Derek Wood. Exiled from Light: Divine Law, Morality and Violence in Milton's Samson Agonistes.

Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 2001. xxii + 248 pp. index. append. bibl. $55. ISBN: 0-8020-4848-X.

In the final pages of chapter 4 of Derek Wood's Exiled from Light, I found myself wondering if Professor Wood had imbibed too deeply from the well of the great medievalist, D. W. Robertson. Noting that the main action of Samson Agonistes documents no "regenerative process" in its hero--a statement that runs counter to most criticism of the play--Wood speculates that "for Samson, recognition [that is, tragic anagnorisis] will seem to come instantaneously at the moment of death. In that moment, this hero of faith will be with Christ, will recognize the futility of his violence, of his hope for the liberation of Israel, of the status of Israel itself" (77). By the time I had read "there is pity in heaven for human tragedy" (78), I couldn't shake the feeling that Wood had reimagined Milton's Samson in terms similar to how Robertson might have described the conceptual movement of Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde: the conclusion of that poem finds a quasi-Christianized Troilus in the "eighth sphere" looking back at his life and laughing at how misguided it was.

Although the Robertsonian reading is not the explicit focus of Wood's new study, the sentences I have quoted do accurately reflect his broader interest in presenting what we might call the full "Christian" reading of Milton's play: Milton's hero of faith is fundamentally flawed because his understanding of the ways of God is limited by his Old Testament status, living, as Milton himself suggests, under the "imperfection of the law" rather than with "a manly freedom under the Gospel." Arguing against those bloodthirsty critics who celebrate God's victory in Samson's slaughter even of Philistine innocents (though overtly respectful, one cannot help but hear the disdain in his recollection that "Mary Ann Radzinowicz heard the mercy of heaven in the 'hideous noise' ... of the murdered Philistines" [157]), Wood counters that Milton is not celebrating the poem's concluding violence but rather imitating the "Old Testament spirit, a mood of tribal exultation in a bloody slaughter of the enemy" (59). Wood is not endorsing Milton's view, but his reading does suggest how powerfully anti-Semitic Milton's understanding of the Hebrew Bible really is: "a savage, pre-Christian morality" (xvii), a "morality ... fashioned in the darkness under the Law," or one that "is ugly and un-Christian" (61), the "limits" of a "moral consciousness" (94) formed in ignorance of Christ are some of the phrases Wood uses to depict Milton's position not just on Samson but on Old Testament spirituality and ethics more generally.

The problem here, in part, is that Wood actually has a pretty good case. He is convincing enough, I think, that we should all feel nervous about exposing our students to such unrestrained bigotry and then justifying it by calling it great art. Of course, if the point is to show what Christians in the seventeenth century really thought about Judaism and Jewish history (and this might not be so far from what many modern Christians think), keeping Samson Agonistes on the syllabus may still serve some useful purpose. But at a minimum, the relationship between art and religious propaganda should be more carefully considered. And the fact that Wood doesn't even register that such consideration is necessary is troubling to say the least.

In other areas, though, Wood's discussion is very helpful, especially when it comes to documenting (always trying very hard not to ridicule) much that is inane in previous scholarship on the play. (He is especially good, for example, at taking down the barely repressed misogyny on display in critical discussions of Dalila.) His finest critical observation is that, because critics too often assume that the Milton of the 1640s and 1650s had not changed his mind about anything when he came to write the great poems in the 1660s, they rather unthinkingly use earlier statements from Milton's work, especially his prose treatises, to support readings portraying an older Milton as still favoring religious violence. Other elements of the argument, however, are less successful. His chapter devoted to a discussion of Aristotelian tragic form, though intended to correct misunderstandings of Milton's play's relationship to the Poetics, reveals that it is Wood and not the critics he attacks who doesn't understand what Aristotle meant. He absolutely butchers Gerald Else's famous argument on the Poetics by consistently misapplying the terms hamartia and catharsis and failing to make any conceptual space for peripety in the movement of the tragic plot.

ADREW BARNABY

University of Vermont