A.C. Bradley

Andrew Cecil Bradley (26 March 1851 – 2 September 1935) was an English literary scholar, best remembered for his work on Shakespeare.

Bradley was born at Park Hill, Clapham, Surrey. He was the youngest of the twenty-one children born to the preacher Charles Bradley (1789–1871) and his second wife Emma Linton. Among his siblings was the philosopher Francis Herbert Bradley. Bradley studied at Balliol College, Oxford. He obtained a Balliol Fellowship in 1874 and lectured first in English and subsequently in philosophy until 1881. He then took a permanent position at the University of Liverpool where he lectured on literature. In 1889 he moved to Glasgow as Regius Professor. In 1901 he was elected to the Oxford professorship of poetry. During his five years in this post he produced Shakespearean Tragedy (1904) and Oxford Lectures on Poetry (1909). He was later 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. His will established a research fellowship for young scholars of English Letters.

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 his published work was originally delivered in the form of 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 poem , by Guy Boas, Lays of Learning, 1926, 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.

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