{"id":301,"date":"2017-04-04T12:39:37","date_gmt":"2017-04-04T16:39:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/english-2202-spring-2017\/?p=301"},"modified":"2017-04-04T12:39:37","modified_gmt":"2017-04-04T16:39:37","slug":"wit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/english-2202-spring-2017\/john-donne\/wit\/","title":{"rendered":"Wit"},"content":{"rendered":"

There’s a really amazing one-act play called\u00a0Wit\u00a0<\/em>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<\/a> \u2014 warning: it’s super super sad.<\/p>\n

In\u00a0Wit<\/em>, 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.<\/p>\n

If you want to watch the scene,\u00a0here’s a link to it directly<\/a>. It starts at roughly 6:50 and goes on for 3 minutes.<\/p>\n

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\u00a0scene is how concretely it illustrates how seemingly minor\u00a0differences in\u00a0manuscript, in\u00a0editions\u00a0can\u00a0significantly 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\u00a0mistake of rewatching\u00a0Wit\u00a0<\/em>in the library.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There’s a really amazing one-act play called\u00a0Wit\u00a0by 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 \u2014 warning: it’s super super sad. In\u00a0Wit, there’s a scene protagonist, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-301","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-john-donne"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/english-2202-spring-2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/301","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/english-2202-spring-2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/english-2202-spring-2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/english-2202-spring-2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/17"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/english-2202-spring-2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=301"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/english-2202-spring-2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/301\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/english-2202-spring-2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=301"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/english-2202-spring-2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=301"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/english-2202-spring-2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=301"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}