Alisha Peklang
How has the context of each text influenced your understanding of the intentional connections between them?
Between the two texts, ‘Wit’ by Margaret Edson and John Donne’s poetry, each text incorporates the use of context in order to have a greater understanding of the key themes and plot through intertextual connections that the characters may question.
The context of each text differ immensely seeing as John Donne wrote in the 17th century about the themes of life, love, death and Christianity. As opposed to Margaret Edson’s play ‘Wit’ from the 20th century, context plays a large factor in the separation of setting and evaluation of subject matters that the western world confronted. The two texts both deal with some of the same ideas as one of the characters in the play ‘Wit’ is a professor of English Literature who specialised in the holy sonnets of John Donne. This distinction of context is also apparent through the lack of a god like figure in ‘Wit’, reflecting the existence of a secular world, opposite to the extreme religious sentiments explored in John Donne’s poetry. While Donne was living in England during the 17th century, political factions were having disagreements on each other’s loyalty to Roman Catholicism and those who were Protestant. Although, we cannot assume that the persona of his poems necessarily reflect his situations or life.
The intertextual references play a great role in “Wit’ especially as Vivian shows her relation to Donne early on in the play. As Vivian watches the doctors and physicians examining her, she makes a connection between the approach in which they study her body and the means in which she stud...
