THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

The ‘second Adam’ is here to reverse the cause of the Fall if not yet to undo its consequences. We are presented with a
serious, scholarly, articulate, ethical, passionate, sinless Christ, but a cold one. Essentially, the poem lacks drama.
Although the Christian reader of Paradise Regain’d knows the outcome of the encounter with Satan in the wilderness
as much as he or she knew earlier that Adam and Eve would fall, a meeting of the incarnate, omnipotent, and
omniscient God with his far from omnipotent opponent inevitably suggests an unequal struggle of wills and a
foregone conclusion. The real interest of Milton’s poem lies in its presentation of arguments, not in an exploration of
personality or an imaginative speculation about the unknowable. Satan’s intellectual and sensual assaults, and
Christ’s reasoned responses to them, juxtapose ideologies, ways of seeing, thinking, reading, interpreting, and
believing. Satan asks less for submission than for compromise and to answer him Christ insists on the wisdom of
understanding, a wisdom which locates and judges rather than deprecates and fudges.
Milton’s tragedy Samson Agonistes was published with Paradise Regain’d in 1671 though its date of composition
is uncertain. The tragedy takes as its subject the ruined and blinded Samson, the failed hero of Israel, taunted by his
alien wife Dalila, the cause of his downfall, and scorned by Harapha, the representative of the victorious Philistines.
Yet Samson’s former failure to resist temptation also proves a fortunate fall. Herein lies the problem of its dating. The
drama has been traditionally assumed to date from the period of Milton’s own proscription and blindness and to be a
further reflection on the mysteries of divine providence which casts down those who had once seemed champions of
the national cause. Some critics have, however, been inclined to
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see it as a work of the late 1640s or early 1650s. Its subject is essentially appropriate to both phases in Milton’s career
for Samson Agonistes seeks to adapt the form of Greek tragedy to the needs of a Christian society and to equate a
Hebrew moral to the faith of a Protestant elect. The drama closely follows both classical models and the prescriptions
of classical critics. Unlike the English tragedies of Milton’s immediate forebears and contemporaries, it adheres
faithfully to the unities of time, place, and action, it places considerable weight on its Chorus of Danites, and it traces
the growth in enlightenment of its protagonist. It differs from its models in that it is emphaticall;, optimistic in its
internal insistence that Christian tragedy is a contradiction in terms. Samson’s slow enlightenment drives him not to
despair but to a reconciliation to the benign purposes of God. His death is seen not as a purging but as a triumph in
which the Chorus is finally brought to an awareness of the hero’s ‘dearly-bought revenge, yet glorious’. Samson’s
father Manoah proclaims the special nature of the sacrifice of his son:
Nothing is here for tears, nothing to wail
Or knock the brest, no weakness, no contempt,
Dispraise or blame, nothing but well and fair,
And what may quiet us in a death so noble.
Samson, as a type of Christ, prefigures the Messiah’s redemptive death, mastering defeat through a submission to the
will of God. True liberty, all of Milton’s biblically based works imply, rests in a resolved and independent
understanding of the nature of service.
Marvell
Three major poets, all secretaries to the republican government and all dressed in official mourning, walked behind
Cromwell’s coffin in the Lord Protector’s magnificent funeral procession to Westminster Abbey in November 1658.
The eldest, John Milton, had proved his loyalty to the doomed Commonwealth, a loyalty that he silently maintained.
The youngest, John Dryden, later tactfully shifted his poetic ground away from tributes to Cromwell to celebrations of
the returning Charles II. The loyalties of the third poet, Andrew Marvell (1621-78), appear to have been far more
subtly ambiguous. Marvell had spent the early part of the Civil War travelling in The Netherlands, France, Italy, and
Spain and it was during a second visit to France in 1656 that a visiting English royalist described him as a ‘notable
Italo-Machavillian’. The exact degree of Marvell’s commitment to the divisive causes of his day will always be
indeterminate; the acute political intelligence which permeates his poetry is not. In the Preface to the second part of
his prose satire The Rehearsal Transpros’d (1673) he insisted that until 1657 he had ‘not the remotest relation to
publick matters’ and that thereafter he had entered into an official employment which he considered ‘the
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