Content area
Full text
The Tragedy of Septimus Smith: Woolf's Recreation of Shakespeare
In Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, we are presented with the details of a single day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway as she prepares for a party. The novel intertwines the plots of several characters, but the most prominent is that of the World War I veteran Septimus Warren Smith. Septimus spends his day in the park with his Italian wife Lucrezia while sliding in and out of hallucinations about his friend Evans, whom he lost in the war. Though these two characters never actually meet, they are constantly interconnected by their relationship with the works of Shakespeare. Both Clarissa and Septimus quote Shakespeare throughout the novel, often invoking the same passage at different times throughout their day. Despite this shared tendency , it is Septimus who has the stronger bond with Shakespeare and continues to reference his works over and over again, specifically Cymbeline, Othello, and Antony and Cleopatra. The fact that Woolf has Septimus connect so deeply with Shakespeare allows the reader to draw parallels between his character and Shakespeare's Antony's struggle between reason and emotion in Antony and Cleopatra, which in turn makes his suicide appear to be an act driven by hamartia rather than an act of cowardice.
Though Mrs. Dalloway, like most of Woolf's texts, is rife with allusions, Shakespeare is quoted prominently within the first few pages. Clarissa, while out shopping on Bond Street, happens to read from a book that is open in a shop window. Though she mentions several books that lie open, it is these lines from Shakespeare's Cymbeline that catches her attention: "Fear no more the heat o' the sun / Nor the furious winter's rages" (qtd. in Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway 9). This excerpt is returned to several times throughout the novel, both by Clarissa and Septimus. The Cymbeline quotation is from the beginning of the funeral song sung by Guiderius and Arviragus when Cymbeline's daughter, Imogen, is believed to be dead. These lines set a tone of loss for the Woolf's novel early on and help to draw attention to the post-World War I setting that she is trying to establish. The quotations from Shakespeare, specifically the one from Cymbeline, are both thematically and structurally...