Coleridge, Woolf, Shakespeare, Welles

Virginia Woolf writing about the greatest writers and greatest minds like Shakespeare–

“If one is a man, still the woman part of the brain must have effect; and a woman must also have intercourse with the man in her. Coleridge perhaps meant this when he said that a great mind is androgynous. It is when this fusion takes place that the mind is fully fertilized and uses all its faculties. Perhaps a mind that is purely masculine cannot create, any more than a mind that is purely feminine. It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple: one must be woman-manly or man-womanly.”

Interestingly, Orson Welles concluded much the same sort of thing many years later–

“Othello is destroyed easily because he has never understood women–like Lear. Shakespeare was tremendously feminine. Every man who is any kind of artist has a great deal of female in him. I act and give myself as a man, but I register and receive with the soul of a woman. The only really good artists are feminine. I can’t admit the existence of an artist whose dominant personality is masculine.”

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