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.

In his Hamlet lecture, Bradley say that suppose you describe the plot of Hamlet to someone who knows nothing about, but you don’t tell them about Hamlet’s character, just the action.

First, this person might say that with a ghost, madness, eight deaths, adultery, and a fight in a grave this play sounds like the sort of typical “blood and horror” tragedies of the time. (Wasn’t Shakespeare supposed to have risen above all that?)

Second, this person would ask, “But why in the world did not Hamlet obey the Ghost at once, and so save seven of those eight lives?”

Why indeed… As Bradley points out, “the whole story turns upon the peculiar character of the hero.” The other characters are small compared to Hamlet. Without him there is hardly any play at all. Hamlet is the focus of more discussion than almost anything else in literature.

Hamlet without Hamlet is hardly conceivable. He is the play.

Anti-Bradleans, following L.C. Knights, say we must follow the text. That is precisely what Bradley does. Arguing against the Romantic notion that Hamlet is a weak, unheroic character whose delays are all caused by his own lack of will, Bradley writes,

But consider the text. This shrinking, flower-like youth—how could he possibly have done what we see Hamlet do? What likeness to him is there in the Hamlet who, summoned by the Ghost, bursts from his terrified friends with the cry:

Unhand me gentlemen!
By heaven, I’ll make a ghost of him that lets me.

the Hamlet who scarcely once speaks to the King without an insult, or to Polonius without a gibe; the Hamlet who storms at Ophelia and speaks daggers to his mother; the Hamlet who, hearing a cry behind the arras, whips out his sword in an instant, and runs the eavesdropper through; the Hamlet who sends his ‘school-fellows’ to their death and never troubles his head about them more; the Hamlet who is the first man to board a pirate ship, and who fights with Laertes in the grave; the Hamlet of the catastrophe, an omnipotent fate, before whom all the court stands helpless, who, as the truth breaks upon him, rushes on the King, drives his foil right through his body, then seizes the poisoned cup and forces it violently between the wretched man’s lips, and in the throes of death has force and fire enough to wrest the cup from Horatio's hand (‘By heaven, I’ll have it!’) lest he should drink and die? This man, the Hamlet of the play, is a heroic, terrible figure. He would have been formidable to Othello or Macbeth. If the sentimental Hamlet had crossed him, he would have hurled him from his path with one sweep of his arm.

There is more value in this paragraph than in many entire books of Shakespeare criticism. He would have been formidable to Othello or Macbeth. Quite right.

Bradley is superb at demolishing the cliches of Hamlet’s character that were so prevalent at the time. In this, he is united with Knights, on a project to ground literary judgements in the text. That he is happy to pull the text together into an overall assessment of character is not to his critical detriment, but allows him to see what others cannot.

Hamlet is not melancholy in our sense, Bradley says, but “was inclined to nervous instability, to rapid and perhaps extreme changes of mood, and that he was disposed to be, for the time, absorbed in the feeling or mood that possessed him.” This is all on a par with the contemporary theory of the temperament of melancholy. But, Hamlet is not melancholy type; he’s not a moody cliche; he is different. For one thing, he had the soul of a poet, in the days before all his troubles crowded upon him.

We know this, Bradley says, from the man himself.

… this goodly frame the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy the air, look you, this brave o'er hanging firmament, this majestical roof, fretted with golden fire: why, it appeareth no other thing to me, than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours.

As Bradley says, there is no commonplace with Hamlet. He has the “language of a heart thrilled with wonder.” Why would we mock Bradley for these insights? Look what he deduces.

Doubtless it was with the same eager enthusiasm he turned to those around him. Where else in Shakespeare is there anything like Hamlet's adoration of his father? The words melt into music whenever he speaks of him.

Some find the Hamlet/Ophelia relationship strange; nothing could be more natural to Bradley,

He saw her innocence, simplicity and sweetness, and it was like him to ask no more; and it is noticeable that Horatio, though entirely worthy of his friendship, is, like Ophelia, intellectually not remarkable.

Think too, when Horatio calls his father “a goodly king” how Hamlet says, “he was a man, take him for all in all.” He declines to have Horatio called a servant. This strong, consistent, reaction to good and evil is distinct and unending, Bradley argues.

He speaks to the actor precisely as he does to an honest courtier. He is not in the least a revolutionary, but still, in effect, a king and a beggar are all one to him. He cares for nothing but human worth, and his pitilessness towards Polonius and Osric and his ‘school-fellows’ is not wholly due to morbidity, but belongs in part to his original character.

You do not have to agree with Bradley’s conclusions, but we can surely see the ways in which serious literary criticism can stoop to character. Indeed, to be really serious, it can hardly not.

Let character criticism reign. Bring back A.C. Bradley.