Andrew Cecil Bradley

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Andrew Cecil Bradley (1851–1935) was an English literary scholar.

1 Biography
2 Works
3 References
4 External links

[edit] Biography

Andrew Cecil Bradley was born at Cheltenham in 1851. In 1864 A. C. Bradley started his education at Cheltenham College. In 1868 he went to Oxford and studied at Balliol College, Oxford under the British idealist philosopher T. H. Green. He was the younger brother of the major figure of British idealism, philosopher F. H. Bradley. A. C. Bradley’s academic career started in 1876, he became a lecturer at Balliol having been a Fellow there since 1874. In 1882 he became the first professor in the King Alfred Chair of Modern Literature and History at the University College of Liverpool. In 1889 A. C. Bradley left Liverpool and became the professor of English Literature at Glasgow. Ten years later he left Glasgow and moved to London where he intended to devote himself to study. He was, however, proposed for the Oxford Chair of Poetry and was a professor there from 1901 until 1906. In 1905, in accordance with the statue, A. C. Bradley’s tenure of the chair came to an end. By this time he became involved in the literary life of London. He helped to create the English Association which was formed in 1906, the major concern of the Association is teaching of English. In 1907 he was offered the King Edward VII Chair at Cambridge but he refused, presumably to devote more time to private study and writing. A. C. Bradley died at the age of eighty-four in 1935.

[edit] Works

The outcome of the five years as Professor of Poetry in Oxford were A. C. Bradley’s two major works, Shakespearean Tragedy, published in 1904, and Oxford Lectures on Poetry, published in 1909. All his published work was originally delivered as lectures. A. C. Bradley pedagogical manner and his self-confidence made him to 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: 40)^[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 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972)^[2]. However, more recently his work has been greatly discredited by many, often said to make anachronistic errors and attempt to apply late 19th century conceptions of morality to early 17th century society. Since the 1980's, the importance of poststructuralist methods of criticism has resulted in students turning away from his work. His other works were: Poetry for Poetry's Sake (1901), A Commentary on Tennyson's In Memoriam (1901), and A Miscellany (1929).

[edit] References

^ Taylor, Michael. "Shakespeare criticism in the twentieth century", p. 40. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.
^ Cooke, Katherine. A. C. Bradley and His Influence in Twentieth-Century Shakespeare Criticism . Oxford: Clarendon, 1972.