“Teach the Erring Soul” 1669–1674the Psalmist, as, like them, Samson seeks to understand God’s ways to him.^123 By
such changes Milton creates a hero capable of self-analysis, intellectual struggle,
tragic suffering, and bitter self-castigation as he confronts his guilt. Samson is not
Milton Agonistes, but Milton put much of himself into Samson’s lamentations about
blindness and captivity among enemies.
This drama has elicited a cacophony of interpretations. Some see Samson en-
acting a paradigm of fall and regeneration; others think he remains tragically flawed
in his vindictiveness, despair, self-concern, and suicidal revenge.^124 Some find
Samson’s character undecidable, given the contradictory contemporary uses of
the Samson story and the absence of any authoritative vantage point.^125 Read in
political terms, the drama has been construed as a near-allegory of the English
revolution and its aftermath; as a covert call to English Puritans to rise again; as a
repudiation of the English revolution and of all military action; as figuring the
situation of the Puritan dissenters in the Restoration; or as projecting the Puritan
radicals’ expectation of God’s destruction of the wicked though his Saints.^126 Milton
indeed emphasizes the ambiguous signs and events of the Samson story: the won-
ders surrounding his birth; the extraordinary strength in his unshorn hair; his
awesome deeds; his catastrophic fall; his sense of repudiation by God; his claims to
“inner impulses” and “rousing motions”; and his final, violent destruction of the
Philistines and himself. Such ambiguous signs, along with such prominent stylistic
features as antitheses and either–or constructions, force readers to weigh and choose,
but Milton’s literary strategies provide some guide among the interpretative pos-
sibilities.^127 Milton’s Samson does not trace a straightforward trajectory from sin to
regeneration, but takes a more realistic, uneven course, often manifesting prideful
self-regard, a disposition to blame others, and even despair. But his final, miracu-
lous destruction of the Philistine theater indicates that God has accepted his re-
pentance and has restored his role as judge, that is, as God’s agent for the deliverance
of his people.
The preface, “Of that sort of Dramatic Poem which is call’d Tragedy,” is Milton’s
only extended commentary on a poem of his own. The title page epigraph quotes
the first few words in Greek and the first sentence in Latin of Aristotle’s famous
definition of Tragedy,^128 and Milton begins by paraphrasing that definition in terms
tailored to this work:
Tragedy, as it was antiently compos’d, hath been ever held the gravest, moralest, and
most profitable of all other Poems: therefore said by Aristotle to be of power by raising
pity and fear, or terror, to purge the mind of those and such like passions, that is to
temper and reduce them to just measure with a kind of delight, stirr’d up by reading
or seeing those passions well imitated. (3)Unlike Aristotle, Milton emphasizes the moral profit of tragedy, and also glosses
catharsis as a purging or tempering of the passions by aesthetic delight – a concept