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 the-matically and structurally important in this way. The lines become a sort of mantra for Clarissa, a character who is concerned deeply with aging and her own death; they return to her when she needs to move forward and act as words of encouragement and endurance.

It is also necessary to examine the fact that Clarissa and Septimus are the only characters who quote Shakespeare throughout the novel or have any real relation to literature at all. They are also the only two characters who are truly dynamic, and both have spouses who are somewhat flat characters. Woolf paints Richard Dalloway as a very stoic and unemotional man who is unable to express himself even enough to tell his wife that he loves her. Woolf writes, “Richard Dalloway got on his hind legs and said that no decent man ought to read Shakespeare’s sonnets because it was like listening at keyholes” (73). This trait is presented as a negative one in Richard, and in a novel with so many allusions to Shakespeare, it seems almost distasteful. Even Clarissa’s ex-lover, Peter Walsh, comments that it is unlike Clarissa to accept a man who feels this way about literature.

In the same respect, Lucrezia, Septimus’ wife—more fondly called Rezia—does not have a love or appreciation for Shakespeare either. As an Italian woman who came to England only to be with her husband, Rezia does not have the same exposure to English literature that the other characters have had. She asks Septimus, “Could she not read Shakespeare too? Was Shakespeare a difficult author?” (87). This question exemplifies her lack of understanding of the literature, though it is not wholly her fault and it is not perceived as a personality flaw as it is with Richard. Instead, Rezia’s lack of understanding of Shakespeare is a flaw in her marriage, acting...