Samson Agonistes would seem to lend itself easily to a book on Milton's theatricality. After all, it is Milton's one true drama – albeit, one ‘never […] intended’ to be staged – and at its heart is a protagonist who performs on stage in a ‘spacious Theatre’. By now, the general case is closed: theatre meant a great deal to Milton the poet; it provided a range of representational resources from which he drew often; it helped to transform his poetic response to scripture; it helped him to represent the Fall and a postlapsarian ethics based in the passions; and it continually worked to reshape his understanding of interiority and of his own role as a poet. Yet the presence of Samson on stage at the point of the drama's catastrophe – when he actually tears down a theatre – poses extraordinary challenges. For the most part, we have considered the signification of the theatrical body; while such signification is often complexly systemic and, to a greater or lesser extent unstable, Samson Agonistes works to create an aesthetic experience of polysemic theatricality. In an important contribution to scholarly discussion, Fish observed that the failure of Samson's body to signify – a failure that is, in the event, ultimately indistinguishable from polysemy – is central to the reading experiences dramatised within the text and the experience of the reader without. The broadest purpose of this chapter is to explore how the ambiguities that have generated so many disparate views do signify, and were intended to signify, in Milton's theatrical poetics.

Scholars have shown extraordinary creativity in arguing how, why and to what effect Samson is prompted by God – either in his decision to go with the Philistine Officer to perform in the Dagonalian festival or in his final act of strength – to murder three thousand people and to kill himself in the process. Samson is a deeply troubling character, a problem for which solutions have been many and diverse: Samson Agonistes dramatises a refinement of carnal passions into spiritual intellect. The drama is a Christian tragedy that shows a ‘modern’ Samson ‘becom[ing] his own man’. God recuperates him by sending him ‘secret refreshings’ that help to refine his heart and mind, and thus to realign him with God's purposes.