Shakespeare in Bloomsbury

“A spirited dance of minds. . . . [Garber] places Shakespeare and Woolf in passionate conversation with each other, separated by centuries but joined at the hip. . . . The beautiful minds of Shakespeare and Woolf are joined by a third, belonging to Garber . . . [whose] love of language and of her subject, and her ability to render that love contagious, is enough to make you want to devour the works of the playwright, the novelist, and the critic together in one fell swoop.”—Chris Vognar, Boston Globe

“[Garber] succeeds in highlighting the diverse ways in which a brilliant group of thinkers made use of Shakespeare’s oeuvre. . . . A worthy testament to the Bard of Avon’s ubiquitous influence.”—Publishers Weekly

“Eloquent, sensitive to nuance, committed to civilized personal friendship and immersed in Shakespeare, Marjorie Garber might herself be considered a latter-day member of the Bloomsbury Group. This scintillating account of their engagement with Shakespeare radiates all that was most valuable about the Bloomsbury ethos.”—Michael Dobson, director, Shakespeare Institute

“Marjorie Garber’s brilliant book shows that Shakespeare should be considered a part of the Bloomsbury Group and a part of the invention of modernity. He was their contemporary because he truly was their companion, not roughly dragged into their present to preserve their needs, but the very medium of their thought and their creativity.”—David Scott Kastan, author of On Color

“With great intelligence and warmth, Garber paints a richly detailed, immensely appealing, often dazzling portrait of Bloomsbury’s Shakespeare as a figure omnipresent in the lives and hearts of a remarkable group of artists and thinkers. In their private diaries and letters, in their conversations, in the poetry they read, either silently or aloud, in plays they read and performed with such pleasure, but most of all in their writings and paintings, he appears as a touchstone for all they revered, indeed loved, an indispensable standard to measure themselves against.”—Maria DiBattista, author of Imagining Virginia Woolf

“The highly literary nature of these friends meant on the whole that they preferred reading Shakespeare to hearing his plays performed. It was his words that mattered, as Marjorie Garber shows in this hugely enjoyable book, as she moves swiftly, through the complex history of Bloomsbury, showing how Shakespeare infiltrated their lives, thoughts, and discussions about art and literature.”—Frances Spalding, author of The Bloomsbury Group