A. C. Bradley

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This article is about the English literary scholar. For the American screenwriter, see A. C. Bradley (screenwriter).
A. C. Bradley

Francis Herbert Bradley
(brother)

Andrew Cecil Bradley,

Shakespeare
.

Life

Bradley was born at Park Hill,

Francis Herbert Bradley (1846–1924), was the fifth.[3][4] An older half-brother was Rev. George Granville Bradley
(1821–1903), who was Dean of Westminster.

Bradley studied at

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 (1899), 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.[4] His will established a research fellowship for young scholars of English Letters.[5]

Work

The outcome of his five years as professor of poetry at the University of Oxford 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)[6]

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.[7]

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.[8] 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.

poststructuralist 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 has paid tribute to Bradley's place in the great tradition of critical writing on Shakespeare: 'This [Bloom's] book – Shakespeare: the Invention of the Human – is a latecomer work, written in the wake of the Shakespeare critics I most admire: Johnson, Hazlitt, Bradley.'[11]

Bradley delivered the 1907–1908 Gifford Lectures at the University of Glasgow, entitled "Ideals of Religion."[12] He also delivered the 1909 Adamson Lecture[13] of the Victoria University of Manchester and the 1912 Shakespeare Lecture of the British Academy.[14] 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).

See also

References

  1. ^ "BRADLEY, Andrew Cecil". Who's Who. 59: 202. 1907.
  2. ^ DiPietro, Cary. Bradley, Greg, Folger: Great Shakespeareans:, Volume 9. New York: Continuum, 2011, p. 14 (See W. W. Greg and Henry Clay Folger.)
  3. ^ DiPietro 2011, p. 14
  4. ^ a b Bradley, Francis Herbert, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
  5. ^ Hancock, Brannon. Andrew Cecil Bradley – Gifford Lectures Archived 14 August 2010 at the Wayback Machine.
  6. ^ Taylor, Michael. Shakespeare Criticism in the Twentieth Century, p. 40. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.
  7. ^ Gauntlett, Mark. "The Perishable Body of the Unpoetic: A. C. Bradley Performs Othello." Shakespeare Survey Volume 47: Playing Places for Shakespeare. Ed. Stanley Wells. Cambridge University Press, 1994.
  8. ^ Cooke, Katherine. A. C. Bradley and His Influence in Twentieth-Century Shakespeare Criticism. Oxford: Clarendon, 1972.
  9. ^ Burke, Kenneth. Kenneth Burke on Shakespeare Archived 11 July 2012 at the Wayback Machine. Parlor Press, 2007.
  10. doi:10.2307/2867083
  11. ^ p. 717.
  12. S2CID 170479982
    .
  13. ^ English poetry and German philosophy in the age of Wordsworth by A. C. Bradley; 1909 Adamson Lecture. Manchester University lectures. University Press. 1909. {{cite book}}: |website= ignored (help)
  14. ^ Bradley, A. C. (1976). "Coriolanus". Proceedings of the British Academy, 1911–1912. 5: 457–473. Second Annual Shakespeare Lecture of the British Academy (1912)

Sources

External links

Academic offices
Preceded by
Regius Professor of English Language and Literature,
University of Glasgow

1889–1900 		Succeeded by
Preceded by
Oxford Professor of Poetry

1901–1906 		Succeeded by
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