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.