BOOKS | LITERATURE
Shakespeare in Bloomsbury by Marjorie Garber review: the Bard in WC1
Why Virginia Woolf and her circle were obsessed with Shakespeare
Steeped in Shakespeare: Lytton Strachey and Virginia Woolf, 1923
LADY OTTOLINE MORRELL/HARVARD UNIVERSITY
The Sunday Times
In her celebrated essay A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf creates the figure of Shakespeare’s sister. “Judith Shakespeare” is as clever and as verbally agile as her brother William. But while he strides to fame and fortune, her life plays out in a minor key. There is domestic drudgery, an unwanted pregnancy, professional rejection, leading to an exhausted death by suicide. Judith goes to the grave with her genius unfulfilled. “Young women,” the narrator of A Room of One’s Own demands of her present-day audience, “the plays of Shakespeare are not by you … What is your excuse?”
In this revelatory book, Marjorie Garber sets out to show how Shakespeare’s fingerprints — his verse, his prose, the idea and the shape of him
