POETRY UNABRIDGED John Milton Samson Agonistes Performed by Iain Glen and cast 1 Introduction - On a Festival Day 8:55 2 Chorus 1: This, this is he... 3:19 3 Samson: I hear the sound of words... 2:16 4 Chorus 1: Tax not divine disposal, wisest Men... 1:45 5 Samson: That fault I take not on me... 2:03 6 Chorus 1: Thy words to my remembrance bring... 2:33 7 Manoa: Brethren and men of Dan, for such ye seem... 3:11 8 Samson: Appoint not heavenly disposition, Father... 2:56 9 Manoa: I cannot praise thy Marriage choices, Son... 3:36 10 Manoa: With cause this hope relieves thee... 4:22 11 Chorus 1: Desire of wine and all delicious drink... 4:05 12 Samson: O that torment should not be confin’d... 2:45 13 Chorus 3: Many are the sayings of the wise... 3:07 14 Chorus 3: But who is this, what thing of Sea or Land? 1:14 15 Dalila: With doubtful feet and wavering resolution... 2:05 16 Dalila: Yet hear me Samson; not that I endeavour... 6:47 17 Samson: I thought where all thy circling wiles would end... 7:32 2 18 Chorus 1: She’s gone, a manifest Serpent by her sting... 3:24 19 Samson: Fair days have oft contracted wind and rain. 0:48 20 Harapha: I come not Samson, to condole thy chance... 7:15 21 Samson: Among the Daughters of the Philistines... 3:15 22 Chorus 1: His Giantship is gone somewhat crestfall’n... 3:15 23 Officer: Ebrews, the Pris’ner Samson here I seek. 2:20 24 Chorus 1: Consider, Samson; matters now are strain’d... 2:34 25 Officer: Samson, this second message from our Lords... 3:03 26 Manoa: Peace with you brethren, my inducement hither... 4:09 27 Manoa: I know your friendly minds and – O what noise! 1:56 28 Messenger: O whither shall I run, or which way fly... 4:01 29 Messenger: Occasions drew me early to this City... 4:27 30 Chorus 1: O dearly-bought revenge, yet glorious! 2:22 31 Manoa: Come, come, no time for lamentation now... 4:07 32 End Credits 1:26 Total time: 1:51:11 3 John Milton Samson Agonistes Directed by John Tydeman Samson Iain Glen Manoa David de Keyser Dalila Samantha Bond Harapha Philip Madoc Public Officer Matthew Morgan Messenger Michael Maloney Chorus Tim Bentinck, Simon Treves and Sean Barrett 4 John Milton (1608–1674) Samson Agonistes To many, Milton appears to be perhaps tragic state means that his God has the sternest and most forbidding figure in abandoned him, and wondering whether English poetry: a rigorous Puritan obsessed his life can be redeemed before death by sin and death, whose great religious claims him – this is Samson in the poem, epic, Paradise Lost, analyses the flaws and it is Milton himself in his final years, and suffering of the human condition in living in Restoration London, the holy a language that is pseudo-classical, cold, experiment of the Puritan Commonwealth, heavy and almost impenetrable. They to which he had devoted his life, now think of his entire poetic achievement as consigned to dust, and he himself ignored divorced from human emotion, frozen by the godless Philistines who now ruled into a kind of ornate heartlessness. England. But in fact Milton was a proud, John Milton (1608–1674) grew up in a passionate man, all-too-human in wealthy and cultured London household, his enthusiasms, his mistakes and his surrounded by music and private tutors. misfortunes. The more we know about He was taught French, Italian, Latin, his life and the more carefully we read Greek and Hebrew, and was reportedly his works, the more interesting he composing poetry at the age of ten. He becomes. The identification of Milton with went up to Cambridge in 1625, but two Samson, the hero of his last major work, years later his proud, uncompromising is irresistible. Blind, humiliated, helpless, temperament led to his being rusticated, surrounded by his enemies, all his hopes although he did return to take his degree. and beliefs shattered, wondering if his This was an age when it was still possible 5 to build a poetic reputation privately, and happened between them we can only his early work was sufficiently admired guess at, but it must have been a case of for him to be invited to submit a poem total incompatibility. In response to this on Shakespeare for publication in the personal trauma, Milton wrote several Second Folio of the plays in 1632. Leaving tracts demanding the reform of England’s Cambridge, he adopted no profession, divorce laws. Mary did eventually return to but travelled in 1638–40 in France and him in 1645, and bore him four children, Italy, mingling with learned men of all three daughters, and one son who died. kinds, including Galileo. He returned on Mary herself died in 1652. He re-married hearing the news of impending Civil War in 1656, but his second wife and her in England, explaining: ‘I thought it base infant also died. Meanwhile he had that I should travel abroad at my ease for published tracts on government, arguing the cultivation of my mind while my fellow that it was lawful for a nation to depose citizens were fighting for liberty.’ and kill a tyrannical king, and tracts in For the next twenty years, poetry was favour of the publication of books free of relegated to second place in his life, and state censorship. he became a polemical writer on Church The severest trial of these years and State, and on intellectual and moral however was his loss of sight. It had been issues. Some of these polemics were failing for some years, and by 1652 he was personal, but many others were written in irrecoverably blind. With iron willpower the service of the Puritan Commonwealth he continued his writing with the aid of headed by Cromwell, which employed amanuenses, among them his daughters, Milton as a secretary and ‘ideas man’. to whom this duty became a cause for During this time, his private life was rebellion and estrangement. It was in often in disarray. In 1642 he made a the late 1650s that he began to dictate disastrous marriage with seventeen-year- Paradise Lost. He would compose in his old Mary Powell, who left him after only mind perhaps as much as forty lines, often a few weeks. The true story of what in the quiet of the night, then dictate 6 them when day broke, revising them as ways of God to man’. Just as Adam had they were read back to him. In spite of been expelled from Eden into a harsh and the crumbling of the Commonwealth, hostile world, so Milton and his kind had in 1659 and even in early 1660, he was experienced the destruction of the godly still publishing tracts advocating the ideal republic, and were left facing a desolate of an anti-monarchical Puritan state, future, having only the faith that a new thereby placing himself in great danger. order would one day arise to wipe out At the Restoration in May 1660, he went the sins and failures of the past. Paradise into hiding, but was arrested and briefly Lost was published in 1667, and it soon imprisoned in the Tower. He was probably attracted the attention of the literary fortunate to be pardoned, thanks partly world for its sublime seriousness and the to the support of other writers, including majestic beauty of its language. ‘Into the Andrew Marvell. In 1663 he was married heaven of heavens I have presumed /An for the third time, to Elizabeth Minshull, earthly guest,’ wrote Milton, and indeed aged 24, who would outlive him by 50 once the ear had become accustomed years. to his idiom, it did come to resemble an Paradise Lost grew steadily, and he unearthly music. One early reader, the had inserted into Book 7 the sombre poet Sir John Denham, is said to have words: declared it ‘the noblest poem that ever was wrote in any language or in any age’. More safe I sing with mortal voice, unchanged By 1680 it had come to be regarded as To hoarse or mute, though fallen on evil days, the English national epic, rivalling Homer, On evil days though fallen, and evil tongues, Virgil and Dante. In darkness and with dangers compassed round. While sharing something of this sublimity, Samson Agonistes is in many This epic poem is a vast meditation on ways his most personal poem, as divine providence and human freedom, personal as the sonnet On His Blindness. with the avowed aim of ‘justifying the ‘Agonistes’ means a competitor, wrestler, 7 or athlete, and Samson, once mighty in In the last few years, commentators have physical strength, must now wrestle with pointed out that Samson’s actions and the spiritual anguish of knowing that he his self-justification are those of a suicide was destroyed through his own sin and bomber, prepared to die so long as he can weakness, and must seek some means take his enemies – who are also God’s of redemption. The poem is modelled enemies – with him. Yet who can fail to strictly on a Greek tragedy, although it is be moved by his suffering, and his tragic scarcely intended for stage production. lines: It is concentrated in time and place, occupying only a few hours, and features O dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon, a chorus which comments on the action.