Samson Agonistes

John Milton’s dramatic poem often invites autobiographical readings. As the 20th-century Milton scholar Douglas Bush writes in his introduction to The Portable Milton (Penguin, 1988), “And then, eyeless in London, under a Stuart king, he was reliving his own career as a great deliver now in subjection the Philistines” (22). There are many similarities between Milton and Samson: Both are blind, and each is fighting against what they see as oppression, Milton on the side of the Commonwealth opposing the absolutist monarchy of Charles I, and Samson defending the Israelites from the oppressive occupation of the Philistines.

Yet this kind of autobiographical comparison is overly grandiose. In Milton’s Peculiar Grace, the contemporary Milton scholar Stephen M. Fallon describes Milton’s flattering representation of himself in his work. He’s “[S]houlder to shoulder with God and Moses” and “a superhuman benefactor” (Cornell UP, 2007, p. 118). Like Samson, Milton arguably thought of himself as special, or, as Samson puts it, “[A] person separate to God” (Line 31). In the play, Samson says he behaved “like a petty God” (Line 529) and was “swoll’n with pride” (Line 532). Milton, too, might have been rather full of himself. Though Milton was a prolific writer, he was not the crucial lynchpin of Cromwell’s government in the same that Samson’s extraordinary physical strength made him a key part of the Israelite army.