Coping with Hebraic Legalism: The Chorus inSamson Agonistes

Abstract

The Chorus of Milton'sSamson Agonistesis highly platitudinous because it relies on Old Testament traditional wisdom to account for Samson's experience. It is groping within that kind of wisdom to understand the significance of what is happening to Samson, while his experience cannot be made explicable on the basis of Old Testament legalism. Trying to cope with the Chorus, critics often speak of the “different levels of awareness” in the poem and tend to press a division between Samson and his Chorus, too frequently insisting that the separation obtained is even greater at the end of the work. Professor Summers, for example, ascribes this tension between the protagonist and the Hebraic Chorus to the disparity between heroic and non-heroic experience: “…the Chorus is often wrong in typically unheroic ways, and … only as a result of the action does it acquire ‘true experience’ and understanding. Those Danites, friends and contemporaries of Samson, represent the ‘conventional wisdom’ of the drama; but the premise of the poem is that conventional wisdom is inadequate for tragic experience. If it were otherwise, there would be no function for the tragedy; the community would already have been saved …” The Chorus (with Manoa) is impercipient; but the fact that it follows after Samson, noting his changes and his actions and often repeating his attitudes, attests to a unity between Samson and the Chorus which Professor Summers' otherwise excellent treatment misses. Christian heroism does not, as he seems to suggest, depend upon separation, but upon communion with others, even as a true relationship with God, for Milton, removes the obscurities from one's relationships with other men. Milton plays off Samson's former selfheroism — which does separate him from his people — against the true heroism of the ending; responsiveness to the latter pulls the Chorus and Samson together.

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