The Rest Is Silence: Death as Annihilation in the English Renaissance (review)

Reviews Robert N. Watson, The Rest Is Silence: Death as Annihilation in the English Renaissance. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1994. xiv + 416 pp. $52. by Christopher Hodgkins Bacon wrote that "some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested." I would add to his menu another kind that is worth consuming, but best taken with a grain of salt. Such a book is Robert N. Watson's study of Kyd, Shakespeare, Donne, and Herbert, The Rest Is Silence: Death as Annihilation in the English Renaissance. On the one hand, it is loaded with fresh and sometimes startling insights, and it is bracingly skeptical of reigningNew Historicist certainties about the hegemonic Christianity of the English Renaissance, asserting rather that "[d]espite its ferocious displays of Christianconviction,Jacobean culture struggled with the suspicion that death was a complete and permanent annihilation of the self, not merely some latency of the body awaiting the Last Judgment" (p. 3). Thus Watson takes prolonged issue with "the first precept of New Historicist criticism — Jonathan Dollimore's claim that political virtue can arise only from the belief 'that there is no shared human essence ... no traits not the product of social forces at a particular historical juncture' " (p. 20). In Watson's initially Freudian, "neo-essentialist" rebuttal, the generations are united across the historical abyss by a common fear of the deepest abyss: the fear, to paraphrase Hamlet, that in that sleep of death no dreams may come. Yet, on the other hand, the book is troublingly at odds with its subjects and with itself in ways that seem strangely personal and even self-indulgent. First, Watson is prone to overstatement. For instance, as a self-described atheist (the son, he informs us, of a "lapsedpreacher father" turned "psychologist and literary critic" [pp. 99, 54]), Watson decries "the peculiar exemption" from serious critique that, in his view, Christianity enjoys in the modern secular academy. This exemption produces "a double standard whereby audible assertions of atheism strike most observers as a tasteless and even Book Reviews103 malicious affront to Christian believers, whereas ordinary assertions of Christian belief are considered nothing other than the practice of spiritual freedom" (pp. 48, 49). This double standard probably does obtain in many walks of middle American life; but the contemporary academy, especially in its humanities departments, seems conversely inclined to celebrate the skeptical, the heterodox, and even the overtly blasphemous. Imagine the response were one to open a typical college class or an MLA session with the Lord's Prayer. Second, Watson's tendency to overstatement can rebound as retraction. For example, Watson has intentionally taken his book's annihilationist title from a play whose protagonist is famously obsessed, not with annihilation, but with the inevitability of an afterlife; Prince Hamlet is stymied at every turn by his belief in eternal consciousness, whether beatific or horrific. So, Watson provocatively claims, our seeing how Hamlet's idea of the Divinity shapes his dead end "may liberate us to obey neither God the Father nor the fathers' ghosts when they tell us to kill each other for the sake of our immortality" (p. 99). In other words, Hamlet might well be subtitled "The Theist's Tragedy." Yet Watson quickly reverses field, conceding these earlier assertions to be mere "preacherly (if atheistical) speculations" (p. 100). He then ends his discussion of the play by counter-claiming that "dying for tribal honor, as Hamlet does, is arguably a sounder answer to mortality than blindly replicating those ancestors for tribal survival" (p. 102). Such instances of assertion and reversal might be valued as balancing judiciousness did they not belong to a larger pattern of conscious self-contradiction; for, to return to my opening phrase, this book finally does ask to be taken with a grain of salt. I say "conscious self-contradiction" because Watson chooses to end with a puckishly agnostic "Retraction" admitting that perhaps he has overstated his case for the previous 321 pages: "while my doubts about the afterlife remain, my argument has evolved away from theology and towards psychology ... in the process, it has become more sympathetic toward the mythmaking impulse . . . Without some...