<i>Samson’s Cords: Imposing Oaths in Milton, Marvell, and Butler</i>. Alex Garganigo. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 2018. Pp. ix+332.

Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewSamson’s Cords: Imposing Oaths in Milton, Marvell, and Butler. Alex Garganigo. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 2018. Pp. ix+332.Andrew HadfieldAndrew HadfieldUniversity of Sussex Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThe seventeenth century was undoubtedly the period during which people in Britain and Ireland were forced to swear oaths most frequently. The majority, of course, conformed, many probably with some reluctance, but the insistence of successive governments in demanding public displays of loyalty from its subjects generated considerable opposition so that “at one end of a continuum of oath-swearing practices stood the oath-refusing Quaker; at the other, the oath-abusing rake” (3). It is little wonder, then, as Alex Garganigo argues in his meticulous, informed, and rewarding study, that oaths loomed large in the imagination of the period’s most significant writers.Samson’s Cords is a study of the ways in which Samuel Butler, Andrew Marvell, and John Milton explored the implications of an oath-swearing culture, arguing that they all came to very different conclusions about the moral and theological efficacy of oaths, as well as the effects of imposing them. The introduction establishes the theoretical and methodological principles of the study. Following Austen, Garganigo employs a revised version of performance theory to explore how oaths exist in the world “as part of larger, public rituals,” making “the commitments they entail more explicit and harder to break” (13). The question is how restricted and prescriptive the identity or identities oaths demanded would have to be to ensure the right level of loyalty. Articulated too loosely, oaths serve no meaningful function; expressed too narrowly, they will undoubtedly generate the opposition they are intended to stamp out.For Butler, oaths of loyalty to church and state were valuable, meaningful, and a trifling burden on the ordinary citizen. Hudibras satirizes the excesses of Nonconformists, guilty of an enthusiasm that obliterates good sense, but it is also targeted at the casual immorality of Cavaliers. Butler’s ideal is what Garganigo terms “homeliness,” or good sense, a commitment to the rhythms and practices of everyday life in Anglican England. Accordingly, he argues that it is the duty of local government officials to impose the Test Acts and crack down on Dissenters who want to purge communities of legitimate pleasures such as sports, bearbaiting, and Skimmington rides. Butler abhors a culture that places excessive emphasis on oaths and is prepared to break a fundamental promise in order to impose a lot of others: rebelling against the king and then demanding loyalty to the institutions that overthrew him ran the risk of creating a mass of professional perjurers (26). The key is to keep oaths set to a minimum, but to require that they be properly employed.Marvell, as thoughtful about oaths as Butler, comes to very different conclusions. By the end of his life, as his satire The Rehearsal Transpros’d (1672) demonstrates, Marvell displayed “a clear hostility to the unnecessary multiplication of oaths” (55), and his writings contain a number of passages that indicate that he wished that he had not sworn any oaths when he took his degree at Cambridge. Marvell argues that the people should only have to swear loyalty to the secular authorities and not to any particular doctrine, retaining only the Oaths of Allegiance and Supremacy. Oaths were being used to persecute rather than ensure that the fabric of civil society was preserved. A second chapter on Marvell argues that the Horatian Ode is a secular poem and a plea for toleration. Its secular nature does not mean that it is “non-religious or atheist” (79), but makes the case that church and state ought to be separated. The republican culture of the poem works not to exclude religion but to place it at a distance from the public sphere, as Marvell makes the case that religion should be, as far as possible, a private matter.There are three chapters on Milton, which make the case that Milton grew ever more opposed to imposed vows, cords that bound Samson but that inspired opposition rather than loyalty to the state. These contain the most stimulating and original readings in the book but also the most problematic. Samson Agonistes (1671) “worries over the problem of living with imposed oaths, recreating the qualms of conscience experienced by members of the political nation confronted with the latest regime’s demand for an expression of allegiance that invalidated previous ones” (118). The dilemma is the same as that in Hudibras, but the conclusion is rather different. Both Samson and Dalilah suffer from being forced to swear oaths, and she “describes a process of magistrates imposing an action on someone with an oath, thereby foregrounding the issue of forced oaths in a way that the Judges’ narrative does not” (123–24). Samson justifies his violent actions through an improvised “pseudo-oath of loyalty to God disguised as submission to the Philistines” (127). Here I wondered whether the notion of oath swearing was distorting the reading of the text, as surely the central issue is that of an illegitimate authority imposing unreasonable and ungodly conditions on its subjects and provoking an Antinomian response.Chapters 5 and 6 explore the significance of oath taking in Paradise Lost, which “demonstrates that Milton’s heart was antimonarchist and that [the poem] best expresses this brand of republicanism” (151). God has to invent a decree that enables him to pronounce the Son as king, something that is obviously problematic. Garganigo reads the speech act in terms of oaths, specifically the promises monarchs made in Coronation Oaths, but I wondered whether it is more helpful to think of the creation of Christ’s role in terms of the temporal imagination of the poem. Just as the postlapsarian reader has to imagine a prelapsarian world, so do we also have to imagine a republican God establishing rules ex nihilo, a Coronation Oath before the history of oaths, which does not, I suspect, provoke “in readers a temporary republican dismay over a non-contracturalist, non-republican ceremony in which God hogs all the rules” (162). He had to, didn’t he? Chapter 6 argues that because taking an oath makes a citizen a citizen, Milton accords this right to women through his representation of Eve breaking her oath to God by eating from the Tree of Knowledge. Milton’s works try to “fashion an independent, inquisitive, anxiously self-questioning citizen—female or male—who will fight for what is right and suffer patiently but expectantly when nothing else can be done” (188).Samson’s Cords is a sophisticated, learned, and thoughtful book based on wide reading and deep thinking. It betrays signs of excessive gestation in places, and the prose can be clotted and confusing. Some of the readings, especially those of Milton, are, I think, sometimes more ingenious than persuasive. But even the densest and most tendentious passages yield significant insights and should inspire readers to think more carefully about what oaths did and can do. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 117, Number 1August 2019 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/704147HistoryPublished online May 09, 2019 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

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