Building from a fresh reading of funeral sermons and consolatory tracts, the book exposes a sharp edge of blasphemous protest against mortality, running through revenge plays such as The Spanish Tragedy and Hamlet, where the villians serve as scapegoats for mortality itself, and through plays of procreation such as Measure ofr Measure and Macbeth, where the comic promise of genetic secession proves desperately inadequate to answer the tragic erasure of the individual.  These alternative tactics of denial reappear in the vengefulness that John Donne directs toward female bodies for failing to bestow immortality, and the promise of renewal that George Herbert set against the threat of closure.

Placing these literary manifestations in the context of specific Jacobean deathbed crises and modern cultural distortions, The Rest is Silence explores the psychological roots and political consequences of denying that death permanently erases sensation and consciousness.  These Renaissance texts expose the origins of our continuing struggle to reconcile a materialist view of the universe with a narcissistic valuation of the self.