Keep in mind for future reference that we’re usually happy to help with homework as long as you start the process yourself. If you start there, you’ll see an early reference to R&J as “star-crossed” (meaning they had the stars as their enemies, a bad sign). Useful tip to start you off: a word like “star” should be in your search because the people in Shakespeare’s time believed heavily that the celestial bodies (like stars and planets) had influences on people’s lives, kinda like astrology. Seems like a quick essay question so it shouldn’t take long. If you find that your “yes” column is longer/better, stick with your hypothesis and try to do a quick outline of the message. I would next scan through the play (might be easier online with a word search function) and look for any words that relate to fate/destiny/choice and make a list of the places where they seem to agree with you, and another list where they disagree with you. You’re making a valid point that others would traditionally agree with. I won’t say whether I personally believe your interpretation, but I will let you know that you’re not crazy. It isn’t necessary to be right in your interpretation, it’s just important that you can come up with an answer and justify it using the text. Which is a fancy way of saying it’s possible to see answers from both sides. One of the things that makes Shakespeare great, is an idea called ambiguity. But you at least put forth a little effort, so we’ll generally help. And it’s precisely Bradley’s humility-his willingness to embrace his ultimate defeat-that allows him to polish and display certain facets of Shakespeare we aren’t likely to have seen so sharply on our own.īradley isn’t merely critiquing Shakespeare-he’s writing a fiction of his own. Again and again, Bradley takes up the four great tragedies of Shakespeare and uses them to bring his personal observations about the world into focus.Ok, in general we discourage kids asking us to do their homework for them. He assumes that good literature always has more to give us than even the best critics can express in topic sentences and abstractions. Bradley knows this, and his modesty is appealing. In the end, he can’t tell us more about Hamlet or about the world than Shakespeare tells us himself. His only real shield against failure is his own insight into people, based on his inevitably dated and incomplete notions of human nature. Obviously, this approach exposes him to ridicule. He says what he thinks of Shakespeare’s characters, and why he feels they matter to our understanding of life. He skates around this conclusion, but it is there – “The main source …is in every case evil in the fullest sense, not mere imperfection, but plain moral evil….”Īt heart, Bradley’s method is personal. He is pre-modern in his belief that there is good and evil in the world. However, Bradley’s intertwining of tragic flaw and ‘fate” – does not really explains tragedy. He has an easy acquaintance with the imposing German tradition of Shakespeare scholarship, along with an elegant, lightly-worn knowledge of the many influences Shakespeare drew upon for his writing. Bradley highlights Hamlet’s disastrous failure, which leads not only to his death but to the deaths of many others, including his mother and the young woman he has loved-a domino fall of wasted lives that goes far beyond the intended murder of Claudius.īradley’s learning is formidable. The Hamlet lectures are the standouts here. Bradley says that because of this ineluctable course of fate, “All this makes us feel the blindness and helplessness of man.”īradley goes on to expound on his theory of ‘waste’ – how in this universe where the striving for good is always thwarted by evil, man’s heroic actions are always wasted. In the first case, Lear could not have known the outcome of his first, precipitous act of self-disinheritance and in the latter, Desdemona’s loss of her handkerchief at just the wrong moment. Bradley first talks about ‘fate’ in the sense of tragic, heroic characters not being able to predict the outcomes of their acts – that is, understanding their own tragic flaws and appreciating the unpredictable nature of the world. A moral order and fate are behind tragedy. In a series of lectures on Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, and Lear collected in Shakespearean Tragedy (1904), Bradley has written a number of introductory essays the first entitled “ The Substance of Shakespearean tragedy” in which he describes what are for him its basic elements.Īt the root of Bradley’s conception of tragedy is the concept of greatness – the glory of Man, and therefore the tragedy of his fall. Harold Bloom groups him in the same category as Samuel Johnson. Bradley, writing in the early 1900s, is one of the most intelligent and respected critics of Shakespeare of any period.
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