LIT 5388 Spring 2019 Caputi

“Shakespeare is getting flyblown,” writes Virginia Woolf. “A paternal government might well forbid writing about him, as they put his monument at Stratford beyond the reach of scribbling fingers.” The relationship between the founder of feminist literary criticism in English and the immortal “Bard of Avon” is one of the most fascinating and fraught in English literary history. As famous, perhaps, for her granting Shakespeare a hypothetical “sister” on behalf of women writers as for her masterful and innovative contributions to literary modernism, Woolf offers, in her fiction, diaries, letters, and essays, an opportunity to watch one great mind challenge and co-create with another across the boundaries of death, history, and gender.

In this course, we will explore Woolf’s commentary on, allusions to, and re-workings of Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets, focusing particularly on the following texts: Jacob’s Room, Mrs. Dalloway, Orlando, A Room of One’s Own, The Waves and Between the Acts. Shakespearean works to be studied alongside the aforementioned texts include (but are not limited to) Othello, Antony and Cleopatra and the Sonnets.