Daily Inspiration Quote by Andrew Coyle Bradley

Bradley is smuggling a cool bit of stagecraft into the language of moral seriousness: tragedy doesn’t just devastate, it regulates. His “constant alternation of rises and falls” frames Shakespearean drama less as a single climb to catastrophe than as a carefully engineered pulse. The key word is “regular.” This isn’t messy grief spilling over; it’s calibrated feeling, measured out in peaks and troughs so an audience can keep bearing the load.

The intent is partly corrective. Against the idea that tragedy is wall-to-wall darkness, Bradley insists on structure: scenes that tighten the screw, then scenes that let it loosen. The subtext is almost physiological. “Tension” and “emotional pitch” treat spectatorship like a body being managed - breath quickened, then steadied - which anticipates modern talk of pacing, “beats,” even the binge-era concern for what keeps viewers watching. Bradley is pointing to a craft principle: intensity, held too long, becomes noise; relief, strategically placed, makes the next blow land harder.

Context matters: a Victorian critic with a judge’s cast of mind, Bradley wants to make tragedy legible as an ordered experience rather than an indulgence in sensationalism. He’s also quietly defending Shakespeare’s apparent digressions (comic interludes, domestic pauses, minor characters) as functional, not frivolous. The alternation isn’t a distraction from “the tragedy”; it is the tragedy’s mechanism, the way art turns suffering into something we can endure long enough to understand.