Front cover image for Justice in the dock : Milton's experimental tragedy

Justice in the dock : Milton's experimental tragedy

In Justice in the Dock, Harold Skulsky argues that the currently dominant moral readings of Samson Agonistes reduce it to the pious antiquarian charade it energetically refuses to be - whether the hero is taken as a war criminal or a saint (Christian or existentialist). Milton is as subversive a traditionalist here as elsewhere; he has picked a theologically scandalous stretch of Bible history to dramatize, and he invents a dramatic structure that makes over the theater, or theatrical imagination, into the scene of a jury trial. The result is neither a sermon in disguise nor a study in indeterminacy, but the theatrical equivalent of the republican freedom the poet's political career was dedicated to promoting. Attorney Milton declares his mind - but leaves the audience free to make up theirs
Print Book, English, ©1995
University of Delaware Press ; Associated University Presses, Newark, London, ©1995