We talk with Harvard Professor Marjorie Garber about how modernist writers of London’s Bloomsbury Group made Shakespeare their own. Garber’s most recent book—her twentieth—is Shakespeare in Bloomsbury. In it, she traces the influence of Shakespeare on the members of the Bloomsbury Group, that circle of early 20th-century intellectuals included novelists Virginia Woolf and E.M. Forster, painter Vanessa Bell, director Dadie Rylands, critic and biographer Lytton Strachey, economist John Maynard Keynes, and others. She tells Barbara Bogaev about 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.
Marjorie Garber is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of English and Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University. Shakespeare in Bloomsbury is available from Yale University Press. Garber is the inaugural Scholar in Residence of Washington, DC’s Shakespeare Everywhere Festival, happening across the city this fall. Join Garber in-person for five free public lectures through November 16. Learn more at shakespeareeverywheredc.com.
