ABSTRACT
This article discusses the range of Virginia Woolf's (1882 –1941) writings on theatre and dramatic form as they subtend both her experimental narrative practice and her interest in historiography. In the course of Woolf's lifetime, British drama shifts from the popular comic, music hall, and melodramatic forms common in the early nineteenth century into the twentieth century's modernist embrace of realism, naturalism, and alienation. Woolf's lifelong engagement with theatre and theatrical metaphors, likewise, demonstrates her progressive investment in drama—first for its mimetic value and contribution to her writing, and later, as a potent political art form that shaped communal values while also having the capacity to ironize those self-same values. While she utilizes dramatic form to hybridize and invigorate her novels, in her diaries and essays she simultaneously problematizes concepts of audience, reception, and spectatorship. “Notes on an Elizabethan Play,” written by Woolf in 1925, for the Times Literary Supplement, brings many of these concerns together with a meditation on the emotional concentration, word-coining splendor, and sensual pageantry of Elizabethan drama.
