Who's afraid of A.C. Bradley?

Marxists be damned. I'm with Bradley.

Last week, I said the next play for the Shakespeare book club was As You Like It. This is wrong. **The next play is Henry IV, part I**. Schedule here.

For The Critic, I wrote about the proposed Jane Austen statue in Winchester and how those who oppose it are hypocritical snobs. For

The Fitzwilliam

I wrote about James Joyce and whether he rejected Ireland. (One of my better pieces, recommended.)

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Getting a little Bradlean

My first experience of the anti-Bradlean ideology was at a meeting of a Shakespeare Society where a former professor from Aberdeen interjected in a discussion to say, “Aren’t we at risk of getting a little too Bradlean here?” A polite silence followed. As an undergraduate, one of my tutors joked that no-one was allowed to quote Bradley in her presence. I say it was a joke, but she very much meant it. And, to my knowledge, no one did quote Bradley.

The problem is that, following L.C. Knights’ famous essay How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth, it has been considered uncritical to talk about Shakespeare’s characters as if they were people. And that is exactly what A.C. Bradley does. So Bradley became outré. For many critics, to be Bradlean is to be beyond the pale.

Few topics excite the bitchy propensities of literary scholars so strongly. In provocative moods (did he have others?) Harold Bloom used to say he wanted to take literary criticism back to A.C. Bradley, that everything that had happened since then should be swept away. Search for Bradley on Shaksper and you’ll find long strings of emails full of snipping and sniping. Indeed, when it comes to rousing tempers, the question of whether Shakespeare’s characters can be discussed as people is second only to the question of whether Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare. (Recently, the former editor of Shaksper encountered an anti-Stratfordian who was proclaiming the conspiracy theory that the Earl Of Oxford wrote Shakespeare. Naturally, the editor told the Oxfordian to go and fuck himself.)

In 1996 the members of the Shaksper forum were discussing “the state of the profession” (i.e. the decline of the humanities—their discussion is full of the same worries we hear today: decreases in funding, ailing state of humanities studies, the lost golden age of hiring PhDs). At the same time, there was a discussion about which old criticism is still worth reading. One member was making a reading list about madness and wanted nothing pre-1950. That in itself was seen as a comment on the state of the profession.

As part of that debate, Terence Hawkes wrote this:

Whence all this enthusiasm for Granville-Barker? His Prefaces offer little more than the sort of hell-for-leather pursuit of psychological realism that we ought to have out-grown by now. Bradley and water if you ask me.

Ouch! That tells you how Bradley is seen, or was. More recently, last year, the academic Richard Strier declared himself pro-Bradley. He finds praise in other quarters, too. And in the Blackwell critical guide to Shakespeare’s Tragedies, Bradley is a prominent figure. And Jonathan Bate points out in the RSC edition that the idea of Shakespearean character has survived a century of critical disdain.

In 2006, Shakespeare Studies devoted itself to the question of “Is there character after theory?” Though many pointed out that character had remained dominant outside the academy, they stuck to their cultural materialism. No matter how insightful these critics were (and the issue is full of well-informed discussion ) they simply couldn’t let go of their theories. Once you have decided to believe that personality is a by-product of bourgeoise life (we become the people capitalism needs us to be, etc.) you cannot allow yourself to read the play as anything other than a construction of political ideology.

Most of these discussions start with the idea that capitalism and modern life are bad, have created a set of illusions about identity, and are distracting us from the real business of literary criticism: Marxist political analysis and deconstruction.

But what does this tell us about the plays as plays? Not much. When Bradley is quoted, it is not uncommon for him to be invoked to be mocked. And he is occasionally mockable. But he also writes with the sort of insight to the drama that too many modern critics lack.