Richard Allen Cave

Richard Allen Cave

Richard Allen Cave

“Il Bloomsbury Group, Firenze e Vernon Lee”

Virginia Stephen visitò Firenze per la prima volta nel 1904, insieme alla sorella Vanessa. Vi tornò nel 1908, poi nel 1909 e con una certa frequenza nel decennio successivo. In città e nei dintorni le ragazze incontrarono varie personalità della colonia inglese, tra le quali Janet Ross. Non più tardi del 1907 Virginia aveva letto Vernon Lee, poiché il 9 gennaio 1908 pubblicò una recensione a The Sentimental Traveller sul Times Literary Supplement. In quel periodo si stava interrogandosulla natura della scrittura e la sua opinione su Lee, di cui si sarebbe occupata ancora negli anni seguenti, oscillava tra il caustico e il cauto. Lee rappresentava tutto ciò che Virginia non avrebbe voluto essere dal punto di vista artistico. Tuttavia, benché ne denunciasse un’eccessiva facilità stilistica, il suo biasimo nascondeva forse un po’ d’invidia, dato che per sua stessa ammissione scrivere era una sfida e una “faticaccia”. Le sue idee su Lee non mutarono fino a che, negli anni Venti, l’amicizia con Vita Sackville-West ed Ethel Smyth la indusse a vedere l’autrice sotto una luce diversa. Il mio intervento indagherà i molti contesti nei quali Woolf si occupò di Lee, concentrandosi sui sottili mutamenti che la sua ricezione mostrò nel corso degli anni.

“The Bloomsbury Group, Florence and Vernon Lee”

Virginia Stephen first visited Florence with her sister Vanessa in 1904 and again in 1908 and 1909. They met with many English residents in the city and its environs, including Janet Ross, and continued to return to the city frequently over the coming decades. Virginia had certainly met Vernon Lee as a writer by 1907, when she reviewed the latter’s The Sentimental Traveller for the Times Literary Supplement (published January 9, 1908), at a time when she herself was desperately questing “to discover how to write”. Her opinion of Lee veered between the caustic and the guarded (she was to review further publications by Lee over the coming years), since Lee seemed to represent for her everything that she wished not to be as a novelist. Yet, though she appeared to despise what she saw as Lee’s facility, her superior scorn may have masked a degree of envy, since she found creativity challenging and (an off-repeated term) a “grind”. This view persisted until Woolf’s growing friendship with Vita Sackville-West and Ethel Smyth in the 1920s encouraged her to take a more appreciative view of Lee. The paper will explore the many contexts in which Woolf wrote about, charting the subtly changing patterns of her responses to her senior.

Richard Allen Cave è Professore Emerito di Teatro e Arti Tetrali al Royal Holloway, Università di Londra. Tra i suoi molti interessi vi sono il teatro rinascimentale, il teatro inglese e irlandese moderno, lo stage design, la danza e i movement studies. Ha curato edizioni del teatro di Wilde e Yeats ed è stato direttore responsabile di un progetto, durato quattro anni e finanziato dall’Arts and Humanities Research Council of Great Britain, che ha prodotto un’edizione online dei Collected Plays of Richard Brome (2010). Ha recentemente curato la regia del dramma danzato di Yeats The King of the Great Clock Tower in collaborazione con il Royal Ballet e la Royal Ballet School. Dallo spettacolo ha tratto la monografia Collaborations: Ninette de Valois and William Butler Yeats (2011). Da anni il professor Cave tiene corsi di metodo Feldenkrais alla Royal Shakespeare Company.

Richard Allen Cave (M.A., Ph.D. Cantab.) is Professor Emeritus in Drama and Theatre Arts at Royal Holloway, University of London. His publications extend through many fields: Renaissance Theatre, modern English and Irish Drama, stage design and dance and movement studies. He has edited the plays of Wilde and Yeats and was General Editor of a four-year project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council of Great Britain, to create an online edition of the Collected Plays of Richard Brome (2010). As a director, his most recent staging was of Yeats’s dance drama, The King of the Great Clock Tower, in conjunction with the Royal Ballet and Royal Ballet School, which with his related monograph, Collaborations: Ninette de Valois and William Butler Yeats (2011), drew on a wide range of his scholarly, directorial and theatrical interests. Professor Cave is also a qualified Feldenkrais practitioner, who has offered regular Feldenkrais classes with the Royal Shakespeare Company as part of their Actor Development Programme for many years now.