Wit Play Analysis

Throughout Margaret Edson’s post modern drama, a plethora of implicit and explicit connections to John Donne’s metaphysical poetry are illuminated through the characterisation of Vivian Bearing as she lives through Donne. John Donne has been abducted to the sterilized academic world of ‘publish or perish’, along with the myriad central values of enduring themes that engulf the audience due to their prevailing ability to transcend contextual barriers.
The connections shared between Donne’s metaphysical poetry and Edson’s play Wit, occupies more than the adaptation of ideas and form, it represents the relationship between text and context. Wit reshapes Donne’s experiences of agency and self evaluation, thereby rejuvenating the humanistic paradigms
of the Jacobean period within her secular context. Thus the reciprocal values of these texts which explore the depth of life, death, relationships, and the central role that language play in the discourse of reality; transcend contextual limitations, their connotations immortalised, and remains ever relevant.

‘I am a professor of seventeenth-century poetry, specialising in the holy sonnets of John Donne’ ‘I know all about life and death.
I am after all a scholar of Donne’s Holy Sonnets, which explore mortality in greater depth than any other’ states Vivian Bearing. But the true sense of reality can’t survive the values of life’s thematic concerns through academic rigour. Therefore Edson uses postmodern techniques such as Absurdist theatre, which challenges realist theatre conventions and thereby confronts audiences with the reality of death: ‘It is not my intention to give away the plot, but I think I die at the end.’ This theatrical opening highlights her deprivation of experiences of love and her curious interest in Donne’s contrasting experiences through his poems: ‘but of Donne’s own God, of the faith that makes his work riveting... no place can be found in (Bearing’s) personal experience.’ Bearing’s lack of understanding and experience of love compared to Donne, further shapes her personal identity: In reply to ‘you’re not having any visitors’ Edson uses italics to assert her response ‘none to be precise.’ This lack of life experiences reflects her dehumanized state, ‘that’s all there is to my life history.’ Edson positions her audience to see Vivian’s intellectualising as a means of self-identity: ‘My only defence is the acquisition of vocabulary.’ Vivian’s confidence in herself is powered through the grand knowledge of Donne’s
poetry.

Death is an obnoxious theme in life that’s value has an individual interpretation but for Bearing she didn’t have personal experiences to create an accurate interpretation yet Donne’s experience of having ‘our best men with thee do go, rest of their bones’ expressing ‘death be not proud’ is adopted to the intellect of Bearing. Through Donne’s manifold pejorative epithets, the conception of death as negative is bowed back on itself, and comes to reflect not death itself, but human ideas and misconceptions about death. It is Edson who we see refer to ‘Death be not proud’ whilst shifting the meaning with a character who seeks to forestall her submission to the faculty of life by holding it at an academic distance through her study of Donne. Immense irony is clear to the responder as here is a person threatened with death, whose whole life has been studying a poet whose central concern is death. Yet Donne had the abiltity to communicate with other people other than students whilst he ‘finds God’s forgivness hard to believe’ his catholic rendezvous involved a religious engagement. Bearing did not even have a person ‘to make their soules, at the last busie day,/meet at this grave, and make a little stay?’ Yet she begged not to be forgotten and whilst she had no lover to remember her by her mark on the world was through her intelligence ‘My dissertation, ‘Ejaculations in Seventeenth-Century Manuscript and Printed Editions of the Holy Sonnets: a Comparison’ was revised for publication in the Journal of English Texts, a very prestigious venue for first appearance’. Bearing’s attitude to others is effacing and harsh; it is the same sword of effacement with which she is herself atomized by scientific medical jargon and discourse, which ironically expresses the behaviour she exhibited to others has now come a full circle. ‘The young doctor, like the senior scholar, prefers research to humanity’. Through ‘Hymn to God my God, in my sicknesse’ a connection of feelings between Donne and Wit is apparent as he likens his doctors to cosmographers mapping out the world (‘my physicians by their love are grown/ Cosmographers, and I their map, who lie/flat on this bed’). This notion is allegorised by the conception of colonisation in which Donne links to the sun and to the life of the working day in ‘Sunne Rising’ whilst it is this figure of colonisation that Edson is attacking as an essentially flawed misconception of the human person. Increasing bouts of severity in the character of Vivian birth in the literal pain of parting from this world, her academics, but the real acute pain lies within her sickness that the doctors administer to her supposedly to make her well but in fact to serve their medical careers very well and her very sick. It is therefore when she concedes that doctors ‘think of me is, in fact, just the specimen jar, just the dust jacket, just the white piece of paper that bears the little black marks’ a transformation is seen. Edson uses wordplay to suggest that the pursuit of knowledge should not be at the cost of human emotion, as “wit will outwit us.” And it is in this stage of bearings life that she begins to realise there’s a deeper side to the human being then the science and research of the world. - cyberessays