A. C. Bradley

Andrew Cecil Bradley (1851–1935) was an English literary critic, the most influential Shakespearean scholar of the early twentieth century. Younger brother of the philosopher F. H. Bradley, he was a fellow of Balliol College, Oxford, and held chairs at Liverpool and Glasgow before returning to Oxford as Professor of Poetry from 1901 to 1906. The lectures of those years became Shakespearean Tragedy, published in 1904, a study of Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth that treated their characters with the seriousness of a philosopher; Oxford Lectures on Poetry followed in 1909. His approach dominated Shakespeare criticism for a generation and provoked an equally influential reaction.