A. C. Bradley | |
|---|---|
 Bradley in 1891 | |
| Born | Andrew Cecil Bradley (1851-03-26)26 March 1851 |
| Died | 2 September 1935(1935-09-02) (aged 84) Kensington, London, England |
| Education | Balliol College, Oxford |
| Parents |
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| Family | George Granville Bradley (brother) Francis Herbert Bradley (brother) |
Andrew Cecil Bradley,FBA (26 March 1851 – 2 September 1935) was an Englishliterary scholar,[1] best remembered for his work onShakespeare.
Bradley was born at Park Hill,Clapham, then inSurrey but now part ofLondon. His father was the preacherCharles Bradley (1789–1871), vicar of Glasbury, a notedevangelical Anglican preacher and leader of the so-calledClapham Sect. Charles had thirteen children (twelve surviving) by his first wife, who died in 1831, and nine by his second wife Emma Linton.[2] Bradley was the youngest of the nine born to Emma and Charles; his older brother, philosopherFrancis 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 atBalliol 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 theUniversity of Liverpool where he lectured on literature. In 1889 he moved toGlasgow asRegius Professor. In 1901 he was elected to theOxford professorship of poetry. During his five years in this post he producedShakespearean Tragedy (1904) andOxford 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) theKing Edward VII chair at Cambridge. Bradley never married; he lived in London with his sister and died at 6Holland Park Road,Kensington, London, on 2 September 1935.[4] His will established a research fellowship for young scholars of English Letters.[5]
The outcome of his five years as professor of poetry at theUniversity of Oxford were Bradley's two major works,Shakespearean Tragedy (1904), andOxford 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:
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 ofShakespearean criticism ever published.[7]
Shakespearean Tragedy has been reprinted more than two dozen times and is itself the subject of a scholarly book, Katherine Cooke'sA. 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.Kenneth Burke's 1951 article "Othello: An Essay to Illustrate a Method"[9] counters a Bradleyan reading of character, asL. 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 byF. R. Leavis as a mockery of "current irrelevancies in Shakespeare criticism."[10]) Since the 1970s, the prevalence ofpoststructuralist 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 1907–1908Gifford Lectures at theUniversity of Glasgow, entitled "Ideals of Religion."[12] He also delivered the 1909Adamson Lecture[13] of theVictoria University of Manchester and the 1912 Shakespeare Lecture of the British Academy.[14] Bradley's other works include "Aristotle's Conception of the State" inHellenica, 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), andA Miscellany (1929).
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Works by or aboutA. C. Bradley atWikisource
| Academic offices | ||
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| 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 |
