This book led me down a Julia Margaret Cameron search engine rabbit hole, made me desperate to dig out The Complete Works and encouraged me to finally explore the writing of Virginia Woolf*. Indeed, this book has opened up so many new treasures- the paintings of Roger Fry, Rupert Brooke's war sonnets, the Neo-Pagans, the life and works of Vanessa Bell.

A good first chunk of the book is with Woolf and her obsession (perhaps even reliance upon?) with Shakespeare (or Shre for the initiated). This section started brilliantly but I found my interest began to wane with the breadth of analysis.

There are other Bloomsbury members are in residence and the book picks up again when we delve in to the Apostles. It all seems to hang upon Woolf however, her presence threaded throughout.

It does amble about a bit and to be truthful I am not quite sure of The Point but the writing is so beautifully flowy and the subject so captivating.

•Intend to start with 'Flush' her biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's cocker spaniel (lol).

It’s obviously quite an esoteric and “worthy” subject, but this book was a brilliant entry point into the creative minds of some of our finest artists and their debt to Shakespeare. Illuminating and oddly moving.

I'm not at huge fan of the Bloomsbury set, but the title of this book piqued my interest, harking back, for me, to the character in a David Lodge novel who is writing a thesis on the influence of TS Eliot on Shakespeare. I hoped that Shakespeare in Bloomsbury would give me an insight into Woolf and her circle via an exploration of their relationship with Shakespeare. Such insight, I thought, would make me view them more positively.

It didn't. The author, Marjorie Garber, is apparently a noted Shakespeare scholar, and clearly knows her way round the Bloomsbury group too, and her book certainly demonstrates their thorough familiarity with the Bard: like other well-educated people of their period, allusions to and quotes from Shakespeare and other authors were a lingua franca, a part of daily life. She bemoans the fact that this kind of intercourse no longer exists outside academia (if it even exists there).

If I'd read this book when I was 14, and had just discovered Orlando, it might have influenced me profoundly. At the other end of my life it just reinforces my feeling that the Bloomsbury set were a) of their time and b) rather "precious". If you love them, then you may well enjoy it. If you prefer Shakespeare then I'm not sure that it will tell you anything much except that they quoted him a lot.

A brilliant read. I’ve always been so struck by the refrain of Cymbeline’s ‘fear no more the heat of sun’ and the connections between Shakespeare and Bloomsbury that Garber establishes and scrutinises was enlightening.

Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare in Bloomsbury, Yale University Press 2023.

Thank you, NetGalley, for providing me with this uncorrected proof for review.

‘How Shakespeare Would Have Loved Us’ introduces Shakespeare in Bloomsbury with a wealth of information about the focus of the book. It suggests that the book will be accessible, fascinating and a provide a new approach to some of the interests of the Bloomsbury Group. This assessment is fulfilled in the succeeding chapters: Shakespeare in Victorian Bloomsbury, Shakespeare as a (Victorian) Man, The Shakespeares of Virginia Woolf, Shakespeare Among the apostles, Mr Eliot’s Shakespeare, Shakespeare at Charleston and Ham Spray, and Coda: Bloomsbury’s Shakespeare. Prominence is given to the Bloomsbury Group and their reflections on Shakespeare, despite Marjorie Garber’s background and a chapter purportedly about Shakespeare. However, enough new ideas about aspects of his work are woven throughout the material about the Group’s conversation, written material, photography and plays so that by the end of the book Garber provides the reader with an experience of both.

However, a student of Shakespeare could be disappointed as the emphasis on the Bloomsbury Group’s connection with Shakespeare is more anecdotal than analytical. For many readers this will be refreshing. After all, to feel that the minds of such luminaries as Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Clive Bell, Roger Fry, Duncan Grant, Lytton Strachey, John Maynard Keynes and Lydia Lopokova Keynes, Desmond and Molly MacCarthy, and James and Alix Strachey as well as some of their children and less well known members of the Bloomsbury Group and those associated with its outer perimeters are being unlocked to scrutiny through their domestic a well as public pursuits is appealing.

The chapter, Shakespeare as a (Victorian) Man, is an insight into those who wrote about Shakespeare, rather than the man himself. Garber’s appraisal of Leslie Stephen’s assumed knowledge of Shakespeare’s character and motivation is extremely witty. In this chapter, through Stephen’s essays she possibly enhances to what is known of Shakespeare. She certainly adds to our knowledge of Virginia Woolf’s father. However, I felt that the information about Shakespeare was speculative more than analytical, although worth thinking about.
I think this is the way in which to read and enjoy Shakespeare in Bloomsbury. Rather than demanding a thorough academic assessment of Shakespeare and his impact on the Bloomsbury Group, I appreciated the lively anecdotal evidence which provided valuable insights into these artists’ personal lives and Shakespeare as an invaluable part of those lives. Here I must acknowledge the copious citations and bibliography which also have an important role in the text.

Creating a book that weaves the Bloomsbury Group’s photographs, plays, diary entries, writing, conversation and thoughts and the leading role of Shakespeare in all these settings into an accessible form is a praiseworthy accomplishment. More than that, I found it an enjoyable read.

An excellent book on the role of Shakespeare and his works among the literary Bloomsbury Group--Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Lytton Strachey, and many others. Garber uses letters, drafts of works, and completed and published pieces by members of the Group to uncover the influence of Shakespeare, how the writers read and discussed his plays, and how they used his work in their own. Written for a general audience with interests in British literature, Shakespeare in Bloomsbury will find fans everywhere.

As a lover of Shakespeare and the Bloomsbury Group, this was a win for me. I found the research thoroughly interesting, drawing out connections beyond written texts into arts and drama. A very enjoyable read that I’ll recommend my older students try.

An incredibly thorough, at times bordering on tedious, account of how Shakespeare's work wove through the Bloomsbury group. Like many readers (I imagine), I was most interested in the Virginia Woolf section and pleased by the level of detail devoted to Woolf's readings of Shakespeare. Some of the lesser figures on the scene and their connection to the Bard were of less interest to this non-academic reader, but I can see the value for the academic. Recommended and will be purchasing for the library.

a nice, informative book, but i do wish it had gone beyond surface-level anecdotes and really tackled deeper motives that link the bloomsbury group and shakespeare’s plays together.

Anyone working in early modern literature, culture and history owes a profound debt to Garber and her sometimes groundbreaking existing work (her work on cross-dressing and gender was 'big' for me) so it's sad that this book isn't more exciting. The idea is fabulous: to plot the presence of Shakespeare in the writings, work and leisure pursuits of the Bloomsbury Group. And Garber is as rigorous and meticulous as ever in tracing these... um... traces - but that's all this is, at heart: recording snippets, vague allusions and throwaway comments like '... seated round the table with our visitors like the witches from Macbeth', or 'waved her arms and shouted, her white hair flying like King Lear's'.

There's no question that this well-educated (even if not formally, in the case of the girls - something Virginia Woolf always resented), intellectual, artistic group all knew their Shakespeare and quoted lightly as an everyday thing - but so did most other well-educated people of the period. This was a time when Shakespeare was deemed the pre-eminent English writer and 'genius' and his words permeated everyday speech. There's nothing special, it seems to me, about the Bloomsberries and their easy relationship with Shakespeare.

In fact, other writers are frequently mentioned and it would be almost as valid to suggest that Tennyson or Donne were a member of Bloomsbury: 'when Carrington painted her famous portrait of Lytton Strachey - reclining at ease, holding a book in his long thing fingers - he posed for her while reading aloud from Donne and Shakespeare.'

The most interesting sections for me were about those people on the edge of Bloomsbury proper and the visualisation of Shakespeare's work: Ellen Terry's roles on the stage, the photos of Julia Margaret Cameron who used live models, sometimes young Bloomburyites, to make photographic tableaux of Shakespearean characters and scenes.

The book ends with a slightly grumpy coda which laments that our generation, unless academic/theatre specialists, doesn't generally either use or recognise Shakespearean references or allusions in the same way. I would partially disagree: they may not be recognised but Shakespeare permeates English from 'green-eyed monster' (Othello) to 'something wicked this way comes' (Macbeth), to 'the world is my oyster' (Merry Wives of Windsor) to 'wild goose chase' (Romeo and Juliet) and 'brave new world' (The Tempest). Instead, Garber asserts, contemporary engagements with Shakespeare are via adaptations such as the short-lived Hogarth Shakespeare series. Maybe the situation is different in the US but here Shakespeare is still being acted continuously, not least at The Globe. But Garber is right that this may not be the direct and casual exchange of Shakespeare that was a shared language amongst the Bloomsberries.

By the end, though, I was wondering what this book proves: that the Bloomsberries knew their Shakespeare well, and especially from reading rather than watching the plays? - yes, for sure. But did we expect anything else? There's a lack of any kind of intellectual framing to this book: it could have been a work of reception but the evidence is too sparse in terms of slight references in passing, and the users too diverse: not just the core Bloomsburyites but those on the margins and the second generation. And the term 'reception' isn't used.

In the end, this is a slightly oblique return to the lives of this fascinating group with Shakespeare as a kind of glue to tentatively hold the whole thing together. I'd see this as an enabling work where Garber's done the hard work of accumulating all these traces of Shakespeare and other scholars may do the analysis to create this into something intellectually meaningful. Nevertheless, Garber's delight is evident and there's a certain charm to the whole enterprise.