Irony in Donne’s Biathanatos and Pseudo-Martyr

Abstract

The most insistent theme in Donne's writings is his sometimes trivial obsession with suicide and martyrdom. From his ‘Paradoxes’ to his last sermon this theme runs through his prose, and it is no less a constant preoccupation of his verse. That the Jacobeans in their melancholy were obsessed with death has often been observed; but Donne's obsession was a special one, a quintessence of Jacobean melancholy, distilled in him by a special circumstance of his life: he had been born a Catholic. Donne's personal rebellion against the trend of religion in his society was a lifelong struggle within him, though the seed of his rebelliousness grew in his words and deeds to be a trifling thing. This seed had been nurtured by his mother, who lived all her long life a stubborn Catholic, almost outliving her apostate son. She reared him to be a soldier for the Old Faith, bringing him into association with hunted and martyred priests, as if by their example he might learn to savour death. Somehow, this strange education led Donne not into the path of righteous fidelity, but to a bemused fascination with death by self-murder, a cavalier irony that is one of the hallmarks of his style.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 3 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.