Wit Essay | Critical Essay #3

Wit Critical Essay #3

In the following review excerpt, Hornby says Wit includes "a rare and welcome depiction of a professor as a positive figure."

Margaret Edson's Wit, another play first developed at South Coast Rep, is a rare and welcome depiction of a professor as a positive figure, in contrast to the way we are usually depicted, as hypocrites, lechers, or fools. Perhaps to counteract this iconoclasm, Edson depicts her heroine as dying of ovarian cancer, at the peak of her career at age fifty.

Vivian Bearing, Ph.D., is a prominent scholar of John Donne. She narrates her experiences as she is dying, including the clinical details, with insight and wit worthy of Donne himself. "It is not my intention to give away the plot, but I think I die at the end," she remarks with typically wry humor. There is also deft satire of doctors, who are depicted as concerned...
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