The Uncertain World Of Samson Agonistes

Ambiguity, present in all aspects of the poem, is seen as central to Milton's authorial intentions. Shawcross proposes that the many ambiguities surrounding Milton's dramatic poem Samson Agonistes are intentional: the actual words, the dates of composition, the genre, and the characters - particularly Samson and Dalila but including Manoa, Harapha, and the Chorus. Ambiguity also lies in Milton's presentation of political issues both philosophical and practical, his treatment of gender concepts, the constant questioning of the reader, and the poem's effect. Discussing all these elements, Shawcross follows with a detailed reading of the text which argues that it remains purposefully ambiguous, reflecting Milton's own recognition of the uncertainty of the content, and suggesting that Milton himself would question some of the nice 'solutions' that modern scholarship has offered in the last two decades. JOHN SHAWCROSS is Professor of English, Emeritus, University of Kentucky.

Yearly volume containing twelve essays on topics from Shakespeare to Middleton, Donne, Propertius, political resistance and legitimation, Elizabethan anthologies, and Milton. This volume collects the best scholarly essays submitted to the Southeastern Renaissance Conference in 2006. Two focus on Shakespeare: one on twins in The Comedy of Errors, one on differences between the Quarto and Folio versions of the reunion of Lear and Cordelia. Three essays deal with non-Shakespearean drama, examining the unvarying prefatory matter in frequently reprinted dramatic texts, economic systems in Middleton's city comedy, and theoriesof political resistance in revenge tragedy. Political resistance is also the theme of an essay on the satires of Donne and Propertius, while political legitimation is the subject of one on Medici family portraiture. Two essays concern Elizabethan anthologies: one on the unexamined collection Youthes Witte, the other on childbirth prayers in The Monument of Matrones. One essay on Milton's treatment of forgiveness and two on his Samson Agonistes conclude the volume, showing the unexpected affinities between Milton's tragedy and Jonson's comedy Bartholomew Fair and meditating upon the challenge to interpretation posed by end of the play. Contributors: John Adrian, David Bergeron, Kevin Donovan, Heather L. Sale Holian, Matthew T. Lynch, Steven W. May, Andrew Shifflett, Gerald Snare, Susan C. Staub, Emily Stockard, Lewis Walker, and George Walton Williams M. Thomas Hester is Professor of English at North Carolina State University, and Christopher Cobb is Assistant Professor of English at Saint Mary's College.

In early modern culture and in Milton's poetry and prose, this book argues, the concept of hope is intrinsically connected with place and land. Mary Fenton analyzes how Milton sees hope as bound both to the spiritual and the material, the internal self and the external world. Hope, as Fenton demonstrates, comes from commitment to literal places such as the land, ideological places such as the "nation," and sacred, interior places such as the human soul. Drawing on an array of materials from the seventeenth century, including emblems, legal treatises, political pamphlets, and prayer manuals, Fenton sheds light on Milton's ideas about personal and national identity and where people should place their sense of power and responsibility; Milton's politics and where he thought the English nation was and where it should be heading; and finally, Milton's theology and how individuals relate to God.

This study describes a variety of ways of thinking about place in the Renaissance and in Paradise Lost. Despite coming from different perspectives, they have in common the idea that the difficulty of the relationship of reciprocity that poetic subjects often expect from their environment destabilizes those subjects’ understanding, not only of environment, but of themselves. The study explores destabilization as it affects aspects of the poem from Adam’s sense of the landscape of Eden and the meaning of the Fall itself, to the relationship the ambiguous landscapes of Paradise Lost create between Adam and Eve, the poet and the reader; all of whom are struggling to make sense of the same problematically described places. To a surprisingly large extent, the description of prelapsarian Eden and the events that go on within it have in common a failed attempt to understand the nature of the surroundings. In observing the centrality and difficultly of this poetic discourse of place, the problem of place is found at the very heart of the Fall.

Prayer divided seventeenth-century England. Anglican Conformists such as Lancelot Andrewes and Jeremy Taylor upheld set forms of prayer in the Book of Common Prayer, a book designed to unite the nation in worship. Puritan Reformers and Dissenters such as John Milton and John Bunyan rejected the prayer book and advocated for extemporaneous or free prayer. In 1645, the mainly Puritan Long Parliament proscribed the Book of Common Prayer and dismantled the Anglican Church in the midst of civil war. This led Anglican poets and liturgists to defend their tradition with energy and erudition in print. In 1662, with monarchy restored, the mainly Anglican Cavalier Parliament reinstated the Church and its prayer book to impose religious uniformity. This galvanized English Nonconformity and Dissent and gave rise to a vibrant literary counter-tradition. Addressing this fascinating history, David Gay examines competing claims to spiritual gifts and graces in polemical texts and their influence on prayer and poetry. Amid the contention of differing voices, the disputed connection of poetry and prayer, imagination and religion, emerges as a central tension in early modern literature and culture.

John Milton's major poems have long provoked wide-ranging judgements about the purposes of his biblical engagement. In this elegant and insightful study, Phillip J. Donnelly transforms our common perceptions about Milton's writing. He challenges the traditional assumption that the poet shared our modern view that reason is a capacity whose purpose is to control nature. Instead, Milton's conception of reason - both human and divine - is bound up with a poetic sense of difference, a capacity for being faithful to a goodness and beauty that survives the effects of human frailty in the fall. Providing fresh new readings of Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes, Donnelly gives us important new perspectives on Milton's aesthetics, theology and politics.

In Fleshly Tabernacles, Bryan Hampton examines John Milton’s imaginative engagement with, and theological passion for, the Incarnation. As aesthetic symbol, theological event, and narrative picture of humanity’s potential, the Incarnation profoundly governs the way Milton structures his 1645 Poems, ponders the holy office of the pulpit, reflects on the ends of speech and language, interprets sacred scripture or secular texts, and engages in the radical politics of the Civil War and Interregnum. Richly drawing upon the disciplines of historical and postmodern theology, philosophical hermeneutics, theological aesthetics, and literary theory, Fleshly Tabernacles pursues the wide-ranging implications of the heterodox, perfectionist strain in Milton’s Christology. Hampton illustrates how vibrant Christologies generated and shaped particular brands of anticlericalism, theories of reading and language, and political commitments of English nonconformist sects during the turbulent decades of the seventeenth century. Ranters and Seekers, Diggers and Quakers, Fifth monarchists and some Anabaptists—many of those identified with these radical groups proclaim that the Incarnation is primarily understood, not as a singular event of antiquity, but as a present eruption and charged manifestation within the life of the individual believer, such that faithful believers become “fleshly tabernacles” housing the Divine. The perfectionist strain in Milton’s theology resonated in the works of the Independent preacher John Everard, the Digger Gerrard Winstanley, and the Quaker James Nayler. Fleshly Tabernacles intriguingly demonstrates how ideas of the incarnated Christ flourished in the world of revolutionary England, expressed in the notion that the regenerated human self could repair the ruins of church and state.

The phrase “early modern” challenges readers and scholars to explore ways in which that period expands and refines contemporary views of the modern. The original essays in Milton’s Modernities undertake such exploration in the context of the work of John Milton, a poet whose prodigious energies simultaneously point to the past and future. Bristling with insights on Milton’s major works, Milton’s Modernities offers fresh perspectives on the thinkers central to our theorizations of modernity: from Lucretius and Spinoza, Hegel and Kant, to Benjamin and Deleuze. At the volume's core is an embrace of the possibilities unleashed by current trends in philosophy, variously styled as the return to ethics, or metaphysics, or religion. These make all the more visible Milton’s dialogues with later modernity, dialogues that promise to generate much critical discussion in early modern studies and beyond. Such approaches necessarily challenge many prevailing assumptions that have guided recent Milton criticism—assumptions about context and periodization, for instance. In this way, Milton’s Modernities powerfully broadens the historical archive beyond the materiality of events and things, incorporating as well intellectual currents, hybrids, and insights.