released by death, to inscribe an individual death with unambiguous meaning. By defining his surviving audience (few, however fit) as Manoa and the Chorus, Samson enjoys just such a consolidation by the end of the play: his prescribed audience expectations--"of me expect to hear / Nothing dishonourable, impure, unworthy" (SA, 1423-24)--are answered antiphonally in the final assessments of his "noble" death by Manoa ("no weakness, no contempt, / Dispraise, or blame, nothing but well and fair" [SA, 1722-23]) and the Chorus ("All is best" [SA, 1745]). To judge by the carefully couched words of Andrew Marvell, Charles achieved a similar control over his audience's response, dying (like Samson) with a consummate theatrical gesture of rehearsed significance:

He nothing common did or mean
Upon that memorable scene;
         But with his keener eye
        The axe's edge did try. ⁷³

Milton, of course, strenuously objected to both the theatricality of the king's death and the political reaction it seemed calculated to elicit; and yet one may ask how the author of Samson Agonistes--a play published under the political triumph of Charles's ars moriendi--could escape the skepticism he directed so forcefully at the King's Book. Indeed, by writing a play so implicated in the language and conventions of Eikon Basilike, Milton seems to have exposed Samson's own "remarkable" "great act" to the same questions with which he prosecuted Charles's "memorable scene." If Fish is right, then, in identifying the Chorus as the first proponents of the regenerationist reading of Samson Agonistes, we can find methodological precedent for his own skeptical reading in Milton's Eikonoklastes.

As Fish finds Milton's play riddled with evidentiary gaps and spectacular indeterminacy, so does Milton find Charles's "stage-work" (E, 3:530) "doubtfull and ambiguous" (E, 3:598), full of "equivocal interpretations" [End Page 317] (3:495) that destabilize its meaning. As Fish asks us to recognize the impossibility of interpreting Samson's inward condition by the final outward gestures recounted by the messenger ("with head a while inclined, / And eyes fast fixed he stood, as one who prayed" [SA, 1636-37]), so does Milton ask us to doubt the "Image and Memory" of Charles reproduced by William Marshall's frontispiece--a portrait that represents the king at prayer, with head inclined and eyes fast fixed on a heavenly crown. ⁷⁴ For Milton, this portrait was just one of the many emblematic devices by which Charles transformed "Tyranny into an Art" (E, 3:344), an art of self-presentation that resembles--in its scripted performance of mimetic martyrdom--the ars moriendi; and as I want to show, Milton's specific criticism of the "King's Picture" merges--in his response to Charles's "Meditations upon Death"--with a generic criticism of the art of dying which is the King's Book. But first we should note how Milton's response to one other tactic of this art, Charles's self-portraiture as Samson, further anticipates the skeptical reading of Samson Agonistes.

Throughout his reign, Charles enjoyed considerable analogical association with the biblical Samson as his courtiers, and in at least one instance Milton himself, developed flattering homologies between the two leaders. ⁷⁵ One might expect the author of Eikonoklastes to recant this earlier mythography, to rescue Samson from his sullying association with the king; yet while Milton's regular practice in this work is to replace Charles's self-serving references to biblical heroes with types of hypocrisy, he leaves the Charles-Samson conceit intact. ⁷⁶ Indeed, Eikonoklastes's most extended reference to the Samson story elaborates the similarities between king and judge as an allegory of Charles's duplicity. Writing of the king's decision to seek refuge with the Scottish troops in 1646, Milton describes him as a Samson-like riddler and dissembler:

However it was a hazardous and rash journey taken, to resolve riddles in mens Loyaltie, who had more reason to mistrust the Riddle of such a disguised yeelding . . . What providence deny'd to force, he thought it might grant to fraud, which he stiles Prudence: But Providence was not couzen'd with disguises, neither outward nor inward . . . Had he known when the Game was lost, it might have sav'd much contest: but the way to give over fairely, was not to slip out of op'n Warr into a new disguise. He layes down his Armes, but not his Wiles; nor all his Armes, for in obstinacy he comes no less arm'd than ever, Cap a pé. And what were they but wiles . . . to persist the same man, and to fortify his mind before hand, still purposing to grant no more than what seem'd good to that violent and lawless Triumvirate within him, under the falsifi'd names of [End Page 318] his Reason, Honour, and Conscience, the old circulating dance of his shifts and evasions.

The words of a King, as they are full of power, in the autority and strength of Law, so like Sampson, without the strength of that Nazarite's lock, they have no more power in them then the words of another man.

(E, 3:545-46)

Milton's reference to Samson here is surprising--not least because it appears unsolicited, if not gratuitous, in its polemic context (no mention of Samson appears in the section of Eikon Basilike to which this passage directly responds). In Milton's constitutionalist application, the shorn Samson seems to exemplify wily and fraudulent stratagem rather than divinely sanctioned guerrila warfare--a perspective in fact shared by Milton's Harapha, who declares Samson "Due by the law to capital punishment" (SA, 1225; see also 1182-91). For Milton, of course, capital punishment was Charles's legal due; but the inescapable irony is that in presenting his case against this Samson-like king, Milton here adopts a Philistine perspective. ⁷⁷ It is also a skeptical perspective, easily transferred to his own representation of Samson: by deconsecrating "The words of a King," Milton deconstructs the triumvirate of "Reason, Honour, and Conscience" by which his own hero justifies his actions--the triumvirate upon which all regenerationist readings of Samson Agonistes depend.

Like faith, doubt is a conviction based on the evidence of things not seen; and it is this latter verdict that Milton repeatedly delivers on the seemingly pious "words" of the king, such as when he judges Charles's Penitential Meditations an exercise in insincerity and fabrication:

It is not hard for any man, who hath a Bible in his hands, to borrow good words and holy sayings in abundance; but to make them his own, is a work of grace onely from above. (E, 3:553)

Samson's Chorus similarly observes the necessity of grace "from above" (SA, 664) to render consonant the man "within" (SA, 663) and his book-gleaned language; but the crucial difference between Milton and this Chorus, in their analyses of two remarkably similar cases of conscience, is that Milton responds corrosively to the same evidentiary deficiencies upon which the Danites construct their interpretive and integrative interpolations. Nowhere is this difference more apparent than in the last chapter of Eikonoklastes, where Milton declares Charles's Samson-like "Meditations upon Death" a work of hypocritical theater, a formal linguistic performance reflecting the easily conned "cheap cure" of literary precedent rather than a genuine internal drama. [End Page 319]

Milton introduces this chapter, a skeptical revision of the king's contemplatio mortis, by first acknowledging the hermeneutic privilege conventionally ascribed to the topic. Echoing claims we have already heard from Montaigne, he recognizes the culturally entrenched conception of dying as an art somehow above criticism or contestatory interpretation:

It might be well thought by him who reads no further than the Title of this last Essay, that it requir'd no answer. For all other human things are disputed, and will be variously thought of to the Worlds end. But this business of death is a plaine case, and admitts no controversie: In that center all Opinions meet. (E, 3:582)

But by exposing Charles's "business of death" as so much stage business, by exploding the "plaine case" of his dying as a piece of theatrical subterfuge, Milton reveals the artificiality of the ars moriendi conventions employed by the king; his criticism of Charles's self-fashioned death, then, also involves a more general critique of the generic assumptions that rendered such performances indisputable and uncontroversial (assumptions still operating in the more credulous regenerationist readings of Samson Agonistes).

Indeed it is for dying by the book, for exploiting the literary and theatrical conventions of the ars moriendi in his own self-dramatized fifth act, that Milton condemns the king and the book that survives him. Equating publicity with duplicity, he declares Charles's testimony perjured, suspects the evidence of his meditations as the exhibition of a false witness:

Such Prayers as these may happly catch the People, as was intended: but how they please God, is to be much doubted, though pray'd in secret, much less writt'n to be divulg'd. (E, 3:601)

Equating Eikon Basilike with the seductions of sensuous theater, he declares Charles's sympathetic readers at once a visually besotted mob of relic-seekers and a blind chorus of acquiescent interpreters:

an inconstant, irrational, and Image-doting rabble; that like a credulous and hapless herd, begott'n to servility, and inchanted with these popular institutes of Tyranny, subscrib'd with a new device of the Kings Picture at his praiers, hold out both thir eares with such delight and ravishment to be stigmatiz'd and board through in witness of thir own voluntary and beloved baseness. (E, 3:601) ⁷⁸ [End Page 320]

Earlier in Eikonoklastes, Milton remarked on the tendency of an autobiographical art of dying like the king's to falsify evidence, to identify a revealingly amorphous representation with deceptively determinate, epitaphic significance:

Martyrs bear witness to the truth, not to themselves . . . He who writes himself Martyr by his own inscription, is like an ill Painter, who, by writing on the shapeless Picture which he hath drawn, is fain to tell passengers what shape it is. (E, 3:575)

At the end of his work, Milton blames the perpetuation of the king's forged perspective--the pious guise of a protean actor--on a "credulous" audience that ignores the ambiguity of his artistic performance, complacently reproducing the self-portrait (and self-inscribed emblematic meaning) of a poseur.

With Milton's iconoclastic critique of this ars moriendi in mind, it is tempting to treat his dramatization of Samson's death as a transposition of certain discredited aspects of Charles's literary dying; to correlate the Israelite judge's carefully calculated death by theater with that of the English king; to read the Hebrew messenger and removed Chorus as representatives of the Royalist propaganda machine that converted slim eyewitness accounts of Charles's execution into reliquarian hagiography. Indeed, this last temptation grows even stronger when we realize how closely the emblematic conclusion of Samson Agonistes approximates the iconographic frontispiece of the King's Book.

As the messenger's description of Samson's gestures in the temple resembles Marshall's post mortem portrayal of Charles at prayer, for instance, so does the Chorus's gloss of Samson's meditations recall the interpretive apparatus included with the "Kings Picture": the Danites declare their hero's final act elucidated by spiritual insight ("But he though blind of sight, / Despised and thought extinguished quite, / With inward eyes illuminated / His fiery virtue roused" [SA, 1687-90]); the king's portrait depicts a beam of light (labelled Clarior è tenebris) descending from dark clouds to the top of Charles's meditative head, while another beam (labelled Coeli Specto) emanates from his eyes to the heavenly crown he contemplates. The Danites proclaim the revival and reflourishing of Samson's "virtue given for lost, / Depressed, and overthrown, as seemed" (SA, 1697-98); Marshall represents Charles as a palm tree (with the motto Crescit sub pondere virtus), resilient despite pendent weights. ⁷⁹ As Manoa plans to reclaim Samson's body in an ancestral monument (shaded with "branching palm" [SA, 1735]) that [End Page 321] will be both the object of future pilgrimage and the symbol of further contest, the Chorus--like Charles's portraitist--seeks to consolidate the meaning of its hero's death in an "embossed" (SA, 1700), iconic testimonial. Like Eikon Basilike's superadded "new device" of pictorial annotation, then, Samson Agonistes's visually charged conclusion provides an interpretive coda that also prefaces the "calm of mind" (SA, 1758) of future regenerationist responses to the work; but to accept the Danites's consolatory portrait of Samson as the "true experience" (SA, 1756) of his drama is to confuse the image with the man, a fallacy shattered in Eikonoklastes. By asking us to mistrust the king's final performance and the corroborative construction it received from his supportive readers, it would seem that Milton also asks us to doubt Samson's last act and its choric exegesis.

The problem with such an imputational and intercalary reading, of course, is that it risks reducing Milton's play into either an exercise in perverse irony or a rather cynical act of artistic appropriation--in which ideology alone distinguishes between the representation of Samson and the misrepresentation of Charles. By holding the author of Samson Agonistes accountable to his textual criticism of the King's Book, moreover, we perhaps dislocate the drama from its historical context--ignoring the possibility that the Restoration and its inaugural execution of the regicides may have caused Milton to reevaluate the art of martyrdom he had earlier rejected. ⁸⁰ Perhaps in Samson Agonistes Milton tries to recover those representations and hermeneutic conventions rejected in Eikonoklastes?

These are legitimate interpretive possibilities that cannot be dismissed; the Civil War and its aftermath present us with many examples of contested and contaminated symbols--rejected and reclaimed as the occasion fit. Yet even the most persuasive reading of Samson as a figure of the martyred regicides concedes an almost metatheatrical skepticism that renders this interpretation problematic:

Samson Agonistes does not so much make Samson a martyr as it shows how his fellow Israelites do so. The closure invoked by the Chorus is not closure for the reader, who knows that Israel does not "take hold" upon this occasion . . . The supreme irony is that Samson's act of iconoclasm makes him a kind of idol for his own people. ⁸¹

As witnessed by the Quaker Edward Burrough, the regal funeral that the Protectorate provided for Cromwell was the occasion of similar irony; from the detached position of a critical reader, Burrough's [End Page 322] republicans--like Milton's Danites--appear to be of the king's party without knowing it:

What for him! Alas for him! Who was once a great Instrument in the hand of the Lord to break down many Idolatrous Images and grievous Idols . . . and have they now made an Image of him? ⁸²

We need not read Milton's Samson or Burrough's Cromwell as an explicit allegory of Charles, then, to recognize the problematic legacy Eikon Basilike left to its critics: regardless of the authenticity of an individual's spiritual life, the King's Book rendered irrecoverably ambiguous the conventions by which that life could be witnessed in death. Indeed, though the skeptical response to Samson Agonistes is typically substantiated by the indeterminacy of its hero's dying, it is finally the overdetermined nature of this dramatic act--its inevitable evocation of the performance and reception of Charles's ars moriendi--that signals Milton's interpretive and evaluative disengagement from the play.

Standing Aloof: Samson and the Dangers of Construction

This removal, the distance of a playwright refusing complicity in his own representation, is my final concern. This essay has purposed, not to contribute another installment in the regenerationist/skeptical debate, but rather to demonstrate how the seeds for such a debate exist in both Milton's age and his text; not to take one exclusive side in a critical dialogue, so much as to locate the dialogue in Milton's drama of history. In conclusion, however, I wish tentatively to suggest how standing aloof from this dialogue might be the most responsible option Milton gives us.

Within the text at least, interpreting Samson proves a sirenic temptation: "Irresistible Samson" confounds not only the Philistines who attempt to bring him to "public proof" (SA, 1314), but also those readers--beginning with the Danites--who feel compelled to witness Samson's regeneration and martyrdom by analyzing his life and death. Samson's threatening reply to the enemy come to "survey" him, in fact, also serves as a warning to such readers: "The way to know were not to see but taste" (SA, 1091). The tactile and gustative senses introduced by "taste" here recall the "mortal taste" (PL, 1.2) represented in Paradise Lost; but for the spectator in or reader of Samson Agonistes, this "way to know" remains as inaccessible as the eyesight proves unrevealing. ⁸³ For as with the forbidden fruit, knowing Samson is fatal: the only characters who directly "behold" Samson's single disclosive act in this play are struck forever dumb "with amaze" (SA, 1645); the judges who subject [End Page 323] him to the only real trial theater can offer immediately taste death when he brings the house down. Those who survive to interpret, on the other hand, must accept the evidence of a spectator who "aloof obscurely stood" outside the theater of proof (SA, 1611)--whose central testimony of Samson's speech and act is based not on experience, but on hearsay "from such as nearer stood" (SA, 1631).

If standing aloof from the interpretive seductions of Samson Agonistes attenuates one's commentarial authority, however, it also delivers one from the collapses (architectural and hermeneutic) that amaze all those involved less circumstantially in the play and with its text. In this sense the messenger is consistent: his detached perspective produces a relatively objective report modest in its claims and conclusions; and he remains silent as Manoa and the Chorus seize upon this representation with an interpretive zeal that implicates them more directly in the play's ambiguities. For the Danites, of course, this response is also consistent.

Indeed, the Chorus--which neither resists Samson nor avoids Samson's interpretive pitfalls--says more than it means when it recalls the hero's exploits in Ascalon:

But safest he who stood aloof,
When insupportably his foot advanced
In scorn of their proud arms and warlike tools,
Spurned them to death by troops.

(SA, 135-38)

"Irresistibly," the invariable editorial gloss of "insupportably" in this passage, adequately conveys the Chorus's apparent meaning here; but when we acknowledge collateral senses resonating in this word in the Renaissance--such as "untenably" or "unaccountably"--the passage comments ironically on its speakers. ⁸⁴ For the very account the Danites provide of Samson's biography involves them in the unaccountable; their dogged attempt to witness his life as a consistently meaningful story implicates them in an implosive text. The casuistical contortions required of these interpreters by Milton's Samson may merely accentuate exegetical maneuvers long performed by biblical commentators; and the Chorus's kommos reiterates a reading as old as the Book of Hebrews (11:32), which transforms the ambiguous Old Testament representation of Samson by including him in an heroic catalogue recognized by the Renaissance as "a little Book of Martyrs." ⁸⁵ But the instability of the Judges text, and thus the untenability of such readings, had well before Milton caused exegetes to seek safety by standing aloof. ⁸⁶ As Joseph Wittreich has extensively shown, moreover, long and tumultuous periods [End Page 324] of reassessing Samson in the Renaissance had the effect of challenging received allegories and typologies--further destabilizing the Judges story and questioning the reliability of its narrator. ⁸⁷

The demonstrated ambiguity of this story did not, of course, prevent its service to every conceivable ideology in the seventeenth century; on the contrary, the exegetical indeterminacy ascribed to Samson seems to have corresponded with (if not encouraged) his interpretive appropriation by ideology, particularly in the contest for symbols that was prologue and epilogue to the Civil War. The status of the biblical Samson in the mid-seventeenth century, in fact, resembled that of Milton's Samson as increasingly polemical interpretations were based on a decreasingly probative proof text.

A play that elides the Bible's annunciatory angels and authoritative narrators altogether, that leaves Samson alone to convince his fellow characters and readers that his dubious actions were "of God" (SA, 222), seems designed to invite the observer to make meaning; but such a play also draws all who so commit onto increasingly shaky interpretive ground, into a text that threatens to collapse and consume the participant with its own ambiguities. Indeed, such a play contains more perils than the precarious Judges drama Lancelot Andrewes warned his readers from engaging as participatory spectators: "Wee were not best make sport with Sampson, lest he pull down the house about our eares, and so make us pay dearlie for our pastime." ⁸⁸ The criticism of Samson Agonistes has tacitly agreed to the applicability of such a warning to the play.

Even the most fervidly regenerationist readers stand aloof from the interpretive misprision and historical myopia of the Danites; and the skeptic's instinct for distance from the conclusions of Manoa and the Chorus, at the play's close, is that of a survivor who has seen less withdrawn readers "immixed, inevitably" with an insupportable interpretive framework:

The Chorus had never previously vested its confidence in Samson's interpretation of events, and we may find it difficult now to vest much confidence in its interpretation. Indeed, to the very end, Manoa and the Chorus are found contradicting Samson and, in the end, contradict Samson into a heroism he is perhaps not meant to enjoy. ⁸⁹

This same instinct is interestingly revealed in a critical desire for differentiation not only from the play's misreading characters, but also from its misreading critics; Johnson's claim that Samson Agonistes is a tragedy "which ignorance has admired, and bigotry applauded," for [End Page 325] instance, still resounds in Wittreich's dismissive conflation of his predecessors with the untenable hermeneutic practiced by the Danites:

Miltonists have approached Samson Agonistes in much the same way that Peter Martyr pursued the Samson story in the Book of Judges, and with many of the same results. ⁹⁰

The irony in all such instances of diacritical assertion is less obvious than the dramatic irony literalized in the Philistines's death by theater, but with much the same effect: the Danites celebrate the destruction of Samson's captors, only to be portrayed themselves as a captive audience by readers who in turn court fallacious ruin by making a similar idol of interpretation. In a reminder of the hall of mirrors quality variously explored in Renaissance theater and painting, the drama of interpreting Samson has thus ramified into the drama of interpreting Samson: like the spectator in the play, the reader of the play risks making a spectacle of himself when he privileges his own perspective and forgets that it, too, is critically observed. Far from an anachronistic product of the play's criticism, moreover, this reflexive paradigm contrived what we might call the historical irony that Samson Agonistes offered to its original audience--which would have seen its own gaze problematized in Gaza.

Milton's method of poetic education has often been described as the presentation of interpretive choices--with the more conventionally alluring option proving a temptation to error. For readers conditioned by his epics, however, his drama seems to complicate this hermeneutics of discrimination: if Paradise Lost instructs us vicariously through Adam's angelic lessons in interpretation, and if Paradise Regained reveals to us the heroically exemplary decisions of the second Adam, Samson Agonistes seems to confront us with an "artificial Adam, such an Adam as he is in the motions," whose dubious actions provide no grounds for interpretive authenticity. ⁹¹ Yet as a companion piece or coda to Milton's brief epic, certain aspects of the play's hermeneutical challenges appear less idiosyncratic--at least in the context of that moment in his career when the poet chose to make both works simultaneously public. ⁹² If Paradise Regained tempts both its hero and its reader with plot, with a series of scenes designed to elicit an erroneous action (or a misplaced expectation of action), might not Samson Agonistes tempt with interpretation itself, with an almost irresistible opportunity to commit to a reading whose conventions the play itself renders insupportable? ⁹³ If Milton's "poem in IV books" [End Page 326] exemplifies the divinely adiaphorous response of one who stands and waits for his tempter to collapse on his own hermeneutical hollowness, might not the play "added" to this poem test more directly the reader's ability to stand aloof from a drama that consumes itself? ⁹⁴

Before these questions become statements, qualification is necessary: I do not mean to imply that Samson Agonistes today asks not to be interpreted; nor do I claim that in this play Milton presented his seventeenth-century audience with a meaninglessly relativistic text. ⁹⁵ Rather, I want to suggest that Samson Agonistes's invalidation of the interpretive conventions it dramatizes attains ironic significance as a Restoration publication. For this self-consuming drama recapitulates a drama of construction and deconstruction that an audience in 1671 would have recognized as recent history.

Vanderbilt University

Notes

* A grant from Vanderbilt University's Research Council enabled me to finish work on this article. I am grateful for the keen criticism and kind encouragement of Gordon Braden, Alastair Fowler, Jonathan Goldberg, Albert Labriola, Leah Marcus, Katharine Maus, and Stephen Orgel.

1. Michel de Montaigne, "That our happiness must not be judged until after our death," in The Complete Works of Montaigne, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1943), 1:19, 55.

2. William Shakespeare, 1 Henry IV, in The Riverside Shakespeare, gen. ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1974), 5.4.113-14. All subsequent references to Shakespeare are to this edition.

3. Devotion 17, in The Sermons of John Donne, ed. G. R. Potter and E. M. Simpson, 10 vols. (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1953-62).

4. Measure for Measure, 4.2.161.

5. Hamlet, 1.2.85, 84.

6. Macbeth, 1.4.11-12.

7. "Fra Lippo Lippi," 188, in The Complete Works of Robert Browning, ed. Roma A. King, 9 vols. (Athens: Ohio Univ. Press, 1969-89), 4:121.

8. William Shakespeare, Macbeth, 1.4.11-12. It is appropriate that when Falstaff does make his final and "finer end" in Henry V (2.3.11, 16), he leaves us with a notorious textual crux; for the offstage death of this humorous Vice--associated and disassociated with an ambiguous Protestant hero (2 Henry IV, Epilogue, 27-28)--raises the epistemological and evidentiary problems encountered by spectators seeking to distinguish between a regenerate and a reprobate death.

9. John Milton, Samson Agonistes, in Milton: The Complete Poems, ed. John Carey and Alastair Fowler (London and New York: Longman, 1968), 1579. Hereafter abbreviated SA and cited parenthetically in the text by line number.

10. Stanley Fish, "Spectacle and Evidence in Samson Agonistes," Critical Inquiry 15 (1989): 585.

11. For an extensive survey of the various regenerationist, typological, and skeptical positions (and bibliographies) see Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, "Milton's Samson and the 'New Acquist of True [Political] Experience,'" Milton Studies 24 (1988): 233-52, esp. 233-34 and n. 1-4).

A fine example of the regenerationist position appears in Albert C. Labriola's essay, "Divine Urgency as a Motive for Conduct in Samson Agonistes" (Philological Quarterly 50 [1971]: 99-107). Labriola's argument anticipates the skeptical reading of the play by confronting the problematic fact that Samson seems just as convinced that the "intimate impulse" that occasioned his first marriage "was of God" as he is of the authenticity of the "rousing motions" in the temple. Labriola also anticipates my application of the ars moriendi to this play when he compares the first stage of death delineated in De Doctrina Christiana with Samson's "slavish subjection to sin and the devil, which constitutes . . . the death of the will" (104); indeed, Labriola stops just short of applying the art of dying conventions to this play when he analyzes Samson's stages of temptation and inspiration (especially 105-7). Other critics who have considered the role of visitants in the play through the "good temptation" defined in De Doctrina include Ann Gossman, "Milton's Samson as the Tragic Hero Purified by Trial," JEGP 61 (1962): 535-36; John Steadman, "'Faithful Champion': The Theological Basis of Milton's Hero of Faith," Anglia 77 (1959), especially 25-26; William O. Harris, "Despair and 'Patience as the Truest Fortitude' in Samson Agonistes," ELH 30 (1963), especially 120; and Paul R. Baumgartner, "Milton and Patience," SP 60 (1963): 208-14. Without mentioning the art of dying explicitly, these studies have illuminated for me its presence in Milton's play.

The skeptical revision of the play appears in Stanley Fish, "Question and Answer in Samson Agonistes," Critical Quarterly 11 (1969): 237-64; most provocatively in Joseph A. Wittreich, Interpreting "Samson Agonistes" (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1986); and perhaps most influentially in Fish's sequel, "Spectacle and Evidence in Samson Agonistes."

12. For what remains the most exhaustive bibliographic study of the tradition, including its classical and medieval predecessors, see Sister Mary Catherine O'Connor, The Art of Dying Well: The Development of the Ars Moriendi (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1942). For a more analytical survey of the chief examples of the genre in Renaissance England, see Nancy Lee Beaty, The Craft of Dying: A Study in the Literary Tradition of the Ars Moriendi in England (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1970). The Reformation's important intellectual and literary influences upon the genre are examined by Beaty, 108-270, and by David W. Atkinson, "The English ars moriendi: its Protestant Transformation," Renaissance and Reformation, Renaissance et Refórme, New Series 6 (1982): 1-10.

13. Samuel Johnson, Rambler 139 (16 July 1751), in The Complete Prose Works of Samuel Johnson, ed. W. J. Bate and Albrecht B. Strauss, 16 vols. (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1969), 4:376.

14. Thus Milton enigmatically and perhaps wryly concludes his cryptic discussion of Aristotelian structure in "Of That Sort of Dramatic Poem Which Is Called Tragedy": "It suffices if the whole drama be found not produced beyond the fifth act." (SA, Preface) He says nothing of beginnings and middles in this "epistle," and his definition of mimesis as "passions well imitated" might similarly be read as an adaptation of Aristotelian expectations for a poem devoted to the representation and analysis of dying.

The Visitatio infirmorum constituted the liturgical foundation of the ars moriendi. See O'Connor, 24, 172-73; and Beaty, 2-3, 237-40, 246.

15. The relation between the ars moriendi and this morality play is explored by Donald F. Duclow, "Everyman and the Ars Moriendi: Fifteenth-Century Ceremonies of Dying," Fifteenth-Century Studies 6 (1983): 93-113.

16. Fish, "Spectacle and Evidence in Samson Agonistes," 556.

17. Cherrel Guilfoyle has noted that by the mid-seventeenth century, "to agonise" could mean "to die" in England ("'If Shape it Might Be Call'd That Shape Had None': Aspects of Death in Milton," Milton Studies 13 [1979]: 49 and n. 52).

"Moriens" becomes the generic name of the subject of the art of dying in the anonymous fifteenth-century Ars Moriendi, Editio Princeps, the most accessible copy of which appears today in the Holbein Society's facsimile of the British Museum's manuscript (ed. W. H. Rylands [London: Wyman and Sons, 1881]). In 1490, William Caxton published a translated and abridged prose version of this work, the "Art & Crafte to Knowe Well to Dye" (see O'Connor, 1-10).

18. In Rylands's edition of the Ars Moriendi, for instance, the ninth folio page (labelled "Temptacio dyaboli de auaricia") presents three demons surrounding the bed and tempting Moriens with wine, horses, his wife, and other emblems of domestic ease.

19. Atkinson, 2-6. The Protestant arts of dying of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries questioned the efficacy of deathbed repentance and the viaticum, predictably emphasized faith rather than works, and sought to replace the hora mortis as a key to salvation with a narratable life as an index into election.

20. David E. Stannard, The Puritan Way of Death (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1977), 73.

21. Becon, The Sicke Mannes Salve, in Workes ([STC 1710], vol. 2, fols. ccxviiv-cclxxxiiiv), reprint in Prayers and Other Pieces of Thomas Becon, S.T.P., ed. Rev. John Ayre (Cambridge: The Parker Society, 1844), 87-191. Hereafter abbreviated SMS and cited parenthetically in the text by page numbers of Ayre's edition.

For the immense and enduring popularity of this work in Protestant England, see Beaty, 110. At least eleven editions were printed between its first appearance and the end of the century, and at least seven more were printed in the first half of the seventeenth century. Becon's was also the most imitated art of dying in the Renaissance, with countless subsequent titles (such as William Perkins's A Salve for a Sicke Man) attesting to its influence.

22. As elsewhere in Becon's work, Philemon serves as the author's principal raissoneur (Becon used the name as a pseudonym). Beaty (113-14) traces the biblical referents of this and the rest of Becon's dramatis personae; she is certainly right in claiming that these names are "appropriate less for their historical references than because they all suggest types of godliness," as she is right in describing the comforters as "almost completely undifferentiated" (indeed, like a Chorus). Eusebius, however, would become an historically significant name for Foxe: the extended 1570 edition of Acts and Monuments includes the period of Roman persecutions described graphically by Eusebius of Caesarea.

23. The blurring of death in life is a central image in Paradise Lost (see, for example, Paradise Lost, in The Complete Poems, 10.1028. Hereafter abbreviated PL and cited parenthetically in the text by book and line number). In the context of my argument that Samson is portrayed as a type of Moriens, however, we might look further back for analogues. In his initial encounter with Satan, for instance, Dante hovers between life and death as Virgil arms him with fortitude (Inferno, 34.20-7).

24. See SA, 176-77. In The Sick Man's Salve, Epaphroditus complains of his failing tongue, senses, and memory (94).

25. See Stannard, 72-134, and Arthur Barker, Milton and the Puritan Dilemma (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1942), 169 and throughout.

26. Camille Wells Slights, The Casuistical Tradition in Shakespeare, Donne, Herbert, and Milton (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1981), 292. Slights discusses two casuistical works at length in her discussion of Samson Agonistes: William Perkins's A Case of Conscience and Jeremy Taylor's Ductor Dubitantium. Perkins, as we have seen, authored A Salve for a Sick Man (1595) in obvious imitation of Becon; Taylor's Holy Dying (1651) is generally considered the pinnacle of the ars moriendi tradition (see Beaty, 197-270).

27. Slights, 262.

28. Slights, 294.

29. Fish, "Spectacle and Evidence in Samson Agonistes," 571. In this formulation, of course, Fish's skepticism and any argument that would refute it fall outside the realm of dramatic criticism: his elusive "confidence" requires either a literal theophany or faith in things not seen (both difficult effects in the theater, even closet drama). A more fair paraphrase of Fish's general argument in this essay, however, might be that there is no way to be confident that Samson's reported motions signify what he perceives as a communication between himself and God (though Milton's Argument makes it clear that Samson understands his summons to the temple, at least, as "from God").

30. Though Slights seems to suggest one possibility in her comparison of Milton's "ode" (SA, 667-709) with an ode in Antigone (272-74). For an analysis of classical and Hebrew models of consolation in Samson Agonistes, see Lynn Veach Sadler, Consolation in Samson Agonistes: Regeneration and Typology (Salzburg: Salzburg Studies in English Literature, 1979), 8-43.

31. For the syncretic effects of humanism and the classical way of death upon the Renaissance ars moriendi, see Beaty, 54-107.

32. G. W. Pigman III, Grief and English Renaissance Elegy (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1985).

33. Jeremy Taylor, Holy Dying (London, 1651), 81, 106.

34. Though Epaphroditus reveals that his motions are contemporaneous with Philemon's "godly communication," the relation is not necessarily causal; it seems instead as though the dying man has been participating in two conversations at the same time. For a discussion of the retrospective search for causes and temporal origins occasioned by Samson's motions, see Fish, "Question and Answer in 'Samson Agonistes,'" 255-57.

35. "Resolution" is specifically associated with the Calvinist ars moriendi in such works as Edmund Bunny's Resolution (1584), an appropriation of Robert Parson's Jesuit Christian Exercise (see Beaty, 158-59). Hamlet's "native hue of resolution" is just one of many instances in Renaissance drama where the word is associated with the "action" of dying (3.1.84, 88).

George Herbert, "Affliction (I)," in The Works of George Herbert, ed. F. E. Hutchinson (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1941), 55-56.

36. For the most complete discussion of this passage and its possible authorial intentions, see Stephen B. Dobranski, "Samson and the Omissa," SEL 36 (1996): 149-69.

37. William Haller, Foxe's Book of Martyrs and the Elect Nation (London: Trinity Press, 1963), 142. In Historicizing Milton: Spectacle, Power, and Poetry in Restoration England ([Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1994], 42-66), Laura Lunger Knoppers compares Samson's suffering and death with the execution of the regicides in 1660, claiming that for Milton their death represented a contemporary martyrdom.

38. The nature of Samson's death, an apparently suicidal act of vengeance in the Judges account, was a traditional exegetical question. In Biathanatos, John Donne apologized Samson's death as "intended . . . accidentally" (ed. Ernest W. Sullivan, II [London and Toronto: Associated Univ. Presses, 1984], 141).

39. For the centrality of reported gestures in Foxe's treatment of the Marian martyrs, see John R. Knott, Discourses of Martyrdom in English Literature, 1563-1694 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993), 9.

40. John Day entered The Sycke Mans Salve for publication in the Stationers' Register in 1558, though the earliest extant copy of the book is dated 1561. Foxe's reference to Becon's persecution appears in Actes and Monumentes, ed. S. R. Cattley, 8 vols. (London, 1837), 6:610. For further discussion of the connection between Foxe and Becon, see Knott, 112-13, 116-17.

41. Fish, "Spectacle and Evidence in Samson Agonistes," 586.

42. Othello, 3.3.360 ("ocular proof"); King Lear, 1.2.92 ("auricular assistance").

43. The verb agein (the etymon of "agonist" or "actor") further suggests agonistikos, a contender in athletic games. See also the definition of "actor" in Edward Phillips, The New World of English Words (London, 1658).

44. Richard Macksey, "Last Words: The Artes Moriendi and a Transtextual Genre," Genre 16 (1983): 493-516.

45. Julius Caesar, 2.2.32-33. For an excellent discussion of the relation between the contemplatio mortis and the ars moriendi tradition in Renaissance dramatic conventions, see Michael Flachmann, "Fitted for Death: Measure for Measure and the Contemplatio Mortis," ELR 22 (1992): 222-41.

46. The Sermons of John Donne, 8:190 ("graving all his life").

47. Henry Vaughan, "Rules and Lessons," 125-26, in Henry Vaughan: The Complete Poems, ed. Alan Rudrum (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1976), 196.

48. See Clare Gittings, Death, Burial and the Individual in Early Modern England (London: Cromm Helm, 1984); Erwin Panofsky, Tomb Sculpture: Four Lectures on its Changing Aspects from Ancient Egypt to Bernini (New York: AMS Press, 1964); T. S. R. Boase, Death in the Middle Ages: Mortality, Judgment, and Remembrance (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1972); Millard Meiss, Painting in Florence and Siena after the Black Death (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1951), 74-75; and Henriette s'Jacob, Idealism and Realism: A Study of Sepulchral Symbolism (Leiden, 1954), 46-47.

49. For the Renaissance conflation of ars moriendi and ars vivendi, see Beaty, The Craft of Dying, 101-4, 204-20. Also see De Doctrina Christiana (in The Cambridge Milton, 15:203-20); and Guilfoyle, 35-40.

50. Essais, 1:20. For an analysis of Montaigne's "evolutionary" attitude toward death, arguing for its increasing equation with the work of life, see Donald M. Frame, Montaigne's Discovery of Man (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1955), 30-48.

51. See Fish, "Question and Answer in 'Samson Agonistes,'" 252-55; and "Spectacle and Evidence in Samson Agonistes," 574-79.

52. I have further traced the verbal and situational similarities between Caesar's interview with Decius Brutus and Samson's exchange with the Philistine officer in "Shakespeare's Rome in Milton's Gaza? Some Possible Allusions in Samson Agonistes," English Language Notes 34 (1997): 1-10.

53. Julius Caesar, 2.2.71 ("the cause is in my will").

54. Patricia Parker, Shakespeare from the Margins: Language, Culture, Context (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1996), 82.

55. Hamlet, 3.2.91 ("a good actor").

56. Ben Jonson, Eastward Hoe, in Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford, Percy and Evelyn Simpson, 11 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925-52), 2.2.7 ("prodigal similitude"); 2.2.32-38 ("I am now free"). I modernize the spelling of this edition in this and all other references to this edition. Eastward Hoe hereafter abbreviated EH cited parenthetically in the text by act, scene, and line number.

57. For a study that locates Milton's play within mid-seventeenth-century controversies over providence (and the heightened skepticism directed toward providential historiography), see Robert Wilcher, "Samson Agonistes and the Problem of History," Renaissance and Modern Studies 26 (1982): 108-33.

58. The Oxford editors assign the preceding passages to Jonson (9:645), though authorial attribution for Eastward Hoe (which Jonson wrote with Marston and Chapman) must always be followed by a question mark.

59. Jonson, Epicoene, in Ben Jonson, 4.2.171-74.

60. Sigmund Freud, "Thoughts for the Times on War and Death," in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey 24 vols. (London: Hogarth Press, 1957), 15:291.

61. Milton and Jeremy Collier read passages of Acts and Monuments skeptically. Collier's objections, in The Ecclesiastical History of Great Britain (1702), are discussed by George Townsend in The Acts and Monuments of John Foxe, 8 vols. (New York: AMS Press, Inc., 1965), 1:179-87. John R. Knott has demonstrated Milton's iconoclastic skepticism toward Foxe's individual "portraits," particularly those of the early martyrs (154-57).

Milton objects to the Foxean method of misleading credulous readers with dramatized "fragments of old Martyrologies, and legends" in Of Prelatical Episcopacy (in Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. Don M. Wolfe, and others, 8 vols. [New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1953-82]).

62. David Loewenstein, Milton and the Drama of History (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990), 58.

63. Ernest B. Gilman, Iconoclasm and Poetry in the English Reformation (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1986), 2. Milton wrote no poetry in the decade following the publication of Eikonoklastes, and Thomas Corns has argued that even his prose following this work eschews complex image patterns (in The Development of Milton's Prose Style [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982], 43-65, 83-103).

64. Richard Helgerson, "Milton Reads the King's Book: Print, Performance, and the Making of a Bourgeois Idol," Criticism 29 (1987): 1-25. Helgerson's central argument is that Milton's deconstruction of the royal "idol" enabled his construction of an authorial "image"--the distinction between idol and image being a dubious one. Unfortunately, Helgerson does not really consider Samson Agonistes in this argument, suggesting instead (in juxtapositions similar to my own) that in the explicitly autobiographical portions of Paradise Lost (such as the proems to Books 1, 3, 7, and 9) the rhetoric of the King's Book and the imagery of Marshall's frontispiece subtly appear (see 18-19). While I do not accept Helgerson's portrait of a Milton complacently appropriating the king's iconography, the method of analysis in this essay has greatly illuminated for me the possible relations between Eikon Basilike, Eikonoklastes, and Milton's poetry. Particularly insightful is Helgerson's observation, "In the process of assuming the polemical stance required by his encounter with the king, Milton had to divide himself from himself" (14).

65. See William Prynne, Histrio-Mastix. The Players Scourge, or, Actors Tragaedie (London, 1633), fols. 562v, 558v. Mary Ann Radzinowicz, "The Distinctive Tragedy of Samson Agonistes," Milton Studies 17 (1983): 267-69; and Knoppers, 42-66, 142-63. Charles Carlton has argued that Charles read Foxe during his final imprisonment (Charles I [London: Routledge, 1983], 347).

66. Milton, Eikonoklastes, in Complete Prose Works, 3:536 ("great show of piety"). Hereafter abbreviated E and cited parenthetically in the text by volume and page number.

67. Eikon Basilike: The Portraiture of His Sacred Majesty in His Solitudes and Sufferings, ed. Philip A. Knachel (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1966). Hereafter abbreviated EB and cited parenthetically in the text by page number. The subtitle apparently added by John Gauden. On the question of the collaborative authorship of Eikon Basilike, see Francis Madan, "A New Bibliography of Eikon Basilike," Oxford Bibliographical Society 3 (1950): 126-63.

68. The Samson story of Judges 13-16 afforded Charles obvious biblical coordinates for his own martyrdom: the Parliamentarians could be figured as Philistines, Parliament itself as the Philistine temple, the vacillating Royalists as Israelites ("my friends and loving subjects being helpless spectators"), and the apocalyptic "confusions" predicted after his death as Samson's ruinous and vengeful last act of theatrical display (EB, 173, 175, 178). Yet some of Charles's less obvious--indeed perhaps unintentional--evocations of the Samson story seem to furnish Milton with images for his dramatic elaboration. An example is Eikon Basilike's twenty-first chapter, "Upon His Majesty's Letters Taken and Divulged," which complains of the treacherous publication of his domestic epistles--entrusted to a secretary--in terms similar to Samson's charge that Dalila has published his "secrets" (SA, 879-81, 946-48); in Judges, Dalila's betrayal of Samson is confined to the divulgence of his Nazarite "secret," but both Eikon Basilike and Samson Agonistes expand this image of betrayed exposure to represent a protagonist "sung and proverbed for a fool" (SA, 203), victimized by the textual glozings of political enemies.

69. This portrait is reproduced in Complete Prose Works (3:150). Several critics have noted the irony in the fact that this frontispiece was designed by the same engraver, William Marshall, who portrayed Milton on the front of his 1645 volume of poetry. See, for instance, Helgerson, 15.

70. On one level, at least, Charles's strategy was successful: the carefully orchestrated drama of his execution, which Cromwell staged as a public confirmation of his rule, produced a mob that had to be dispersed by Parliament troops when the commoners unexpectedly sympathized with the king. Like Milton's Chorus, this mob was seeking relics. For contemporary accounts of the execution and the early reception of the King's Book, see Christopher Wordsworth, "Who Wrote Eikon Basilike?" in Considered and Answered (London, 1824).

71. John Cook, King Charls, His Case, or An Appeal to all Rational Men (London, 1649), 5 ("the most Comprehensive").

72. Andrew Marvell, An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland, in Complete Poetry, ed. George Lord (London: Dent, 1984), 53-54 ("tragic scaffold"; "royal actor").

73. Marvell, An Horatian Ode, 57-60.

74. This portrait, which represents Charles's gazing upon a crown (inscribed with Gloria and superscribed with Beatam et AEternam) that is visible through an upper right-hand window, exteriorizes his meditation by depicting two beams of light that connect him with the heavens: from the upper left, a beam inscribed with Clarior è tenebris descends from dark clouds to the top of Charles's head; from his eyes, a beam inscribed with Coeli Specto reaches to the crown.

75. See the extended conceit in The Reason of Church-Government, in Complete Prose Works, 1:858-59.

76. The most obvious example of this substitution appears in Milton's response to the king's penitential meditations (E, 3:553-54). Here Milton answers Charles's references to David's Psalms with biblical examples of feigned repentance, such as those of Cain, Esau, Balaam, Saul, Ahab, and Jehoram (E, 3:553-54).

77. As Milton's Dalila notes, perspective and political alliance determine whether an act is treasonous or heroic: Charles's "betrayal" by the Scots (who handed him over to Parliament) parallels Samson's betrayal by the men of Judah (who handed him over to the Philistines); yet the former act is celebrated by Milton, the latter emulated by Dalila.

78. Elsewhere in Eikonoklastes Milton specifically represents Charles as Circe (see E, 3:488, 582).

79. As the Chorus's much debated Phoenix simile has Samson attaining a fame that is both glorious and eternal (surviving that of "A secular bird" by "ages of lives" [SA, 1706]), moreover, the frontispiece represents Charles looking at a heavenly crown labeled Gloria and Beatam et AEternam.

80. It will be obvious that I treat Samson as a Restoration play--downplaying the significance of its (possibly much earlier) date of composition--under the sensible if unsophisticated bibliographic assumption that the date of publication determines a work's primary historical meaning. Much of my argument depends upon the possibility that significant portions of Samson might actually respond to Eikon Basilike (and to the earlier response of Eikonoklastes); but this argument can accommodate the claim (made most persuasively by John Shawcross) that Samson was composed in the early 1650s (see The Complete English Poetry of John Milton, ed. John T. Shawcross [New York: Doubleday, 1963]); and Shawcross, "The Genres of Paradise Regain'd and Samson Agonistes," Milton Studies 17 [1983]: 225-48). The skeptical revisions and multiple perspectives born of Milton's encounter with the King's Book, then, could well have begun shortly after 1649; in 1671, though, Milton chose--for what may have been historical reasons--to put an end to further revision by publishing his text as it stood and stands.

While this flexible argument would need to be qualified if new evidence emerged to establish an even earlier date of composition for Samson, however, I still believe that the most compelling case for an author's intended meaning--in a work published with his or her consent--must privilege date of publication over date of composition. Certainly intentions can change during composition, but during this process revision is itself an intent; a work like Samson might have had many different meanings for Milton before and during the Civil War, but the meaning he gave to it (and to us) was decided in part by that moment at which he decided to place it in history.

81. Knoppers, 63. Knoppers also refers to Northrop Frye's recognition that the biblical Samson story and its aftermath would have offered Milton a dubious analogy on which to pin his Restoration hopes (in Spiritus Mundi: Essays on Literature, Myth, and Society [Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1976], 222).

82. Edward Burrough, A Testimony against a great Idolatry Committed and a True Mourning of the Lords Servant Upon the Many Considerations of his heart upon the 23 day of the ninth month (London, 1658), 2 (quoted in Knoppers, Historicizing Milton, 65).

83. "Taste" and "touch" were often used interchangeably in the Renaissance, their meanings meeting in the former's etymon (taxare). Milton's interesting conflation of the two words in his epic, however, probably owes to his synesthetic interpretation of the Prohibition in Genesis 2.17. For Milton's "almost indifferent" use of touching and tasting in this sense, see Fowler, ed., Paradise Lost, 9.651, n.

84. See Samson Agonistes, ed. Carey, 136, n.; and John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merrit Y. Hughes (New York: Odyssey Press, 1957). The Oxford English Dictionary seems to concur with these glosses, citing Samson's "insupportably" as the first adverbial form of the word meaning "in an insupportable degree or manner; insufferably; irresistibly." Yet there is some latitude even in this definition; and the OED further records the introduction, in 1649, of "insupportable" in the sense of untenable or unjustifiable (see OED, under the word "insupportable").

85. See Wittreich, 220. In the Renaissance, as today, the authorship of the Book of Hebrews was a matter of dispute; the Geneva Bible attributes it either to St. Paul ("as it is not like") "or Luke, or Barnabas, or Clement . . ."

86. The Judges' narrator asserts that Samson's marriage was "from the Lord" (14:4), and that "the Spirit of the Lord rushed on him" as an incitement to his revenge in Ascalon (14:19). For some of the rabbinic commentary that dwells on such passages without self-satisfying solution, see Avrohom Fishelis and Shmuel Fishelis, The Book of Judges: A New English Translation of the Text, Rashi, and a Commentary Digest, ed. A. J. Rosenberg (New York: Octagon Books, 1987), 109-35. For the ambiguity of the text itself, see Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative (New York: AMS Press, 1981), 61-62, 101-5, 117. McDonald notes that in this episode, as in several others, Milton exacerbates narrative silences and ambiguities already present in Judges--perhaps amplifying them through rabbinic uncertainty over the Halachic legitimacy of Samson's actions (268-70).

For a compelling regenerationist argument for a distinction between the "evil" "intimate impulse" that has moved Samson toward his first marriage (SA, 223) and the genuinely renewing "rousing motions" in the temple, however, see Labriola, "Divine Urgency as a Motive for Conduct in Samson Agonistes." Labriola argues that the earlier "impulse" is from God but not of God--a legitimate temptation of the kind Milton explores in De Doctrina Christiana. By this argument, the fact that the characters in the play seem to credit the "intimate impulse" is not cause to be skeptical toward the later and genuine "rousing motions"; it is instead dramatic irony (99-107).

87. Wittreich, esp. 53-115, 174-238.

88. Lancelot Andrewes, The Wonderfull Combate (for Gods Glorie and Mans Salvation) betweene Christ and Satan (London: John Charlwood, 1592), 69.

89. Wittreich, 120-21 ("the chorus had never"). On the aloofness of even regenerationist readers consider, for example, Northrope Frye's observation that "In the Book of Judges, the account of Samson is immediately followed by another story about the Danites in which, after appearing in a most contemptible light as idolaters, thieves, and murderers, they vanish from history" (222). Raymond Waddington remains one of the more influential regenerationist readers of the play (following such important critics as Una Ellis-Fermor); for his own observation of "the modulations of difference" that complicate the typologies on which such readings are based, see "Milton among the Carolines" (in The Age of Milton: Backgrounds to Seventeenth-Century Literature, ed. C. A. Patrides and Raymond B. Waddington [Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1980], 352).

90. Dr. Johnson's critique appears in The Poetical Works of John Milton, ed. Henry John Todd, 7 vols. (London: J. Johnson, 1801), 4:347. Wittreich, x.

91. In Areopagitica, Milton personifies the inauthentic selfhood constituted by a thoroughly theatrical text as "a mere artificial Adam, such an Adam as he is in the motions" (in Complete Prose Works, 2:527). By applying these words to Milton's Samson, I do not mean to imply that his character lacks free choice; to do so would involve questions other than those I am asking. Certainly analysis such as I attempt here, focusing on intertextuality and transferable conventions of language and image, tends to hollow out--or at least ignore--a literary character's self. Indeed one line of my argument holds that Milton's Samson does not own his own language; that several aspects of his self have already been played by an other. But my reference to "artificial Adam" does not aim at a radically robotic Samson, nor do I wish to deny the possibility that at some level Milton grants Samson all the free choice that a dramatic character in a familiar story can enjoy (in the Argument, for instance, Milton speaks of Samson being "persuaded inwardly" that the call to the temple was "from God"); rather, I try to suggest here that at another level of representation Milton intends for Samson's role-playing (or referentiality) to be discernible. Perhaps the most apposite comparison is to the genuine Adam whose original and altogether unambiguous regeneration appears in the divinely guided art of dying that is the conclusion of Paradise Lost.

92. The intertextual communication between these two companion pieces has been discussed by Balachandra Rajan, "'To Which is Added Samson Agonistes--'" (in The Prison and the Pinnacle, ed. Balachandra Rajan [Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1973], 82-110); and Shawcross ("The Genres of Paradise Regain'd and Samson Agonistes: The Wisdom of Their Joint Publication," 225-48). John Guillory has briefly suggested that Samson instead stands as a destructive "coda" to "the completed edifice of [Milton's] oeuvre" ("The father's house: Samson Agonistes in its historical moment," in Re-membering Milton: Essays on the texts and traditions, ed. Mary Nyquist and Margaret W. Ferguson [Methuen: New York and London, 1988], 171).

93. Here I summarize Fish's argument in "Things and Actions Indifferent: The Temptation of Plot in Paradise Regained," Milton Studies 17 (1983): 163-85.

94. Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes (1671), title page.

95. Jonathan Culler has famously proclaimed the supremacy of theory over interpretation in our own critical moment: "One thing we do not need is more interpretations of literary works" (The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, and Deconstruction [Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1981], 6).

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