Shakespearean Tragedy

In this book Bradley approaches the major tragedies of Shakespeare through an extended study of the characters, who were presented as personalities independent of their place in the plays. Though his approach has been questioned since the 1930s, the work is considered a classical masterpiece and is still widely read. The book studies in detail four tragedies of Shakespeare, namely Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth. But much that is said on the main preliminary subjects holds good, within certain limits, of other dramas of Shakespeare as well. Of course, it will apply to these other works only in part and to some of them more fully than to others. Andrew Cecil Bradley (1851 - 1935), Professor of Poetry at Oxford 1901 - 6, published Shakespearean Tragedy in 1904 and Oxford Lectures on Poetry in 1909. Shakespearean Tragedy was immediately hailed as a brilliant achievement. Though Bradley has sometimes been censured for writing of Shakespeare’s characters as though they were real people, his book is probably the single most influential 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).