How Shakespeare Would Have Loved Us and How We Love Shakespeare

William Shakespeare is widely considered the “greatest” of England’s many poets and writers, a dramatist whose works stir the heart and mind in both its language and contemplative insight. This, though, was not always the case. Shakespeare’s emergence as the great writer and poet started only after his death—long after his death, reaching critical speed during the Victorian Era and achieving its climax in the twentieth century. Among the many individuals who helped immortalize Shakespeare were the various individuals of the Bloomsbury Group.

The Bloomsbury Group was the other great literary circle that existed in the first half of the twentieth century, a more casual and informal—less academic—counterpart to the Inklings. Its most famous member is Virginia Woolf, but it included numerous others including the economist John Maynard Keynes and the art critic Clive Bell. T.S. Eliot had a passing relationship with the members of the group when he arrived in the United Kingdom, though he was never a member.

Among the loves of this cadre of writers, academics, and journalists was William Shakespeare. In fact, Marjorie Garber argues that it was Shakespeare that truly united this disparate and diverse group of individuals. Despite their differences in profession and education, all the members of the Bloomsbury Group had a love and fascination for the Bard of Stratford-upon-Avon.

Shakespeare in Bloomsbury is an exceptional work of investigation and literary criticism. The book is not about Shakespeare the man but about the Shakespeare of the Bloomsbury Group and how their love of Shakespeare influenced their own writings. The hero of this tale of loving Shakespeare is Virginia Woolf, the great modernist writer and essayist who eventually committed suicide during the dark days of World War II. Through Garber’s book, we learn of the lives of the Bloomsbury Group, the works of Shakespeare they frequently discussed—in person and by letter—which proved influential in their own writings and creative works. As Garber informs the reader at the onset, “This is a book about Shakespeare in Bloomsbury—about the role Shakespeare played in the lives of a remarkable set of writers, artists, and thinkers whose influence is still strongly felt today.” As such, Shakespeare is filtered through the heroes and heroines of Bloomsbury, and Garber reveals how the Bard “would come to play many roles: as a cultural inheritance and social code; as an inspiration for work in genres as apparently different as fiction and biography, art history and economics; as a vehicle for expressing—and also for masking—personal opinions; as a structure of feeling and a structure of thinking.”

The work begins with Shakespeare in the Victorian Era, the time when Shakespeare emerged from his humbler recognition as one among many of England’s prosperous poets and dramatists to become the “greatest” in the minds of many. It was Shakespeare’s elevation to the pedestal of greatness unrivalled by any in the past and present during the latter half of the nineteenth century that brings us to the Shakespeare of Virginia Woolf and the men and women of the Bloomsbury Group.

Although the book portends to be about Shakespeare’s influence over the Bloomsbury Set, it is equally an important work of criticism and insight assessing the literary corpus and letters of those magnificent and complicated souls. For lovers of Virginia Woolf, Garber’s book is also a magnificent window into Woolfe’s writings—specifically devoted to the role and influence of Shakespeare over her. To discuss Virginia Woolf without talking about Shakespeare’s luminous shadow over her is to not discuss Virginia Woolf at all, “All her life, Virginia Woolf made entries about Shakespeare in her journals and diaries, and kept up a lively correspondence about the plays with her friends.” To know Virginia Woolf, as Garber shows, is to know her relationship with Shakespeare.

The chapter dealing with Virginia Woolf’s Shakespeare is the heart of the book, and one cannot help but get the feeling that it was her passion and love for Shakespeare that rubbed off on other members. Not that they did not love or appreciate Shakespeare, but that they did not have the intensity of love and passion for Shakespeare in the same way that Virginia did. In reading Garber’s overview of all the influences and allusions and references to Shakespeare in Virginia Woolf’s writings, we realize just how extensive her knowledge of Shakespeare was and how that knowledge was a reflection of her love for the Bard. “[T]he patterns of Shakespearean allusion” dominate her fiction stories and her many essays and reviews, revealing to readers how any discussion of Woolf without Shakespeare is insufficient and how readers suffer without picking up on or recognizing the Bard’s heart over her writings.

After marvelously writing about Virginia Woolf’s Shakespeare, and highlighting for readers those influences in her books like The Waves and A Room of One’s Own, Garber pivots to looking at the Shakespeare of the other individuals of the Bloomsbury Group. We are treated to Lytton Strachey, the other great unqualified lover of Shakespeare much like Virginia Woolf. We also learn about the famed economist John Maynard Keynes and his love for Shakespeare (and art), how that love led him to be a member of the Shakespeare Society as he wrestled with the crisis of the Great Depression and helped transform modern economics. Keynes’s love for Shakespeare was enhanced when he met and fell in love with Lydia Lopokova whom he eventually married. Lydia was an accomplished dancer and theatre performer who graced the stage of several adaptations of Shakespeare.

We then meet the artist Roger Fry and the art critic Clive Bell. The publisher Leonard Woolf, husband of Virginia Woolf, also proved instrumental in ensuring Shakespeare’s literary legacy by publishing works of fiction from Bloomsbury Group members which contained the traces of Shakespearean thunder in their own writings. The actress Peggy Ashcroft and theatre critic Desmond MacCarthy also appear with Garber explaining to us the Shakespeare that influenced these two individuals.

In turning to the members of the Bloomsbury Group in the world of theater, we are treated to how the men and women of Bloomsbury revolutionized our experience with Shakespeare. The actresses, actors, critics, and directors of the stage helped bring new life to Shakespeare—overturning the often bland and dry adaptations that had become ubiquitous to British theatre life. The Bloomsbury Set breathed new life into Shakespeare, in their letters, in their conversations, and on stage.

Lastly, we are treated to Shakespeare the poet with the poets: John Lehmann, Rupert Brooke, and T.S. Eliot (though he was never a member of the Bloomsbury Group). Of particular interest is Rupert Brooke’s Shakespeare since Brooke had such high praise for Shakespeare while also demeaning him at the same time. “Brooke’s comments about Shakespeare,” Garber writes, “varied in tone depending upon his audience.” Among women and lay audiences, Brooke was “instructive and tutorial.” Writing in private, though, he mixed reverence with irreverence like when he wrote in his Grantchester notebooks, ‘This glutton, drunkard, poacher, agnostic, adulterer, and sodomite was England’s greatest poet.’” Brooke wouldn’t let facts dissuade him from telling a grand story for rhetorical and performative shock—but in that sense he really did follow in Shakespeare’s footsteps who took artistic license to historicity for the same purpose.

“In discussing the writing of the Bloomsbury Group and their followers, I have alluded in passing to something I called Bloomsbury Shakespeare,” writes Garber. “But what might be meant by such a phrase?” Garber insists the passionate amateurism is something we need to recover in our day and age. I concur. There is nothing wrong with “amateurism” and we should be willing and courageous to follow in those same footsteps. “The Shakespeare they admired, read, and quoted, and sometimes performed was a poet, a stylist, a wordsmith, and a thinker. What they valued above all was his language.” All fine and good. But let us return to Virginia Woolf, the true heroine of Shakespeare in Bloomsbury.

Garber insists, “The interest in Shakespeare shown by members of the Bloomsbury Group enriched both their lives and their own practices.” But what might be meant by such a phrase? Bernard, one of Woolf’s characters in The Waves, reveals to us the true enrichment we get by forming a relationship with Shakespeare, ‘He has left me his poem. O friendship, I too will press flowers between the pages of Shakespeare’s sonnets!’” More than anything, Shakespeare invites us to friendship. The love of Shakespeare that all the members of the Bloomsbury Group had brought them together. Some for a few years. Others for a lifetime. How did their interest in Shakespeare enrich their lives? By making friends of the most unlikely of individuals; Shakespeare has that unique grace to make friends of us all.

Shakespeare in Bloomsbury
By Marjorie Garber
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023; 400pp

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