Bradley, Greg, Folger

Great Shakespeareans: Volume IX

Cary DiPietro

• Publisher: The Arden Shakespeare
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781441146533
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism History & Theory
• Index: Literature

A comprehensive critical analysis of the most important Shakespearean critics, editors, actors and directors. This volume focuses on Shakespeare's reception by Bradley, Greg and Folger.

Chapter 1

A. C. Bradley
(26 March 1851–2 September 1935)

Cary DiPietro

A. C. Bradley’s Shakespearean Tragedy was first published by Macmillan in London in 1904. At more than four hundred pages, this substantial volume contained essays on what were according to Bradley the four great plays from Shakespeare’s ‘tragic period’, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth, combined with two further introductory chapters on the substance of tragedy and Shakespeare’s construction of tragedy. The essays were based on a series of lectures Bradley delivered at Oxford University when he was appointed to a five-year term as Professor of Poetry from 1901, and were then lengthened and revised into what is arguably the most significant volume of Shakespeare criticism ever written.

This is no mere hyperbole. The numbers support the claim. At the time of Bradley’s death in 1935 the volume had been reissued no less than 20 times between London and New York. Before copyright expired on Bradley’s works in 2005, Shakespearean Tragedy had been reissued or reprinted by Macmillan and what is now Palgrave Macmillan, as well as by Penguin and Penguin Classics, by Meridian in so-called ‘mass market paperbacks’, and by a number of other publishers and their subsidiaries, no fewer than a hundred times by my count, and probably innumerably more. Since 2005, the volume has appeared in numerous online texts such as the Project Gutenburg edition, while early Macmillan editions can be read online as e-books. There are translations of the whole and parts of the book in German, Italian, Spanish, Japanese and Chinese. A Google search for ‘A. C. Bradley Shakespearean Tragedy’ produces more than 67,000 results. A similar search for ‘William Shakespeare Hamlet’ produces 137,000, a little more than double the results for Bradley’s Shakespeare criticism. A Boolean search for ‘Shakespeare and Tragedy’ finds Shakespearean Tragedy in the top five results. Of course, search results are indiscriminate and can be manipulated, so they do not tell us anything statistically reliable about Bradley’s continued popularity or the marketability of his writing today. Nevertheless, more than a hundred years since its first publication, Shakespearean Tragedy remains ubiquitous and Bradley’s name, to some degree, is synonymous with analysis of the genre that he would have us believe is Shakespeare’s greatest.

The claim for the superlative significance of Shakespearean Tragedy remains arguable, however, because Bradley’s style of criticism was out of fashion almost as soon as it first appeared. To be sure, most of the early reviews were laudatory. Writing in The Academy, R. Y. Tyrrell, classical scholar and Professor of Greek at the University of Dublin, acknowledged that the volume was ‘popular in aim’, and such was its strength: ‘This is the kind of book that all lovers of Shakespeare, erudite and unscholarly alike, stand in need of and will receive’ (11 March 1905). A week later, Tyrrell would claim in a second review in the same weekly: ‘In our opinion a book like that which is before us is not much less essential for the complete comprehension of Shakespeare’s tragedies than an atlas is for the fruitful study of geography’ (The Academy 18 March 1905). In a not dissimilar vein, Henry Jones praised the simplicity and forthrightness of Bradley’s style: Bradley, he argued,

aimed at being simply and merely a medium for the poet’s mind. He has sought to be impersonal, transparent – not with the transparency of a passive medium, but with that of a mind which has experienced in itself and lived over again the life and experience of the dramatist.¹

Professor of Philosophy at the University of Glasgow, Jones was a contemporary of Bradley’s and a colleague in Philosophy at Glasgow between 1889 and 1900. We are told that he was a ‘valued reader of manuscripts for Macmillan publishers’ at the time he wrote his review of Shakespearean Tragedy, so it is reasonable to surmise the he may have read Bradley’s manuscript when it was first submitted to Macmillan for publication² and he would have recommended it on the basis of both its academic and commercial viability.

Not unlike Jones, other reviewers had difficulty containing their hyperbole. This was not the scholarship of a stuffy Oxford professor, a transcription of dryly recited undergraduate lectures, but a work of singular importance precisely because of the public and popular nature of print publication. John Cann Bailey, a London socialite and literary enthusiast writing for the usually conservative Times Literary Supplement, claimed that ‘Mr. Bradley had hardly begun his lectures before the echo of his voice made itself heard beyond the academic boundaries’ (10 February 1905). C. H. Herford, Professor of English Literature at the University of Manchester, qualified his own praise in The Modern Language Review – though it sounded like ‘journalistic hyperbole’ – as ‘merely an attempt to define and explain the impression which [Shakespearean Tragedy] will we think produce upon any open mind at all inured to the Shaksperean [sic] controversies of the past’.³ Here was a volume that put to rest many of the controversies of Shakespeare criticism of the previous century. The TLS review was almost embarrassingly unguarded in its praise: ‘One may well doubt whether in the whole field of English literary criticism anything has been written in the last twenty years more luminous, more masterly, more penetrating to the very centre of its subject.’

Although these reviewers predicted the immediate and long-term popularity of Bradley’s book through the twentieth century, there is something parochial and old-fashioned, quaintly nineteenth-century even in 1904, about the assumptions they bring about Shakespeare to a review of Shakespeare criticism. Herford feels that Bradley is, like Shakespeare, ‘myriad-minded’, invoking Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s praise of Shakespeare in Biographia Literaria; Bradley’s success as a critic results from an imaginative intuition in combination with practical sagacity and a synthetic and constructive intellect. Tyrrell tells us that Bradley understands the attitude of Shakespeare’s mind, and that his ‘common-sense’ criticism is tempered with the spirit of sympathetic appreciation. Bradley, these reviewers suggest, is intellectually and philosophically connected to the man Shakespeare, to the peculiar nature of Shakespeare’s mind and to the lives of the characters he wrote about. The praise comes from men who, like Bradley, were educated at England’s ancient universities in the 1870s and 1880s and whose literary sensibilities included Victorian commonplaces about Shakespeare’s biography and the high literary style of his ‘poetry’. When Bailey describes the ‘essential lines of Shakespeare’s achievement as a tragic poet’, he typifies the style of the Victorian essayist praising Shakespeare in a manner that George Bernard Shaw derisively labelled ‘bardolatry’.⁴ Indeed, the same could be said of Bradley’s own writing.

As early as April of 1905, the detractors were already beginning to voice their dissent. In a second column in the TLS, Arthur Bingham Walkley criticized Bradley for confusing the difference between real people and dramatic personages, who, he argued, were a mere projection and function of the dramatist’s mind who ‘can utter nothing, think nothing, be nothing outside of the range of the dramatist’s own nature and mental vision’ (7 April 1905). Walkley was a literary critic and, importantly, a theatre reviewer for The Star, The Speaker, and, from 1900, The Times. Although a contemporary of Bradley’s at Balliol College in the early 1870s, Walkley was less inclined to philosophical speculation than to practical dramaturgy and theatre review. Thus, although he praised Shakespearean Tragedy for its close attention to the text, he found fault with Bradley’s extrapolation of character beyond the text: ‘What is outside the text?’, he asks of Hamlet,

[Bradley] says (by implication) a set of real lives, which have to be divined and reasoned about as we might reason about Napoleon or our second cousins or any other actual person. We say, Shakespeare’s dramatic needs of the moment, artistic peculiarities, and available theatrical materials.

This would become a familiar refrain. In 1933, L. C. Knights published a lecture, the title of which, How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?, parodied the style of character-oriented criticism practiced not only by Bradley, but by many of his nineteenth-century predecessors and some of his contemporaries.⁵ The issue of Macbeth’s children was addressed by Bradley in a lengthy endnote, though even he admitted that the question was ‘quite immaterial’.⁶ Read alone, the note provides a judicious consideration of Shakespeare’s development of his source material in Holinshed’s chronicle history of the Scottish monarchy, the play’s thematic concerns with hereditary monarchy and legitimacy, Macbeth’s lack of heirs, and the recurring motif of children in the speeches of the Macbeths. But Knights was reading in the context of the one hundred or so pages of notes appended to the main text (A to EE – and the notes have further footnotes), and the issue was what he described as one of the ‘current irrelevancies in Shakespeare criticism’, among others ‘such as the solemn discussion of the double time in Othello, or Bradley’s famous question “Where was Hamlet at the time of his father’s murder?” ’.⁷ The question of the title, according to Knights, had been posed to him by F. R. Leavis, another formidable critic of Shakespearean Tragedy, when poking fun at Bradley’s pedantry. But even as early as 1905, book reviewers such as ‘J. C. C.’ were complaining of ‘those irritating superfluities, aggravated it may be added by the unnecessary diffuseness with which they are discussed’ (Westminster Gazette).⁸ Bradley, in a letter to Gilbert Murray, his colleague in Glasgow and long-time friend, identified this review writer as acerbic critic John Churton Collins, yet another contemporary at Balliol in the late 1860s and early 1870s, and, like Bradley, an advocate of the academic study of English literature. Murray wrote in the Westminster Gazette the following week that he thought ‘Shakespearean Tragedy one of the most illuminating books’ he had ever read.⁹

As many have since noted, the reception of Bradley’s criticism has oscillated almost since its initial publication between these two extremes: on the one side, devotees or ‘Bradleyites’ such as Murray, and on the other, detractors who would brand his ‘pseudo-critical investigation’ of character psychology with the pejorative label of ‘character criticism’,¹⁰ from Knights and Leavis to E. E. Stoll and J. M. Robertson.¹¹ As we will see, this oscillation of opinion between popular fascination and professional ridicule has much to do with the changing nature of literary critical writing between the nineteenth century and twentieth. Shakespearean Tragedy occurs at a pivotal moment in the institutional transformation of British education, spanning from the educational reforms of the mid- to late-nineteenth century, the subsequent widening of public education throughout Britain to formerly excluded groups, and the university reform movement, to the increasing professionalization of literary critical studies in the emerging and growing university English departments and programs of English study in the twentieth century. On the one hand, Shakespearean Tragedy fits harmoniously with the philosophical idealism of educational reform in the nineteenth century, and so it would be taken up as a model of cultural education for newly enfranchised groups and a set text of English literary study, as much as it remains a first stop for many undergraduates today. On the other hand, character criticism would become anathema to the increasingly professional discourse of literary studies articulated by Knights and those who followed after him. And, for the most part, so it remains today. As contemporary scholarly readers informed by decades of cultural theory and anthropological historicism, we tend to approach Bradley’s criticism with the scepticism, sometimes even condescension, we reserve for those familiar essayists of the nineteenth century who informed Bradley’s style, Coleridge among them.

So, in what sense is Bradley a great Shakespearean? Had he not produced Shakespearean Tragedy in 1904, he would very likely not be remembered for his interest in Shakespeare. A further volume of lectures from his Oxford tenure, aptly titled Oxford Lectures on Poetry, published in 1909 was received well, but did not reach the heights of hyperbole with which Shakespearean Tragedy was acclaimed. Though it contained four essays on Shakespeare as well as an essay on Hegel’s theory of tragedy, it was comprised in the main of essays on poetry and Romantic poets including Keats, Wordsworth and Shelley. He published a further series of lectures towards the end of his life, A Miscellany in 1929; and a final collection of lectures on Ideals of Religion delivered at Glasgow in 1907 was published posthumously in 1940. In the absence of Shakespearean Tragedy, these collections might have garnered enough attention to afford Bradley a small legacy as one of the last of the Victorian essayists, perhaps one out of touch with his time. It seems more likely that he would be remembered as one of the minor British Idealists of the late-nineteenth century who dabbled in literary appreciation and aesthetics in later life. Bradley’s claim to greatness as a Shakespearean rests almost solely on the publication of a book whose popular, commercial success sits uneasily alongside the often vociferous critical censure that it has stirred.

A case for the historical importance of Shakespearean Tragedy is fairly easy to build, and so what I want to consider in this chapter is how the success of the volume can be explained, at least in part, by the role Bradley played in educational and university reform, alongside his Balliol contemporaries. Though not singlehandedly, Bradley’s criticism propelled the professionalization of literary criticism in the twentieth century even while it rather quickly became excluded from its practices. That exclusion can, in turn, be explained by the turn of literary criticism from the Victorian themes that characterize Bradley’s writing: the nineteenth-century preoccupation with literary biography and Romantic belief in the nature of creative imagination and genius; Anglo-American interest in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German philosophy and especially aesthetics prior to the First World War – in Bradley’s case, in Hegel and theories of tragedy; and interest in discussing and representing in art the complexity and idiosyncrasy of human character, in combination and often in conflict with increasingly secular and scientistic discourses about human behaviour and psychology (think Darwin and Freud).

But to treat Shakespearean Tragedy as a historical curiosity and strictly a product of its time is to ignore the continued appeal of Bradley’s writing to contemporary readers, even if you or I may not be among them. Few contemporary readers will pick up Shakespearean Tragedy to understand the legacy of late Victorian culture through the twentieth century. Rather, they read Bradley to understand Shakespeare. Moreover, they turn to Bradley often, perhaps more often than they turn to more contemporary criticism. I would not want to argue the innate value of Shakespearean Tragedy as a means to understanding Shakespeare’s plays, but we could make a strong case for its continued relevance to a wide spectrum of readers as evidenced by its ubiquity in inexpensive print and digital media. How do we reconcile its popular success with its critical censure? What place does Shakespeare Tragedy deserve in the canon of great Shakespeare criticism? For that matter, what is criticism? What I will also argue in this chapter, then, is that Bradley’s one book and its continued popularity remains a challenge to the very idea of criticism – what it means to study and write about works of literature – and to the very notion of a professional discipline of English criticism because the book exemplifies the idealist aspirations which provided the impetus and the foundation upon which criticism was built, and which remain conspicuously embedded in its practices today. To understand this, we need to understand Bradley in his time.

Early Life

Andrew Cecil was born in Clapham, Surrey, to the Reverend Charles Bradley (1789–1871) and his second wife, Emma Linton, in 1851. Charles Bradley was an evangelical preacher known well throughout Britain for his published sermons. He produced a number of these b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Series Editors’Preface
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 A. C. Bradley (26 March 1851–2 September 1935)
• Chapter 2 W. W. Greg (9 July 1875–4 March 1959)
• Chapter 3 Henry Clay Folger, Jr. (18 June 1857–11 June 1930)
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index