There’s a really amazing one-act play called Wit by Margaret Edson about a Donne scholar dying of ovarian cancer. It won the Pulitzer prize for Drama in 1999, and was turned into an HBO movie in 2001. Here’s a link to the full movie on YouTube — warning: it’s super super sad.

In Wit, there’s a scene protagonist, Vivian Bearing, recalls an encounter she had with her mentor about the punctuation in the last line of Holy Sonnet 10. The problem is that Vivian wrote a paper using an edition of the poem that was “hysterically” punctuated (“And Death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die!”, whereas the mentor prefers a poem with much less punctuation (“And death shall be no more, death thou shalt die”). Incidentally, our edition punctuates the line somewhere in between.

If you want to watch the scene, here’s a link to it directly. It starts at roughly 6:50 and goes on for 3 minutes.

I can’t speak to the scholarly validity of the play’s claim, although do I find the interpretation compelling. What I like about this scene is how concretely it illustrates how seemingly minor differences in manuscript, in editions can significantly alter the reading of a poem. We talked about this quite a lot when we were reading Shakespeare’s sonnets, and I’d forgotten about this scene’s existence until I made the mistake of rewatching Wit in the library.