Andrew Cecil Bradley (1851?1935) was an English literary scholar, best remembered for his work on Shakespeare.

Works

The outcome of his five years as Professor of Poetry at Oxford University were A. C. Bradley?s two major works, Shakespearean Tragedy (1904), and Oxford Lectures on Poetry (1909). All of his published work was delivered earlier as lectures. Bradley's pedagogical manner and his self-confidence made him a real guide for many students to the meaning of Shakespeare. His influence on Shakespearean criticism was so great that the following anonymous poem appeared:

I dreamt last night that Shakespeare?s Ghost

Sat for a civil service post.

The English paper for that year

Had several questions on King Lear

Which Shakespeare answered very badly

Because he hadn?t read his Bradley.

(Hawkes 1986 as cited in Taylor 2001: 46)^[1]

Though Bradley has sometimes been criticised for writing of Shakespeare's characters as though they were real people, his book is probably the most influential single work of Shakespearean criticism ever published. It has been reprinted more than two dozen times and is itself the subject of a scholarly book, Katherine Cooke's A. C. Bradley and His Influence in Twentieth-Century Shakespeare Criticism.^[2]

By the mid-twentieth century his approach became discredited for many scholars; often it is said to contain anachronistic errors and attempts to apply late 19th century novelistic conceptions of morality and psychology to early 17th century society. Kenneth Burke's 1951 article "Othello: An Essay to Illustrate a Method"^[3] counters a Bradleyan reading of character, as L. C. Knights had earlier done with his 1933 essay "How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?" (John Britton has pointed out that this was never a question actually posed by Bradley, and apparently was made up by F. R. Leavis as a mockery of "current irrelevancies in Shakespeare criticism."^[4]) Since the 1970s, the prevalence of poststructuralist methods of criticism has resulted in students turning away from his work, although a number of scholars have recently returned to considering 'character' as a historical category of evaluation (for instance, Michael Bristol).

Bradley's other works include Poetry for Poetry's Sake (1901), A Commentary on Tennyson's In Memoriam (1901), and A Miscellany (1929).

References

See also

• Timeline of Shakespeare criticism

External links

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