A.C. Bradley

A.C. Bradley (born March 26, 1851, Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, England—died September 2, 1935, London) was a literary critic and preeminent Shakespearean scholar of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Bradley attended Oxford and held professorships of modern literature at the University of Liverpool (1882–90), of English language and literature at the University of Glasgow (1890–1900), and of poetry at Oxford University (1901–06). His Shakespearean Tragedy (1904), praised not only for penetrating analysis but also for its lucid prose style, is recognized as a classic of modern Shakespeare criticism. His psychological analysis of Shakespeare’s characters anticipated post-Freudian criticism; his cataloging of images from the plays foreshadowed the sensitive analysis of Shakespeare’s imagery made by Caroline Spurgeon and several later critics. Bradley also published Oxford Lectures on Poetry (1909), which includes an essay on Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, and A Miscellany (1929), in which a well-known commentary on Tennyson’s In Memoriam appears.