The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
John Milton · a tragedy on the Greek model, written to be read and not staged · 1,758 lines, blank verse in the dialogue and freed verse in the choruses · first published in 1671, added to Paradise Regained · scored on the 1671 text with its preface and argument and the Omissa restored, read from knowledge; no text in hand, quoted only where its words are certain
Mode
Tragedy on the Greek model, written for reading; a drama of regeneration in which the action is a series of visits to a man who does not move
Mythos
The strong man shorn, blinded and betrayed, made to perform for his enemies, who brings down the house of the false god with himself inside it; fall and regeneration; the phoenix
Phase
One day before the prison at Gaza: Samson alone, the Chorus’s entry, four visitations, the summons obeyed, the catastrophe offstage, the Messenger’s report, Manoa’s answer and the last chorus
Presentation
Closet tragedy of 1,758 lines with a prose preface and an argument, published in 1671 in one octavo with Paradise Regained; no division into acts and scenes; the lines printed among the Omissa restored to their places
Register
Blank verse plainer than Paradise Lost and built for argument; choral verse in lines of uneven length, mostly unrhymed, with rhyme falling at intervals and gathering at the close
Scale
One man in one place on one day, with his father, his wife, his enemies, Israel’s servitude and the God of Israel against Dagon brought to him
Governing Proposition
A blind captive at the mill in Gaza, betrayed by his wife and labouring for his enemies, is visited in one day by his father, his wife, a giant of Gath and an officer of the Philistine lords, and refuses what each brings, until a summons he first refuses he then obeys on an inner prompting no one can verify; out of sight he brings the theatre down on the lords and on himself, and the report comes back to those who will call it deliverance. The wager of the play is that a man broken by his own fault may be remade from inside, unprompted and unprovable, and that the last act of such a man can be told but never seen.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The play first appeared at the back of another book. In 1671 Milton published one octavo under the title page “Paradise Regain’d. A Poem in IV Books. To which is added Samson Agonistes.” The brief epic and the tragedy share a volume and a year, and nothing else in their form: the one is a debate in a wilderness, the other a tragedy in the manner of Athens. Before the play stands a prose preface, “Of that sort of Dramatic Poem which is call’d Tragedy”, and an argument. At the end of the volume a few lines left out in printing were set among the Omissa, and every modern edition puts them back in their places.
The preface says what kind of thing the play is. It defends tragedy against the low esteem in which its age held it, claims for it Aristotle’s power “to purge the mind of those and such-like passions”, and sets out the ancient rule of one action within one day. It states plainly that “Division into Act and Scene referring chiefly to the Stage (to which this work never was intended) is here omitted.” This is a tragedy written to be read. The desk scores it so: as a closet drama, a text for reading and not for performance, and in Milton’s English.
The form is the Greek one, without its labels: a prologue with Samson alone, the Chorus’s entry, a series of episodes, and an end. The Chorus of Danites is restored as a speaking person, and it speaks a verse the preface calls “Monostrophic, or rather Apolelymenon”: without strophe and antistrophe, in lines of uneven length, mostly unrhymed, with rhyme falling where it falls. The rest speak blank verse. When the play was written has never been settled: the received view places it after the Restoration, and a minority has argued for the years round 1650. Nothing on this page depends on either.
Movement II
The play opens on Samson alone before the prison. Everything that follows comes to this place: one man, one yard before the prison at Gaza, one day. He is blind, captive and made to labour for the people he was born to fight, and he knows that he brought himself there. He sees himself “Eyeless in Gaza at the mill with slaves” (line 41). The line puts the promise beside the fact: the hero as captive labour, grinding for his enemies.
The first lament rises at once. “O dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon, / Irrecoverably dark, total eclipse / Without all hope of day!” A little later the sun itself goes out for him: “The sun to me is dark / And silent as the moon, / When she deserts the night / Hid in her vacant interlunar cave.” The blindness is the condition of the whole play, and the play never names the blindness of the man who wrote it, or the defeat of the cause he served. Every reader feels both. The desk notes them and scores the play on its own matter.
What weighs on Samson more than the dark is the promise. “Promise was that I / Should Israel from Philistian yoke deliver”, and Israel is not delivered. His despair is not self-pity. He refuses every comfort because each is partial, and the worst of his defeat is not what he has lost but the knowledge that he gave it away. The Chorus of Danites enters and finds him so, and from here to the last line it will be the play’s other mind: grieving, consoling, moralising, and at times saying more than it knows.
Movement III
The visitors come one by one, and Samson does not move. Manoa, his father, comes first, with love and a plan: he will treat with the Philistine lords for his son’s ransom and bring him home to ease. It is the gentlest temptation in the play and the most dangerous, despair dressed as rest, and Samson refuses it. The Chorus, which watches every visit, reaches in the course of the play to despair at Providence itself, “God of our fathers, what is man!”, and its range runs from there to the last calm.
Then Dalila, his wife, who betrayed him. She comes with a plea, with excuses, with love that she may half mean, and with the bed: the old fault offered back. The verse sharpens into argument and bitter wit, as in her “Fame if not double-faced is double-mouthed.” Samson refuses her. When she has gone the Chorus speaks at length about women, in a voice the play elsewhere keeps in check, and the moralising runs past what the action needs.
Harapha of Gath comes next, a giant, and he comes with contempt, and the scene is near comedy: a contest of boasts, in which the giant will not fight a blind man. But it is here that Samson first turns outward. He answers contempt by staking his strength on God again. The scene is longer than its work and its exchanges are stiff, and still it carries the law of the whole play: strength is God’s, given and withdrawn, and it returns only when it is no longer Samson’s boast. Harapha is the boast outside him, and refused.
Movement IV
Then the Officer, with a summons: the lords command Samson to come and perform before them at their festival. He refuses. Then he feels within him “rousing motions”, and he obeys the summons he refused, and goes. That is the turn of the play, and nothing outside him prompts it. For the first time since the play began, Samson leaves the place where the world has come to him.
Samuel Johnson’s charge against the play is that it has a beginning and an end and no middle: nothing between the first scene and the last hastens or delays the catastrophe. The outward plot does stand still. But the visitations are the middle. Each tests a different part of the fall, and their order, comfort, desire, contempt, command, cannot be exchanged. Manoa is refused, Dalila is refused, Harapha is answered, the summons is refused and then obeyed. Take any one away and the regeneration loses a step.
The play will not say where the motions come from. They cannot be verified from inside or from outside, and the deliverance they bring is a slaughter. This is the play’s hardest disclosure, and its form protects it: because Samson leaves the stage, no one will see what he does or how he looks while he does it. The play shows what it is to act on an inner call, and leaves its warrant in the dark.
Movement V
Manoa returns, full of hope for the ransom, and while he speaks a noise is heard. The catastrophe happens out of sight, after the Greek practice: Samson has pulled the theatre down on the Philistine lords and on himself. A Messenger comes to tell it, and the telling, delayed by Manoa’s hopes and by the noise, is held back and then released. He saw Samson stand as if in prayer or in deep thought before the end, and he cannot say what was in his face.
Those left behind supply the meaning. Manoa reads the act at once: “Samson hath quit himself / Like Samson”, and “Nothing is here for tears.” The semichorus sees virtue rising “like that self-begotten bird”, the phoenix, and the pattern of fall and regeneration is named once, at the moment it is complete. For three centuries readers took the ending so, as vindication. From the 1980s some argued that the play invites distrust of its hero and its Chorus, and after September 2001 the argument over its catastrophe became public. The same lines sustain both readings.
The last chorus closes in rhymed lines near a sonnet: “All is best, though we oft doubt, / What th’ unsearchable dispose / Of highest wisdom brings about”, and of the God who has done this, “His servants he with new acquist / Of true experience from this great event / With peace and consolation hath dismissed”. The last line is “And calm of mind all passion spent.” The preface promised that tragedy would purge the passions it raised. The last line performs it. Whether the calm is earned, or only claimed by those who were not in the temple, the play has left for its readers to decide.
Act III · The Twelve
The oldest charge against the play is Samuel Johnson’s: it has a beginning and an end and no middle, since nothing between the first scene and the last hastens or delays the catastrophe. The charge is half right. The outward plot does not move. But the visitations are the action: Manoa offers ransom and ease, despair dressed as rest; Dalila offers love and the bed, the old fault; Harapha offers contempt, which Samson answers by staking his strength on God again, the first turn outward; the Officer brings a summons first refused and then obeyed. Remove any one and the regeneration loses a step. What holds the axis down is in the parts: choral moralising that runs past the action, and a Harapha scene longer than its work.
Score: 8.4 / 10
What the play brings into the open can be stated and holds: that the worst of defeat is not the loss but the conviction of one’s own guilt in it, and that recovery begins, if at all, inside the one who failed, unprompted and unprovable. Samson’s despair is not self-pity; he refuses every comfort because each is partial, and sees himself “Eyeless in Gaza at the mill with slaves” (line 41). The harder disclosure the play will not soften: the “rousing motions” that take him to the temple cannot be verified from inside or out, and the deliverance they bring is a slaughter. Held below the top because the Chorus and Manoa close the question more firmly than the play has earned.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The height is real and comes several times. The first lament: “O dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon”. The sun gone “dark / And silent as the moon, / When she deserts the night / Hid in her vacant interlunar cave”. The Messenger’s narration, held back and then released; the semichorus’s phoenix, “that self-begotten bird”; and the last line. The dreadful height is the catastrophe heard and not seen. But the axis weighs frequency as well as height, and the middle, between Dalila’s exit and the Officer’s entry, falls to wrangling: Harapha’s scene is a contest of boasts, its comedy deliberate but low in elevation. That holds the axis below 9.0.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Myth built, not evoked. The strong man shorn and blinded, the betrayer at the bed, the captive made to perform for his enemies, the house of the false god destroyed with himself inside it: the book of Judges gives the matter, and the play makes it carry the shape of fall and regeneration. Behind it, never pressed, stand the blind king at the end of his life in Oedipus at Colonus and the hero whose strength becomes his death in Heracles. The phoenix names the pattern once, at the right moment. The particular holds: a man in a prison yard, a father bargaining for him, a wife who may half mean what she says. Held a step below the top because Samson as a type of Christ is left latent, and the myth narrows to one line of action.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The turn is the attempt itself: a tragedy in English on the Greek model, the Chorus restored as a speaking person and the action held to one day and one place, written when the English stage ran on rhymed heroic drama and comedy, with a preface defending tragedy against the low esteem its age gave it. The choral verse, freed of stanza and regular rhyme, is the boldest metrical departure in English before the nineteenth century. The stake was political as well: a regicide’s tragedy, published after the Restoration, of a blinded captive who brings down the festival of his conquerors. It stands at the gate and not above it because the departure is toward an older, proven path; the swerve from Greek tragedy itself is real but smaller.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Change the form and the play stops knowing what it knows. The one act on which everything turns happens offstage and arrives by report: the Messenger saw Samson stand as if in prayer or in deep thought, and cannot show his face, so the form itself makes the warrant undecidable. Because the scene never changes, Samson’s stillness is the drama: the world comes to him and is refused. Because the play is for reading, the Chorus can think at length in a verse no stage would sustain. And the preface’s claim from Aristotle, that tragedy can “purge the mind of those and such-like passions”, is answered by the last line, which performs the purgation it named. Held below 9.0 by the slack choruses of the middle.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Evidence, not promise, and unusually sharp. For three centuries the play was read as a drama of regeneration, its ending a vindication. From the 1980s a revisionist reading argued that it invites distrust of its hero and its Chorus, and was answered at length; after September 2001 the argument over its catastrophe became public. That the same 1,758 lines sustain both readings, and that the argument has not exhausted them, is the yield. Formal depth returns as well, in the choral metres, and in the question of when the play was written, which has never been settled. Held below 9.0 because the yield runs in one main channel, the warrant of the act, more than in many.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The field is English verse and drama of the later seventeenth century and, more widely, the English attempt at Greek tragedy. The intrinsic force is high: the play is the only English tragedy on the Greek pattern that stands with its models, and its choral verse widened what English metre could do. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: real but narrow. It did not redirect the English stage, which it was never meant for. Handel’s Samson (1743) set a libretto drawn from it, and Aldous Huxley took a title from it; the later English tragedies on the Greek model owe it a debt hard to separate from their debt to the Greeks. Most of Milton’s pressure on tradition passes through Paradise Lost, and the narrow reach holds the axis below the gate.
Score: 8.1 / 10
Survival is demonstrated over three and a half centuries. The text survives whole, printed in Milton’s lifetime, with only the small matter of the Omissa, which every edition restores; nothing of the work is lost, and form and fabric carry no charge. Presence has been continuous since 1671, in every collected Milton and in the teaching of English literature, and kept in wider view by Handel’s oratorio, by the phrase “Eyeless in Gaza” in common use, and by the argument after 2001. The charge is the academy’s: it is not a book read widely outside the study of literature, and its presence has always stood in the shadow of Paradise Lost. The charge is applied lightly, and the play keeps the highest figure of the twelve.
Score: 9.1 / 10
The command is load-bearing. The blank verse of the dialogue is plainer than Paradise Lost’s, built for argument, and can turn to bitter wit, as in Dalila’s “Fame if not double-faced is double-mouthed”. The choral verse is the achievement: lines of two to twelve syllables, rhyme arriving and withdrawing, the rhythm following the thought, and a close in rhymed lines near a sonnet, from “All is best, though we oft doubt” to “With peace and consolation hath dismissed”. The management of the Messenger’s report, delayed by Manoa’s hopes and by the noise from offstage, is exact. Charged: some choral passages are crabbed and their syntax laboured, and the Harapha exchange is stiff.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: Harapha’s scene, near comedy, a giant who will not fight a blind man, and the Messenger’s narration of the temple. One law governs both: strength is God’s, given and withdrawn, and it returns only when it is no longer Samson’s boast. Harapha is the boast outside him, refused; the temple is the strength returned and spent. Dalila’s scene obeys the same law, since she stands where the strength was lost. The Chorus spans the widest range, from despair at Providence, “God of our fathers, what is man!”, to the last calm, and the law holds across it. Held below 9.0 because the law is narrow, and because the Chorus on women after Dalila leaves speaks in a voice the play elsewhere keeps in check.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Judged on what one closet tragedy holds. Consciousness, fully: the inward drama of despair and its recovery. The family, in a father’s love bargaining with the enemy. Marriage and sexuality, in Dalila, the betrayal and its plea, and the earlier marriage at Timna. The nation and the state: Israel’s servitude, the Philistine lords, the leaders who failed to rise when Samson called them. War and violence, in Harapha and the temple. The sacred, at the centre. History, as the time of the Judges. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is that all of it comes through one man in one place, which binds it and narrows it, and that the natural order is almost absent: the sun and moon of the lament, and the phoenix.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.7 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 9.1, then The Made at 9.0, then The Living Form at 8.9. A text whole and in print since 1671 and never out of teaching; a blank verse built for argument and a choral verse freed of stanza, closing in rhymed lines near a sonnet; and a form that keeps its one decisive act offstage, so that the warrant for it can be reported but never seen.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 8.0: many orders of life, all held through one man in one place, with the natural order almost absent. Above it, Pressure on Tradition at 8.1: the only English tragedy on the Greek pattern that stands with its models, but a reach narrow and indirect, since it never redirected the stage it was not written for and most of its poet’s pressure on the tradition passes through Paradise Lost.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.4 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.9, The Made at 9.0, The Inner Law at 8.8, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 9.1, The Archetypal Deep at 8.8 and The Unconcealment at 8.7 clear the bar of 8.5, and The Swerve meets it exactly at 8.5, but Pressure on Tradition at 8.1 falls short by four tenths. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.1, against 7.5), and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.0. The aggregate, at 8.7, also stands below the summit’s 9.0.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of John Milton’s Samson Agonistes, scored as the closet tragedy printed in 1671 in one octavo with Paradise Regained (Paradise Regain’d. A Poem in IV Books. To which is added Samson Agonistes), with its prose preface and its argument, and with the lines printed among the Omissa restored to their places, as every modern edition restores them: 1,758 lines in all, in Milton’s English. Paradise Regained, bound with it, is a separate work and is not scored here. The play is scored as a text for reading, as its preface declares it. No text was in hand, nothing was measured, and no quotation was checked against a file. Quotations are short passages whose words are certain, given in modernised spelling except in the title page and the preface’s heading, and cited by line only where the line is certain. No translation is involved. The date of composition is unsettled and is given as such. Matters that could not be verified, among them the place and date of an early critic’s charge against the play’s middle, a phrase from the noise of the catastrophe, the names and dates of the critics in the modern argument over the ending, a later poet’s use of the choral metres, and the names of later English tragedies in its line, are not given.