Shakespeare in the imagination of Bloomsbury and Samuel Beckett
SHAKESPEARE IN BLOOMSBURY MARJORIE GARBER 400pp. Yale University Press. £25 (US $35).
SHAKESPEARE AND BECKETT Restless echoes
CLAUDIA OLK 300pp. Cambridge University Press. £75 (US $99.99).
ONE OF THE COURSES I and I think my students most enjoyed in my later years at the University of Sussex was an MA course I invented called “Dante, Eliot, Beckett”. Not only did we get a chance to immerse ourselves in three major writers, we learnt more about the relation of tradition to individual talent than any amount of books on cultural transmission and the afterlife of texts could have taught us, as well as discovering that Eliot’s Dante and Beckett’s Dante were so different, they could almost have been two separate writers. The chance appearance of two books on Shakespeare’s afterlife, one among the Bloomsbury set, the other on Shakespeare in Beckett and reading Shakespeare through Beckett, give us the chance to do the same with him.
Marjorie Garber’s book is a delight to read. Beautifully written, it is also beautifully presented, with fascinating photographs ranging from Julia Margaret Cameron’s of Prospero and Miranda and Lear and Cordelia, as well as Tennyson, which date from the 1860s, to Angelica Bell as Ophelia, attributed to Vanessa Bell (c.1933), and reproductions of numerous paintings, always in the service of the argument.
After introductory chapters on Shakespeare in the Stephen circle and in late-Victorian Britain, reminding us of Shakespeare’s living presence in home readings aloud of the plays and in amateur theatricals, Garber gets down to the meat of the book, a 100-page chapter on Virginia Woolf. After describing in her diary a fancy-dress party at her sister Vanessa Bell’s London house in 1923 Woolf ended: “Shre [her habitual abbreviation], I thought would have liked us all tonight”. To Molly McCarthy she wrote: “I kept thinking of Shakespeare. We were so mellowly and good-fellowly; not any intensity or bitterness, but all serene and melodious”. Shakespeare, for her and her friends, was the comforter, the consoler. Talking about him was, as Garber puts it, “both a pleasure and a sign of intimacy”. The mature comedies, of course, but, perhaps surprisingly, also King John, Richard II, Troilus and Cressida, Measure for Measure, Pericles and Cymbeline all figure in their writings, conversations and epistolary exchanges.
For Woolf the writer, though, he was something else, a constant inspiration and challenge: “I read Shakespeare directly I have finished writing, when my mind is agape and red-hot”, she noted in her diary for April 13,
