Margaret Edson's Wit and the art of analogy

Margaret Edson's play Wit, which embodies quotations from John Donne's metaphysical verse, has a macrostructure that is itself conceitlike. The play establishes contrasts, similarities, contrasts within the similarities, and further similarities within the contrasts, thus both dramatizing and interrogating wit and its instrument, conceit. I analyze the operation of this complex configuration in the relations between the two main physical-institutional spaces of the play (the hospital and the university); between both and the world of language, with its manifestations in two opposed yet parallel intertexts; and in the self-reflexive dramatization of the theatre/life analogy. The effect of these conceitlike techniques is to bridge the gulf between opposites, transforming "insuperable barriers" into thresholds.