Andrew Cecil Bradley, (26 March 1851 – 2 September 1935) was an English

literary Literature is any collection of written work, but it is also used more narrowly for writings specifically considered to be an art form, especially prose fiction, drama, and poetry. In recent centuries, the definition has expanded to include ...

scholar, best remembered for his work on

Shakespeare William Shakespeare ( 26 April 1564 – 23 April 1616) was an English playwright, poet and actor. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's natio ...

Life

Bradley was born at Park Hill,

Clapham Clapham () is a suburb in south west London, England, lying mostly within the London Borough of Lambeth, but with some areas (most notably Clapham Common) extending into the neighbouring London Borough of Wandsworth. History Early history ...

, Surrey. His father was the preacher Charles Bradley (1789–1871), vicar of Glasbury, a noted

evangelical Anglican Evangelical Anglicanism or evangelical Episcopalianism is a tradition or church party within Anglicanism that shares affinity with broader evangelicalism. Evangelical Anglicans share with other evangelicals the attributes of "conversionism, a ...

preacher and leader of the so-called Clapham Sect. Charles had thirteen children (twelve surviving) by his first wife, who died in 1831, and nine by his second wife Emma Linton. Bradley was the youngest of the nine born to Emma and Charles; his older brother, philosopher

Francis Herbert Bradley Francis Herbert Bradley (30 January 1846 – 18 September 1924) was a British idealist philosopher. His most important work was '' Appearance and Reality'' (1893). Life Bradley was born at Clapham, Surrey, England (now part of the Gre ...

, was the fifth.Bradley, Francis Herbert
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Bradley studied at Balliol College, Oxford. He obtained a Balliol Fellowship in 1874 and lectured first in English and subsequently in philosophy until 1881. He then took a permanent position at the

University of Liverpool , mottoeng = These days of peace foster learning , established = 1881 – University College Liverpool1884 – affiliated to the federal Victoria Universityhttp://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukla/2004/4 University of Manchester Act 200 ...

where he lectured on literature. In 1889 he moved to

Glasgow Glasgow ( ; sco, Glesca or ; gd, Glaschu ) is the most populous city in Scotland and the fourth-most populous city in the United Kingdom, as well as being the 27th largest city by population in Europe. In 2020, it had an estimated popul ...

as Regius Professor. In 1901 he was elected to the Oxford professorship of poetry. During his five years in this post he produced ''Shakespearean Tragedy'' (1904) and ''Oxford Lectures on Poetry'' (1909). He was later made an honorary fellow of Balliol and was awarded honorary doctorates from Liverpool, Glasgow, Edinburgh, and Durham, and was offered (but declined) the King Edward VII chair at Cambridge. Bradley never married; he lived in London with his sister and died at 6 Holland Park Road, Kensington, London, on 2 September 1935. His will established a research fellowship for young scholars of English Letters.

Work

The outcome of his five years as professor of poetry at the

University of Oxford , mottoeng = The Lord is my light , established = , endowment = £6.1 billion (including colleges) (2019) , budget = £2.145 billion (2019–20) , chancellor ...

were Bradley's two major works, ''Shakespearean Tragedy'' (1904), and ''Oxford Lectures on Poetry'' (1909). All his published work was originally delivered in the form of 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 poem by Guy Boas, "Lays of Learning", appeared in 1926: :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) 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.

Reputation

''Shakespearean Tragedy'' 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''. 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 Kenneth Duva Burke (May 5, 1897 – November 19, 1993) was an American literary theorist, as well as poet, essayist, and novelist, who wrote on 20th-century philosophy, aesthetics, criticism, and rhetorical theory. As a literary theorist, Burk ...

's 1951 article "Othello: An Essay to Illustrate a Method" 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 Frank Raymond "F. R." Leavis (14 July 1895 – 14 April 1978) was an English literary critic of the early-to-mid-twentieth century. He taught for much of his career at Downing College, Cambridge, and later at the University of York. Leavis ra ...

as a mockery of "current irrelevancies in Shakespeare criticism.") Since the 1970s, the prevalence of

poststructuralist Post-structuralism is a term for philosophical and literary forms of theory that both build upon and reject ideas established by structuralism, the intellectual project that preceded it. Though post-structuralists all present different critique ...

methods of criticism 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).

Harold Bloom Harold Bloom (July 11, 1930 – October 14, 2019) was an American literary critic and the Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University. In 2017, Bloom was described as "probably the most famous literary critic in the English-speaking worl ...

has paid tribute to Bradley's place in the great tradition of critical writing on Shakespeare: 'This loom'sbook – ''Shakespeare: the Invention of the Human'' – is a latecomer work, written in the wake of the Shakespeare critics I most admire: Johnson, Hazlitt, Bradley.' Bradley delivered the 1907–1908

Gifford Lectures The Gifford Lectures () are an annual series of lectures which were established in 1887 by the will of Adam Gifford, Lord Gifford. Their purpose is to "promote and diffuse the study of natural theology in the widest sense of the term – in o ...

at the

University of Glasgow , image = UofG Coat of Arms.png , image_size = 150px , caption = Coat of arms Flag , latin_name = Universitas Glasguensis , motto = la, Via, Veritas, Vita , ...

, entitled "Ideals of Religion." He also delivered the 1909 Adamson Lecture of the

Victoria University of Manchester The Victoria University of Manchester, usually referred to as simply the University of Manchester, was a university in Manchester, England. It was founded in 1851 as Owens College. In 1880, the college joined the federal Victoria University. Afte ...

and the 1912 Shakespeare Lecture of the British Academy. Second Annual Shakespeare Lecture of the British Academy (1912) Bradley's other works include "Aristotle's Conception of the State" in ''Hellenica'', ed. Evelyn Abbott, London : Longmans, Green, 1st ed. 1880, 2nd ed., 1898, ''Poetry for Poetry's Sake'' (1901), ''A Commentary on Tennyson's in Memoriam'' (1901), and ''A Miscellany'' (1929).

References

Sources

''New General Catalog of Old Books and Authors''

External links