In November 1935, Virginia Woolf saw a production of Romeo and Juliet. She was not overly impressed. ‘Acting it,’ she wrote, ‘they spoil the poetry.’ Harsh words, you might think, for a cast that included John Gielgud, Laurence Olivier, Peggy Ashcroft, Edith Evans and Alec Guinness. But Shakespeare on the stage was something of a bête noire for the Bloomsbury group. ‘We, of course, only read Shakespeare,’ Clive Bell later said. The Shakespeare that mattered was the one on the page.
Shakespeare on stage was a bête noire for the Bloomsberries. ‘We, of course, only read Shakespeare,’ said Clive Bell
Who was that ‘we’, though? Marjorie Garber’s understanding of the group’s membership encompasses Woolf and her siblings, numerous alumni of the Cambridge society known as the Apostles, and their children and friends. The question Garber poses in Shakespeare in Bloomsbury, however, would add one more to the list. To what extent, she asks, might we consider Shakespeare himself a member – an ‘absent-present’, in Woolf’s phrase, in their thoughts and conversation?
Woolf’s introduction to Shakespeare came largely through another absent presence in her life, her older brother Thoby, himself an Apostle, who died in 1906.
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