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Wit, pride and the resurrection: Margaret Edson's play and John Donne's poetry.

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From: Renascence: Essays on Values in Literature
Date: 20030101
Author:Sykes, John D., Jr.

FOR reasons internal and external to Margaret Edson's play Wit, it is easy to miss the serious dialogue with John Donne's poetry to be found in it. Internally, the last utterance we hear from the dying scholar on the subject of her studies seems to be a rejection--she emphatically does not want to hear Donne recited to her in her extremity, preferring a children's story. Equally telling seems to be the play's condemnation of what a character calls Donne's "salvation anxiety"--the endless complicating of God's simple gift of grace. Externally, audiences and reviewers seem ...