SOURCE: Sykes, John D., Jr. “Wit, Pride and the Resurrection: Margaret Edson's Play and John Donne's Poetry.” Renascence 55, no. 2 (winter 2003): 163-74.

In the following essay, Sykes counters arguments that Wit is a rejection of Donne's theology, instead asserting that the play is about the redemptive power of God's love and the need for Vivian to overcome her fears and misconceptions about that power.

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...