Samson Agonistes

Abstract

The most remarkable aspect of Samson Agonistes is its internalisation of the action.¹ Samson’s movement back to God, his recovery of his lost pre-eminence and power, is recorded, not in terms of the hero’s actions, but rather in terms of his progressively more acute spiritual awareness. It is in the spiritual movement of the drama that the Aristotelian ‘middle’, which Dr Johnson found wanting in the play, is to be found. Indeed, most of Milton’s modern readers would readily endorse Arthur Barker’s facetiously accurate reversal of Dr Johnson’s charge: ‘Samson’s experience is so far from having no middle that it is in effect all middle.’²