At the Deathbed: Edward Albee's All Over HENRY I. SCHVEY However men die, the experience is not only the physical dissolution and ending; it is also a change in the lives of others. for we know death as much in the experience of others as in OUf own expectations and endings. Raymond Williams, Modern Tragedy. The deathbed scene, where the dying person says his parting words to a group of assembled loved ones and friends, has a long and distinguished history in Western literature and the visual arts. Treatments of the theme naturally vary greatly through the ages and are determined by the attitude of a particular historical period toward the subject of death itself. Thus, medieval paintings on the death of Lazarus emphasize what Johan Huizinga calls the "great primitive horror of death" according to which "Lazarus, after his resurrection, lived in a continual misery and horror at the thought that he should have again to pass through the gate of death."\ In Renaissance canvases, such as Poussin's Testament of Eudamidas , the deathbed scene, in which the dying man is surrounded by his family and friends, suggests triumph over death by means of the loved ones who will survive him. Neo-Classical deathbed scenes such as David's painting Socrates Drinking the Hemlock (1785) stress the idea of death as an art of heroic self-sacrifice to a higher cause, while Delacroix's Death of Sardanapalus (1827), based on Byron's play, emphasizes a brand of romantic Molochism in which the dying Assyrian king, having lost his power, casually looks on as his favorite horses and concubines are all put to death in a lustful orgy of satanic destruction, which reveals the romantic interweaving of death and sexuality. As Baudelaire wrote in "Les deux bonnes soeurs": La Debauche et la Mort sont deux aimables filles, Et la biere et l'alc6ve en blasphemes fecondes http://www.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/md.30.3.352 - Wednesday, June 01, 2016 11:44:08 PM - IP Address:46.161.60.125