Appendix Milton Agonistes: The Date of Samson Agonistes There has, in recent years, been no more contentious issue among Miltonists than the date of Samson Agonistes. Until thirty years ago it was almost universally accepted that the play was Milton's last poetic composition-an assumption based on Jonathan Richard­ son's assertion, in his influential Life of Milton (I 734), that 'His Time was Now [i.e. after I66o] Employ'din Writing and Publish­ ing, particularly Paradise Lost. and after That, Paradise Regain'd and Samson Agonistei.' This 'traditional' dating-which places the compositon of the drama in I667-7o-came under heavy fire for the first time in I 949, in a special Milton number of Philological Quarterly containing essays by W. R. Parker and Allan H. Gilbert. Parker argued that Samson Agonistes was begun in I646-7 and completed in I 653; Gilbert, on the other hand, assigned its composition to the early I64os: 'My own impression ... is that the tragedy is essentially an early work, following soon after the making of the notes in the Cambridge Manuscript.'• Since I 949 the dispute has raged hody and, sometimes, acrimoniously. Gil­ bert's suggestion has attracted no real support; but Parker's hypothesis-forcefully reasserted by Parker himself and taken up by a number of other scholars as well-has had considerable influence.3 At the same time, however, the traditional date has been ably defended,• and it is fair to say that, at the present time, scholarly opinion strongly favours a I667-70 dating. There remains one further dating proposal, which places the composition of Samson Agonistes in I 66o-I-that is, immediately after the Restoration. Although this conjecture is an old one, having been first suggested in I 796, it has been largely ignored and has been advanced in a serious way by only one modem critic, A. S. P. Woodhouse: 'I do not believe that the poem was the product or reflection of a normal mood, but rather of a state of depression not very difficult to imagine in the poet whose world had collapsed around him and who was blind, disillusioned, ill, and essentially alone. Such must have been the prevailing mood of I95 John Milton: Poet, Priest and Prophet I 66o- I, when the poem, I suggest, was most probably written. 's Unfortunately, Woodhouse does not develop this proposal in detail-though his argument is far from being the 'ill-supported plea' that John Carey (PM, p. 332) claims it to be. For a number of years I have believed that a I66o- I dating has much to recommend it; and the more I have worked with Samson Agonistes and the more familiar I have become with the experience and attitudes of Milton himself, the more convinced I have become of the essential rightness of Woodhouse's thesis. To my knowledge, his original motion has never been seconded-nor, although it has often been dismissed, has it been refuted. The argument, then, at least merits reconsideration. There are some few preliminary observations to be briefly made, however, before coming to the major argument. First, nothing whatever is known for certain about the composition of Samson Agonistes. The contemporary biographers give us no help: Edward Phillips (I694) freely admits that 'It cannot certainly be concluded when he wrote his excellent Tragedy entitled Samson Agonistes';6 the anonymous biographer says only that the drama was finished after the Restoration and gives no hint as to when it was begun; John Phillips and Toland (I6g8) mention it but say nothing about its composition; and neither Aubrey (I 68 I) nor Wood (I6gi) even mentions the work. W. R. Parker is quite correct in asserting that 'not a scrap of evidence has ever been published to show that it was written late in Milton's life' (MB, II, pp. 903-4); but it is equally true-despite Parker's claims to the contrary-that there is no solid evidence to show that it was written in middle life. Certainty on the matter is beyond possibili­ ty; and any attempt-including my own-to establish when the poem was written is necessarily grounded on inference and speculation. Second, I am not convinced that Milton's imagery and poetic style provide any real help in determining the date of Samson Agonistes. On the one hand, the complicated statistical studies of Miltonic prosody have been inconclusive-indeed, contradictory.7 And, on the other hand, since Milton frequendy re-uses phrases and images employed in earlier pieces, I am profoundly distrustful of arguments relying on parallel images in different works as a basis for dating.8 Third, since SamsonAgonistes not only employs rhyme but draws attention to its use, I believe that the play must pre-date I667, when Milton added to late issues of the first edition of Paradise Lost9 a note on 'The Verse' in Appendix 1 97 which he inveighs against 'the troublesome and modern bondage of rhyming' (PM, p. 457). The major reason for wishing to assign Samson Agonistes to 166o-1 depends upon biographical considerations. Biographical readings of the play are, of course, not new. The tradition seems to begin with Bishop Thomas Newton who suggested in his Life of Milton ( 1749) that Milton was attracted to the Samson story by the similarity between his own post-Restoration situation and that of tlte blind Hebrew champion surrounded by the Philistines. Although others supported Newton's view, it was left for David Masson to develop fully the possibilities of the biographical approach: But in the entire idea of the drama what else have we than a representation of the Puritan and Republican Milton in his secret antagonism to all the powers and all the fashions of the Restoration? Who are the Philistines but the partisans of the Restoration, all and sundry, its authors and abettors before the fact, and its multitudinous applauders and sycophants through the nation afterwards? Who are the Philistine lords and ladies, and captains, and priests, assembled in their seats within the covered part of the temple of Dagon on the day of festival? Who but Charles himself, and the Duke of York, and the whole pell-mell of the Clarendons, Buckinghams, Buckhursts, K.illi­ grews, Casdemaines, Moll Davises, Nell Gwynns, Sheldons, Morleys, and some hundreds of others .... There were mo­ ments, I believe, in Milton's musings by himself, when it was a fell pleasure to him to imagine some exertion of his strength, like that legendary one of Samson's, by which, clutching the two central pillars of the Philistine temple, he might tug and strain till he brought down the whole fabric in crash upon the heads of the heathenish congregation, perishing himself in the act, but leaving England bettered by the carnage. That was metaphorical musing only, a dream of the embers, all fantasti­ cal. But was there not a very real sense in which he had been performing feats of strength under the gaze of the Philistine congregation, to their moral amazement, though not to their physical destruction? Degraded at the Restoration, dismissed into obscurity, and thought of for some years, when thought of at all, only as a shackled wretch or monster, incapacitated for farther mischief or farther activity of any kind, had he not Ig8 John Milton: Poet, Priest and Prophet re-emerged most gloriously? By his Paradise Lost already, and now by his Paradise Regained and this very Samson Agonistes, he had entitled himself to the place of preeminency in the litera­ ture of that Philistine age, the Philistines themselves being the judges. (LM, VI, pp. 676-7) In our own century the biographical approach has been retained by James Holly Hanford, E. M. W. Tillyard, and A. S. P. Woodhouse. Hanford, for example, writes: 'In Samson's career as a champion of God's people [Milton] could see his own earlier heroic efforts in behalf of the good old cause. In the weakness which had betrayed him into the hands of a treacherous woman, he could read the causes of his own marriage disaster. The circumstances which surrounded his hero in blindness and cap­ tivity naturally associated themselves with the poet's immediate situation in the Restoration. The spiritual despair and the subse­ quent sense of God's favor represent an interpretation of the Biblical personality in the light of his own deepest personal emotion.' •o In recent years the biographical approach to Samson Agonistes has largely been ignored. Either it is thought to be one of those self-evident truths too obvious for comment or, more often, it is seen to be a 'dangerous' approach to the poem-a critical avenue known to exist but not much travelled by the better classes. These attitudes are unfortunate, for they rob the poem of a legitimate level of meaning. 'Samson', warns Anthony Low, 'is not Milton, however, regardless of how much he may reflect Milton's experi­ ence. To push autobiographical theories further, as their respon­ sible exponents recognize, is to depart from the play itself.'" But surely there is a very real sense in which Samson is Milton-precisely because he does reflect so much of Milton's experience. Masson comes, I believe, much closer to the truth of the matter: 'The marvel, then, is that this purely artistic drama, this strictly objective poetic creation, should have been all the while so profoundly and intensely subjective. Nothing put forth by Milton in verse in his whole life is so vehement an exhibition of his personality, such a proclamation of his own thoughts about himself and about the world around him, as his Samson Agonistes.