1. The epigraphs for this chapter are from Yehuda Amichai, “The Shore of Ashkelon,” in A Life of Poetry 1948–1994, tr. Benjamin and Barbara Harshav (1994; rpt. New York: Harper Perennial, 1995), 411 and Robert Scanlan, “Director’s Note,” Milton’s “Samson Agonistes,” 92nd Street Y, April 21, 2003, program insert.
2. While this chapter was written independent of the concluding chapter of Peter C. Herman’s Destabilizing Milton: “Paradise Lost” and the Poetics of Incertitude (New York and Basingstoke, England: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 155–76, that chapter may be read as both complementary and supplementary to my own. Herman’s entire book shimmers with new insight.
3. I borrow this phrase from Norman N. Holland, 5 Readers Reading (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1975), 1 (see chapter subtitle).
4. Sharon Achinstein, “Samson Agonistes,” in A Companion to Milton, ed. Thomas N. Corns (Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001), 414.
5. Peter Bayne, The Chief Actors in the Puritan Revolution (London: n.p., 1878), 345.