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

[Iolanda Plescia]

Thank you, Emily! I didn’t know about Leslie Stephen’s essay - must look it up straight away!

all best
Iolanda

> Il giorno 12/feb/2016, alle ore 23:33, Emily Kopley <emily.kopley at gmail.com> ha scritto:
> 
> 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 <mailto: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 <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 <mailto: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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