The Study of Shakespearian Tragedy Since Bradley

Abstract

NTIL recently, Bradley's analysis of the nature of Shakespearian tragedy has been substantially accepted as fundaiJ imental to our understanding of the tragic pattern in the plays. Something of the excited approval with which was * p first accepted has been described by one of his severest latterday critics; in her article, Bradley Revisited: Forty Years After,' Professor Lily Bess Campbell has recalled the enthusiasm with which critics and teachers alike greeted the appearance of Bradley's study. And it was no wonder that he should have been given so hearty a response, for if we glance at the state of Shakespearian study in the twenty years or so preceding the publication of his book we can see how great an advance he made in the analysis of Shakespeare's tragedies and to what a high level he lifted Shakespearian criticism. However, just as Bradley's learning and critical depth put an end to nineteenth-century didactic, impressionistic, and romantic interpretations of Shakespeare's tragedies, so now a number of developments in modern criticism and scholarship have tended in turn to undermine his labors. These are, first, the emphasis on text instead of idea, characteristic of the new criticism; second, the effect of studies of imagery; third, the reading of Shakespeare's characters in the light of Elizabethan psychology; fourth, the emphasis on native medieval elements in Elizabethan drama; fifth, the semantic revolt against generic terms; and sixth, the assertion of the impossibility of the creation of tragedy at all. The cumulative direct force of the first five of these approaches, plus the indirect influence of the sixth, has brought about a general disparagement of Bradley's point of view and a corresponding lack of interest in the idea of tragedy and its applications. The most formidable of these approaches is the application of -the methods of the new criticism to Shakespeare's plays. By asserting the unique integrity of a work of art, . . a pattern of resolutions and balances and harmonizations, developed through a temporal scheme,2 as Professor Cleanth Brooks puts it, the new criticism effectively cuts off from the consideration of a piece of literature all matters which are not immediately intrinsic to it. More important, however, is the denial of the element of judgment in the new criticism. It is sig-