Shakespeare and Bloomsbury. They may not seem to go together, but they do. And the Folger Shakespeare Library has created a podcast in its “Shakespeare Unlimited” series that explains how.
In episode 221, Harvard Professor Marjorie Garber explains how modernist writers of London’s Bloomsbury group made Shakespeare their own. In this conversation with Barbara Bogaev, she discusses the threads of Shakespeare that run through Woolf’s novels, how Lytton Strachey changed our perspective on Shakespeare’s late plays, and what got her interested in the Bloomsbury Group in the first place, according to the website.
Garber is the author of Shakespeare in Bloomsbury (2023), in which she traces the influence of Shakespeare on the members of the group, which included Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, Vanessa Bell, Dadie Rylands, Strachey, John Maynard Keynes, and others.
What surprised me was how widespread it was . . . they are all writers and they’re interested in style, but no matter what they’re writing about, Shakespeare comes in. . . He is for them the pinnacle of a certain kind of intellectual achievement.
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