MARJORIE GARBER AT NOVEL: SHAKESPEARE IN BLOOMSBURY

Join us as we welcome MARJORIE GARBER in conversation with SCOTT NEWSTOK on THURSDAY, APRIL 11 at 6:00 pm to celebrate the release of her new book SHAKESPEARE IN BLOOMSBURY.

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ABOUT THE BOOK:

The untold story of Shakespeare’s profound influence on Virginia Woolf and the rest of the Bloomsbury Group

“A spirited dance of minds.”–Chris Vognar, Boston Globe

For the men and women of the Bloomsbury Group, Shakespeare was a constant presence and a creative benchmark. Not only the works they intended for publication–the novels, biographies, economic and political writings, stage designs and reviews–but also their diaries and correspondence, their gossip and small talk turned regularly on Shakespeare. They read his plays for pleasure in the evenings, and on sunny summer afternoons in the country. They went to the theater, discussed performances, and speculated about Shakespeare’s mind. As poet, as dramatist, as model and icon, as elusive “life,” Shakespeare haunted their imaginations and made his way, through phrase, allusion, and oblique reference, into their own lives and art.

This is a book about Shakespeare in Bloomsbury–about the role Shakespeare played in the lives of a charismatic and influential cast, including 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. All are brought to sparkling life in Marjorie Garber’s intimate account of how Shakespeare provided them with a common language, a set of reference points, and a model for what they did not hesitate to call genius. Among these brilliant friends, Garber shows, Shakespeare was in effect another, if less fully acknowledged, member of the Bloomsbury Group.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Marjorie Garber is the William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of English and of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University.

She is the author of twenty single-authored books and the editor or co-editor of seven edited collections. Her newest book, Shakespeare in Bloomsbury, from Yale University Press (2023), is the untold story of Shakespeare’s profound influence on Virginia Woolf and the rest of the Bloomsbury Group.

Among her other books are six on Shakespeare (Dream in Shakespeare, Coming of Age in Shakespeare, Shakespeare’s Ghost Writers, Shakespeare After All, Profiling Shakespeare, and Shakespeare and Modern Culture), two on gender and sexuality (Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety and Vice Versa: Bisexuality and the Eroticism of Everyday Life), three on cultural studies (Character: The History of Cultural Obsession, Dog Love and Sex and Real Estate: Why We Love Houses) four that directly address literary study and the arts (Academic Instincts; Patronizing the Arts; A Manifesto for Literary Studies; The Use and Abuse of Literature), and four collections of essays on literature and culture (Symptoms of Culture; Quotation Marks; Loaded Words; and The Muses on Their Lunch Hour). She has published essays in Critical Inquiry, Raritan, and the Shakespeare Quarterly, as well as articles and Op-Ed pieces in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harpers, and The Chronicle of Higher Education. She is a member of the advisory board of the public television series Shakespeare Uncovered, and has appeared in several of its programs, as well as in many other television and radio interviews.

ABOUT THE IN-CONVERSATION PARTNER:

Scott Newstok is professor of English and founding director of the Pearce Shakespeare Endowment at Rhodes College. A parent and an award-winning teacher, he is the author of How to Think like Shakespeare and the editor of several books, including the forthcoming How to Teach Children, a volume of Michel de Montaigne’s essays on education.