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'Samson Agonistes is the only play that Milton wrote. At the beginning of his career he wrote two masques, Arcades and A Masque presented at Ludlow Castle, 1634 [Comus], but nothing else for the stage. Indeed he makes a point of telling us in the opening note, “Of that sort of dramatic poem called tragedy”, that Samson Agonistes “never was intended” for the stage.1 During the years of the English Revolution, 1640-1659, the theatres had all been closed by official order. Milton, as the foremost propaganda writer for the revolutionary government, might be expected to have agreed with its hostility to the public theatre, something seen as a corrupt institution, identified with royalists, prostitutes and such like. So it is not surprising that Samson Agonistes “never was intended” for the stage; nor is it surprising that the model Milton followed was not that of English Shakespearean theatre, but the archaic model of classical Greece.' (Introduction)
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Last amended 14 Feb 2017 13:02:15
Milton’s Samson Agonistes : A Political Reading