Rest is Silence: Death as Annihilation in the English Renaissance, The

The Rest is Silence: Death as Annihilation in the English Renaissance. By Robert N. Watson. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995. xiv + 416 pp. $52.00 (cloth).

"It is certainly risky to project Existentialist anxieties back onto . . . Renaissance culture," Robert Watson writes, but that is the aim of The Rest is Silence, which posits that "annihilationisim" (the belief in non-existence after death) permeated Renaissance literature. Contrary to general scholarly consensus that early modern England was largely composed of Christian believers, Watson maintains that many people feared that immortality and salvation were fictions, or as Macbeth puts it, "life's but a walking shadow . . . a tale/ Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing." The major part of the book traces these anxieties through poetic and dramatic representations of doubt, skepticism, and atheism in familiar works by Kyd, Shakespeare, Donne and Herbert; the first and last chapters document annihilationism in a variety of religious texts such as funeral sermons and deathbed tracts.

Watson's claim for a prevalent religious skepticism in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries is founded first on a historical argument that a crisis of belief arising out of the Reformation undermined Christian promises of afterlife; second, on a transhistorical argument from psychoanalysis, which asserts that human beings have always denied mortality (one's origin and end in nothingness) by generating psychic and social structures that repress and contain the lurking fear of annihilation. By this double argument, Watson takes issue with Foucault-influenced new historicists, who dispute any transhistorical concept of human identity, but more importantly with Christianity, which he sees as a repressive institution that "like other controlling agencies . . . generates the subversion it calls sin to enable the containment it calls grace" (p. 50). While he gives important evidence for both parts of his argument, a contradiction appears at various points: the author never resolves the problem that the case for a transhistorical, fundamentally narcissistic, human identity is to an extent compromised by the evidence that an epistemological revolution took place in the Renaissance, which fundamentally changed the European sense of self. A similar contradiction underlies the attack on Christianity: if the Reformation fundamentally changed and fragmented the nature of Christian ritual and belief, as Watson argues, how can he liken the Christian prejudices of sixteenth-century rulers to those of twentieth-century academics?

The great strengths of the book lie in its six literary chapters on poems and plays, which highlight Watson's considerable critical powers, especially when he is delineating how annihilationism represents the dark side of the humanist impulse to make man the measure of all things. In particular, the two chapters on Donne and Herbert, filled with patient and insightful readings of the poets' struggles with their own fear of death, brilliantly persuade the reader that the ghostly shadow of self-destruction lies behind much poetic self-aggrandizement. Watson argues that Donne's love poems are obsessed with the need to find immortality through a perfect, reciprocal sexual union; in turn, his disgust at woman's betrayal enacts his terror of oblivion, particularly his fear that death will mean the annihilation of soul as well as body (most powerfully rendered in the "Nocturnall on St. Lucies Day": "For . . . I am re-begot/ Of absence, darknesse, death; things which are not"). Herbert, by contrast, is able to come to a healthier compromise with death in his poetry by figuring death as a poetic closure constantly deferred by the possibility of verbal and spiritual renewal.

Four chapters dedicated to drama-one to Kyd, three to Shakespearedepict revenge tragedy and marriage comedy as complementary genres dealing with mortality and annihilationism. Watson believes that drama of this period attempted to fill the gap left by Protestant rejection of religious rituals such as prayers for the dead, which imagine that power can be exercised from beyond the grave (p. 75). Marriage comedies like Measure for Measure replace ritual connections between the living and dead with an obsessive focus on procreation and the institutions surrounding it. But Watson points out that through the punishment of those who avoid procreation (both the chaste and the licentious), the society of these comedies tragically undermines the religious faith of some of its most virtuous individuals.

On the other hand, revenge tragedies like Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy construct villainous assassins to serve as metonNic scapegoats for death itself; by killing the assassin, one does away with the threat of death. Watson contends that Kyd consciously exposes these performances of revenge as shouts in the dark, revealing that salvation is a "hollow fiction" (p. 70). A similar argument about Hamlet maintains that the graveyard scene is the focal point of the play, where Hamlet's meditation on the skull of Yorick constitutes an acknowledgment of the futility of both death and life.