Between Two Pillars: The Hero’s Plight in Samson Agonistes and Paradise Regained

John Milton’s Samson is a figure at once Godly and unGodly. Some recent criticism of Samson Agonistes, with its notion of shifting contexts, treats the play as a repository of conflicting traditions. Between Two Pillars, instead of denying the play’s aesthetic integrity, discerns in it a dialectical opposition between Samson’s irrevocable election by God and his subjection - instanced by his slavery - to a fallen, unGodly order.