Robert Watson's

The Rest Is Silence

By exhuming a fear of personal annihilation underlying the monuments of canonical Renaissance literature, The Rest Is Silence refutes both old and new historicist readings of that culture, which have assumed a virtually universal belief in Christian afterlife.

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 villains serve as scapegoats for mortality itself, and through plays of procreation such as Measure for Measure and Macbeth, where the comic promise of genetic succession 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 sets 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 universe with a narcissistic valuation of the self

Robert N. Watson is Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of Shakespeare and the Hazards of Ambition (1984) and Ben Jonson's Parodic Strategy: Literary Imperialism in the Comedies (1987).

"The Rest Is Silence is analytical and personal, appealing to its readers' emotions even as it engages their critical intelligence. It also breathes new life into some of the older, but still crucial, conventions of literary history."
--Ronald Levao, author of Renaissance Minds and Their Fictions

"Remarkable, exceptionally well-written, and often brilliant.... Watson argues that the fear of death, death as sheer biological extinction, haunts the culture and literature of Jacobean England, even as this fear co-existed with the promises of a Christian afterlife. Watson draws extensively from the sermon literature of the period to demonstrate that the unthinkable--the idea that death is the end of human existence--was indeed thinkable and had to be combatted by orthodox writers. His readings of Donne and Shakespeare are exciting and often strikingly new."
--David Quint, author of Epic and Empire