Andrew Cecil Bradley (March 26, 1851 – September 2, 1935) was an English literary scholar, best remembered for his work on Shakespeare.
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Bradley was born at Park Hill, Clapham, Surrey, the youngest son of the twenty-one children of the preacher Charles Bradley (1789–1871). Among his siblings was the philosopher Francis Herbert Bradley.[1] He studied at Balliol College, Oxford. He took a permanent position at the University of Liverpool where he lectured in literature. In 1889 he moved to Glasgow to teach at the university there. In 1901 he was elected to the Oxford professorship of poetry and during his five years in the post produced Shakespearean Tragedy (1904) and Oxford Lectures on Poetry (1909). He was 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.[2]
The outcome of his five years as Professor of Poetry at Oxford University were A. C. Bradley’s two major works, Shakespearean Tragedy (1904), and Oxford Lectures on Poetry (1909). All of his published work was delivered earlier as 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 anonymous poem appeared:
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.[citation needed] 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.[4]
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"[5] 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 as a mockery of "current irrelevancies in Shakespeare criticism."[6]) Since the 1970s, the prevalence of poststructuralist methods of criticism has 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).
Bradley's other works include Poetry for Poetry's Sake (1901), A Commentary on Tennyson's In Memoriam (1901), and A Miscellany (1929).
  | ''Kenneth Burke on Shakespeare'' - Kenneth Burke on Shakespeare | Parlor Press |
| | 'character' - Project Description, 2003-2006 |
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