The bloomsbury group

What Shakespeare meant to the Bloomsbury Group

In November 1935, Virginia Woolf saw a production of Romeo and Juliet. She was not overly impressed. ‘Acting it,’ she wrote, ‘they spoil the poetry.’ Harsh words, you might think, for a cast that included John Gielgud, Laurence Olivier, Peggy Ashcroft, Edith Evans and Alec Guinness. But Shakespeare on the stage was something of a bête noire for the Bloomsbury group. ‘We, of course, only read Shakespeare,’ Clive Bell later said. The Shakespeare that mattered was the one on the page. Shakespeare on stage was a bête noire for the Bloomsberries. ‘We, of course, only read Shakespeare,’ said Clive Bell Who was that ‘we’, though? Marjorie Garber’s understanding of the

Apostle of modernism: Clive Bell’s reputation repaired

Clive Bell is the perennial supporting character in the biographies of the Bloomsbury group. The husband of Vanessa Bell, brother-in-law of Virginia Woolf and friend of Maynard Keynes and Lytton Strachey, he is often depicted as a witness to historical events rather than a participant in them, a sort of modernist Forrest Gump. At best he is a dilettante with good taste who didn’t quite belong with the intellectuals of Bloomsbury; at worst he is a womaniser with Nazi sympathies who took advantage of Virginia Woolf. In this useful book Mark Hussey lets him take centre stage and delivers a far more nuanced portrait. Bell liked to play up to