Nothingness in Donne's "A Valediction: Of Weeping" and Shakespeare's Cymbeline

Reading John Donne's "A Valediction: Of Weeping" in conjunction with Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness invites us to compare the "nothingness" they exalt to Imogen's Irigarayan view of a materialized sexuality in the three aubades of Cymbeline's first act. As he fosters the verbal possibility produced by the impossibility of love, Donne anticipates Sartre's dictum that "man's relation to being is to modify it." In contrast, Imogen challenges the idea that, in Luce Irigaray's terms, we "constitute [ourselves] through our productions," and suggests instead a "culture of growth" that renders language as an "oeuvre" of the "flesh."