"Samson Agonistes" and Renaissance drama.
Item
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Title
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"Samson Agonistes" and Renaissance drama.
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Identifier
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AAI9315500
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identifier
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9315500
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Creator
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Samuels, Peggy Anne.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Richard C. McCoy
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Date
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1993
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Literature, English
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Abstract
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In the 1671 volume of Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes, Milton writes two anti-dramas that dismantle with great precision the critical and practical Renaissance dramatic legacy, both Aristotelian and Christian. He embraces the Renaissance tradition of closet drama which, often anti-tyrannical, was anti-dramatic in the sense of inviting its audience to become suspicious of spectacular stagings of godly and kingly power. Milton uses closet drama to deconstruct seventeenth-century stage genres which were all structured by specific kinds of desire for dramatic revelation and stunning reversal of situation. Milton's critique of these genres is founded on his reading of contemporary history where, he thought, the desire for the dramatic had fundamental and disastrous consequences for humankind's ability to create social change. Milton constructs a drama which looks like a Renaissance tragicomedy (transformation from seemingly irrevocable loss to ultimate triumph by means of an improbable reversal) but which actually renounces the genre's typical staging of dramatic moments of forgiveness. Milton disavows a human (200) forgiveness that erases history, rewrites sin as accident, redeems merely by sorrow, names weakness inevitable, and recasts near-death into comedy. But because Renaissance tragicomedy staged mutual human forgiveness as the condition for divine forgiveness, in the necessity of Samson's refusal to forgive Dalila, one must read the uncertainty of God's forgiveness of Samson. This uncertainty grows stronger as one examines Milton's use of Renaissance revenge drama. In order to represent the political realities of his own time, Milton draws on the resonances of the revenge tradition in which the revenger/reformer typically becomes excessive in violence, precipitous in action, and indiscriminate in choice of victim. Milton retrospectively reads these revengers as overmastered by their own desire for the immediate, conclusive, visual demonstration of their own Sonship. Likewise, Milton exploits the critique of heroics already present in Renaissance heroic drama, extending that critique to include the renunciation of any hyperbolical gesture and any theatrical demonstration of human or godly power.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
