Shakespeare in Bloomsbury
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
The untold story of Shakespeare’s profound influence on Virginia Woolf and the rest of the Bloomsbury Group
For the men and women of the Bloomsbury Group, Shakespeare was a constant presence and a creative benchmark. Not only the works they intended for publication—the novels, biographies, economic and political writings, stage designs and reviews—but also their diaries and correspondence, their gossip and small talk turned regularly on Shakespeare. They read his plays for pleasure in the evenings, and on sunny summer afternoons in the country. They went to the theater, discussed performances, and speculated about Shakespeare’s mind. As poet, as dramatist, as model and icon, as elusive “life,” Shakespeare haunted their imaginations and made his way, through phrase, allusion, and oblique reference, into their own lives and art.
This is a book about Shakespeare in Bloomsbury—about the role Shakespeare played in the lives of a charismatic and influential cast, including Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Clive Bell, Roger Fry, Duncan Grant, Lytton Strachey, John Maynard Keynes and Lydia Lopokova Keynes, Desmond and Molly MacCarthy, and James and Alix Strachey. All are brought to sparkling life in Marjorie Garber’s intimate account of how Shakespeare provided them with a common language, a set of reference points, and a model for what they did not hesitate to call genius. Among these brilliant friends, Garber shows, Shakespeare was in effect another, if less fully acknowledged, member of the Bloomsbury Group.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This meticulous study by Garber (Character) traces the influence of Shakespeare on the Bloomsbury group, the early-20th-century English cohort of writers, artists, and critics that included E.M. Forster, John Maynard Keynes, Lytton Strachey, and Virginia Woolf, to whom Garber devotes the most attention. Unpacking allusions to the Bard in Woolf's novels, Garber explains that Woolf draws parallels between Mrs. Dalloway's two protagonists, who never meet, through their independent reflections on the Cymbeline dirge, "Fear no more the heat o' the sun," using the lyrics' contemplation of the relationship between death and joy to emphasize her novel's meditations on "the ecstasy of love and the danger of loss." Garber suggests that even though economist Keynes often underscored his critiques of "the dangerous foibles of politicians" with allusions to Macbeth, the Bloomsbury group was otherwise largely unconcerned with Shakespeare's politics and instead primarily valued his mastery as a poet and wordsmith, as exemplified by painter Roger Fry's criticism that the spectacle offered by elaborate scenery made for Shakespeare productions demonstrates a "distrust" of the plays' poetic power. The careful analysis is sometimes a bit dry, but it succeeds in highlighting the diverse ways in which a brilliant group of thinkers made use of Shakespeare's oeuvre. The result is a worthy testament to the Bard of Avon's ubiquitous influence.
