Andrew Cecil Bradley

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Andrew Cecil Bradley (1891)

Andrew Cecil Bradley (born March 26, 1851 ; died September 2, 1935 ) was an English Shakespeare scholar .

life and work

Bradley was born in Park Hill, Clapham , Surrey . He was the youngest of 21 children of clergyman Charles Bradley (1789–1871) and his second wife, Emma Linton. The philosopher Francis Herbert Bradley is one of his siblings . Bradley studied at Balliol College of Oxford University . He received a fellowship in 1874 and taught first English and then philosophy until 1881. That year he became a Lecturer in Literature at the University of Liverpool . In 1889 he was appointed Regius Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Glasgow . From 1901 to 1905 he was Oxford Professor of Poetry . In the five years he worked there he wrote Shakespearean Tragedy (1904) and Oxford Lectures on Poetry (1909). He later became an Honorary Fellow at Balliol College and received honorary doctorates from the Universities of Liverpool, Glasgow, Edinburgh, and Durham. He declined the appointment as "King Edward VII Professor of English Literature" at the University of Cambridge . In 1910 he was elected a member of the British Academy . Bradley was single all his life and lived with his sister in Kensington , London. He bequeathed his property to a foundation to promote young scientists.

legacy

Shakespearean Tragedy has been reissued more than two dozen times and is itself the subject of literary research. In the mid-twentieth century, his methodological approach was questioned by many scholars, accusing Bradley of applying nineteenth-century morals to the writer and society of the Elizabethan era. In 1951, Kenneth Burke questioned Bradley's character analysis in his work Othello: An Essay to Illustrate a Method , just as LC Knights had before him in his essay How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth? (John Britton has pointed out that Bradley by no means asked such a question, but rather stems from a derisive remark made by FR Leavis about "unnecessary questions in Shakespeare research.")

As a result of the predominance of post-structuralist methods since the 1970s, many researchers turned away from Bradley's approach. Most recently, the conservative critic Harold Bloom in particular has cited the Shakespeare interpretation in the tradition of Johnson, Hazlitt and Bradley as a model for his work. Recently there has also been increased interest in Bradley's reception of Hegel's theory of tragedy. Although Bradley has received repeated criticism for treating Shakespeare's characters as if they were real people, his book of tragedies is considered one of the most influential works on Shakespeare. From 1907–1908 Bradley gave the Gifford Lectures at the University of Glasgow under the title "Ideals of Religion."

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Bradley, Francis Herbert , Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
  2. ^ Deceased Fellows. British Academy, accessed May 8, 2020 .
  3. Hancock, Brannon. Andrew Cecil Bradley - Gifford Lectures ( Memento of the original from August 14, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.giffordlectures.org
  4. ^ Katherine Cooke: AC Bradley and His Influence in Twentieth-Century Shakespeare Criticism . Clarendon, Oxford 1972.
  5. Burke, Kenneth. Kenneth Burke on Shakespeare . Parlor Press, 2007.
  6. ^ John Britton: AC Bradley and those Children of Lady Macbeth. In: Shakespeare Quarterly , Vol. 12, No. 3 (summer 1961), pp. 349-351.
  7. See Slavoj Zizek, Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism ; Bradley's essay 'Hegel's Theory of Tragedy' in Oxford Lectures on Poetry , pp. 69-99.
  8. Gauntlett, Mark. "The Perishable Body of the Unpoetic: AC Bradley Performs Othello." Shakespeare Survey Volume 47: Playing Places for Shakespeare. Ed. Stanley Wells. Cambridge University Press, 1994.

swell

Web links