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Shakespearean Tragedy
By AC Bradley
Palgrave Macmillan £15.99
414 pages
Dateline: 11th April, 2008
The old measures are normally good ones. If a book is still in print
over 100 years after its original publication, in this case 1904, it
must be special and worth a read.
AC Bradley was a man ahead of his time. He eventually became Professor
of Poetry at Oxford but, before that, spent twenty years in the relative
wilderness of Liverpool and Glasgow, having projected left-wing ideas
that did not necessarily go down well with the great and the good in
Oxford.
The book consists of ten lectures that Prof Bradley gave at the start
of the last century. The form is helpful, since, if one avoids the footnotes,
the essays flow making them far more readable than the modern introduction,
which has a tendency to be densely academic.
The book ends with around 100 pages of notes on obscure subjects such
as Hamlet's Age, Did Emelia Suspected Iago, Did Shakespeare Shorten
King Lear? and The Date of Macbeth: Metrical Tests.
Lecture I deals with the substance of Shakespearean tragedy, putting
all of the tragic works into context. Its successor goes on to investigate
construction in these works, picking out similarities but also showing
how the playwright developed through his career.
The real meat of this book consists of four pairs of lectures on Shakespeare's
major tragedies. These are treated in chronological order and thus start
with Hamlet, moving on to Othello, King Lear and
finally Macbeth.
The professor's strength lies in meticulous reading of the texts which
allows him to present carefully thought-through and authoritative opinions.
He states at the start that his main interest is in character and, throughout,
his analysis is based on the protagonist of each play, thereafter looking
at the more important minor characters and once again putting everything
into the context of the playwright's oeuvre.
By the end, not only do we learn a lot about the plays but get a really
instinctive understanding of how the major players would react in almost
any given situation. In addition to the four title men, there are also
particularly good investigations of the nature of two of the writer's
most contrasting secondary characters, Iago and Cordelia.
The conclusion that one reaches at the end of the ten lectures is that
Shakespeare was a masterly creator of realistic characters many of whom
could easily have stepped off the stage and into the street and enjoyed
(or perhaps that is not the word) full lives in the real world.
Even a full century after the book's original publication, Shakespearean
Tragedy is still of real value for the insights that it gives. Anyone
cast to play one of the four major parts or some of the larger supporting
roles would do well to read it. Similarly, students who want to learn
about the Bard and general readers who know the plays and want to understand
them better will also benefit.
Philip Fisher
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