SOURCE: Lamont, Rosette C. “Coma versus Comma: John Donne's Holy Sonnets in Edson's Wit.” Massachusetts Review 40, no. 4 (winter 1999): 569-75.

In the following essay, Lamont discusses the use of Donne's sonnets, particularly “Death Be Not Proud,” to inform the treatment of death in Wit.

In the concluding scene of Margaret Edson's Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Wit, we are shown Dr. Vivian Bearing, Ph.D. in English literature, and foremost scholar of John Donne's metaphysical “Holy Sonnets,” rising from the hospital bed in which she just died of stage-four metastatic ovarian cancer. Slowly she loosens the ties of the two gowns she wears on top of one another throughout the play, constantly ready for an invasive pelvic examination by a team of cancer specialists and their students. She discards the baseball cap she wears over her skull, bare of hair following eight cycles of chemotherapy, and takes off her ID hospital...