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6 - Milton, Samson Agonistes, and the Restoration

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 August 2009

Gerald MacLean
Affiliation:
Wayne State University, Detroit
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Summary

Milton's Samson Agonistes raises in an unusually stark form the question how far a work of imaginative literature can or should be understood in terms of the historical background to its composition. From William Godwin to David Masson to Christopher Hill, a succession of historians and of historically minded critics has supposed that Samson's predicament corresponds to Milton's experience of the Restoration, and to the struggle of the blind poet to come to terms with the defeat of the Puritan cause. To that view, some distinguished literary critics have taken profound exception. E. M. Krouse argued that “any attempt … to make political allegory the heart of this poem is indefensible.” Barbara Lewalski has maintained that there is “no basis for reading the play as political allegory of any kind,” and that the “echoes” of Restoration politics which have been detected “are merely the contemporary reverberation of a universal paradigm recurring throughout history.” W. R. Parker's biography of Milton not only declined to recognize any “personal” or “political allusions” in Samson Agonistes, but concluded, on stylistic grounds, that the poem was written not after the Restoration but well before it – though that view seems to have lost such favor as it once enjoyed.

Which is the greater, the exasperation of historians when literary critics dismiss the historical context, or the indignation of literary critics when historians are blind to the literary one? At issue, as always in the discussion of local allusions in a work that transcends its time, is the relationship of a writer's imagination to the world around him.

Type
Chapter
Information
Culture and Society in the Stuart Restoration
Literature, Drama, History
, pp. 111 - 136
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1995

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