[Vwoolf] Information about the thinking of Virginia Woolf onWilliam Shakespeare

[Emily Kopley]

Hi Iolanda, Sara, and All,

Woolf's father mocked the tradition of proposing alternate authorships for
Shakespeare's plays: Leslie Stephen reverses this tradition in his
still-amusing
"Did Shakespeare Write Bacon?" (*National Review* XXXVIII, 1901, 402-6;
reprinted in *Men, Books, and Mountains*, ed.  S.O.A. Ullmann, Hogarth
Press, 1956). And in *Night and Day*, Woolf adds a feminist touch to her
father's mockery: “Beginning with a perfectly frivolous jest, Mrs Hilbery
had evolved a theory than Anne Hathaway had a way, among other things, of
writing Shakespeare’s sonnets,” an idea “struck out to enliven a party of
professors” (266 in the edition I have most easily on hand, the
non-scholarly 2005 Barnes&Noble edition).

Best,
Emily


On Fri, Feb 12, 2016 at 3:23 PM, Iolanda Plescia <
iolanda.plescia at uniroma1.it> wrote:

> Dear Sara,
>
> The second issue of the new series of *Memoria di Shakespeare. A Journal
> of Shakespearean Studies*, which I co-edit, is devoted entirely to the
> question of Shakespeare’s biography and identity. Nadia Fusini’s essay in
> that issue takes into account, among other things, Woolf’s special take on
> biography and life writing vs. writing life, to argue against an excessive
> preoccupation with everyday life details that cannot give an adequate sense
> of a writer’s identity.
> You can check out the journal here:
> http://ojs.uniroma1.it/index.php/MemShakespeare/index
>
> If you haven’t yet come across it, Julia Briggs’ excellent essay ‘Virginia
> Woolf Reads Shakespeare: Or, Her Silence on Master William’ is a wonderful
> exploration of what Shakespeare meant to Woolf, though she never wrote
> 'formally’ about him, for a number of possible reasons that Briggs goes
> into.
>
> Personally, just to give my two cents, my hunch is that Woolf would not
> have been interested in the slightest in Shakespeare’s so-called ‘true’
> historical identity (and the idea that S. was Florio, or the Earl of
> Oxford, or Bacon, etc. etc. has been widely disproven in serious
> scholarship).
>
> All best to everyone from this part of Italy as well :-)
>
> Iolanda Plescia
>
>
>
>
> Iolanda Plescia, PhD
> Dipartimento di Studi Europei, Americani e Interculturali
> Università di Roma Sapienza
> Via Carlo Fea, 2
> 00161 Roma
>
>
>
>
>
> On 10 Feb 2016, at 23:18, Sara Spessa <spessasara at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Dear Woolfians,
>
> recently I have heard about reasearches and texts regarding the
> real identity of William Shakespeare: there are persons that think that
> William Shakespeare was not English and they talk about the relation
> between Shakespeare and John Florio.
>
> I kindly ask you if anybody know what Virginia Woolf thought on this
> matter.
>
>
> Thank you very much for your help.
>
>
> Kind regards from Italy,
> Sara
>
> --
>
> ---
> Sara Spessa
>
>
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-- 
Dr. Emily Kopley
Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow
McGill University, Department of English
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