If there is a motif that runs like a thread through all of John Donne’s writings, it is the awareness of death and its impact on life. Donne’s portrait in a shroud, the frontispiece to his most famous sermon, “Deaths Duell,” which became the model of his epitaph in St. Paul’s Cathedral, is the visible sign of this constant awareness.¹ It shows the living Donne awaiting his deliverance from “the manifold deaths of thisworld” and visualizes his notion of a paradoxical interdependence ofexitusandintroitus, of going out and going in, which characterizes the relation of life and...

Kathryn Kremen defines the Western conception of thehieros gamos(sacred marriage) as a way of imagining the “sexual union of man and woman on earth” to be a prefiguration of “the hypostatical union in body and soul of man and the Godhead in heaven.”¹ Even completely nonreligious love lyrics such as Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116 often reflect this idealized vision of sexuality: “[N]o impediment to the marriage of true minds” exists for soul mates whose love conquers age, time, and every other barrier. Donne’s love lyrics alternatively express this ideal in spiritual as well as in secular terms, but both...

The last stanza of Donne’s dawn song “The Good Morrow” asserts that the love between the poet and his beloved shall never die as do loves “not mixed equally.”¹ Instead, Donne’s speaker posits, “If our two loves be one, or, thou and I / Love so alike, that none do slacken, none can die.” Their love is a balanced mix of humors that will allow it to live forever as a unified and perfected body. More important, though, the ending pun ondieheightens the morbid eroticism of the final stanza. Obviously, Donne is using this image to express never-ending...

Born within eight years of each other, Shakespeare and Donne grew up under the terms of the Elizabethan Settlement, as a result of which the monarch’s governance of all things political, social, and cultural merged with the governance of religious belief and practice through the Act of Uniformity and mandated use of theBook of Common Prayer. As Patrick Collinson has observed, however, Elizabeth’s best intentions of bringing “settlement” to years of religious turmoil and effecting uniformity and commonality of religious belief among her subjects must be delineated from the grassroots reality of diverse religious allegiances and practices throughout her...

Now more than fifty years ago, in “Donne the Space Man,” William Empson excavated evidence from a range of John Donne’s poems to suggest a preordination interest on the writer’s part in space travel and the inhabitation of other planets. In this essay, Empson goes to great lengths to argue that Donne’s apparent fascination with other worlds is evidence that the (somewhat) young poet “believed that every planet could have its Incarnation, and believed this with delight, because it automatically liberated an independent conscience from any earthly religious authority.”¹ As a result of such an interest, according to Empson, Donne...

This was at first intended to be a reading of Shakespeare’s “Will” sonnets in the light of Donne’s Holy Sonnets and some questions about predication. In the event, however, I have managed only the prelude to such a reading. What follows, then, is not a reading but an invitation to a reading of Shakespeare’s sonnet 135.

Donne and Shakespeare share a profoundly linguistic discovery: the realization that the self can be possessed and confirmed only through and as acts of predication in which the immediacy of the self is sacrificed to the hegemony of its signifiers. One can identify with...

What follows is a series of short sections that, in many respects, comprise different ways of grasping the same phenomenon. And though every section will fail to grasp the phenomenon in its totality, I hope that their mitigated failures will amount to something of a success. Already, though, I may have engineered my first small failure: in saying that what I consider constitute examples of “the same phenomenon,” I am making an extraordinary and quite dubious claim that the phenomena I observe constitute a coherent and singular whole and one that (as my title assumes) is designated by a single...

Although “perfect” and “universal” language schemes have been extensively studied, fantasies of “private language” in the seventeenth century have been neglected.¹ “Private language” is a vexed term seldom applied to the early modern period, mostly because it is anachronistic, having been coined by Ludwig Wittgenstein in the mid-twentieth century. Yet the idea of a private language would not have seemed far fetched in the Renaissance. Seventeenth-century notions of language as the privileged site of rationality derive in part from Adam’s naming of the animals in Genesis 2:19. This story of origins becomes the basis for divergent but related models of...

Like Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Donne in his youth was “a great frequenter of Playes,” and, in the melancholy of his maturity, he pondered the subject of self-slaughter.¹ His tonal range included irony, sarcasm, satire, and more, with a special, witty, punning emphasis on sex. Death, as dying and lying, was never far from his sight. Whether in prose or verse, he was given to a dramatic speaking voice and to expressive forms suggesting dramatic context, dialogue, and soliloquy. If imaginatively agitated, he spoke, like Hamlet, in an extravagant multiplicity of puns, figures, extensions, and amplifications. As a writer, he was intensely...