Life & Mortality Quote by Andrew Coyle Bradley

Bradley is smuggling a moral argument into what looks like tidy dramaturgy: Shakespeare’s tragedies don’t explode because goodness goes too far, but because what’s “good” is fused to its enemy inside a single person. The line is a rebuke to sentimental readings that treat tragedy as cosmic bad luck or as virtue unfairly punished. For Bradley, catastrophe has a recognizable engine: the character whose admirable qualities are inseparable from the flaw that will detonate them.

The phrasing matters. “Convulsion” suggests an involuntary seizure, not a clean, rational choice. That’s Bradley’s subtext about agency: the tragic hero isn’t a puppet, but neither is he a calmly calculating villain. Othello’s openness becomes credulity; Lear’s appetite for love becomes a demand for performance; Hamlet’s moral scruple turns into paralysis. Goodness “contributes” only because it’s implicated, compromised by proximity, by being structurally unable to stay pure in the world Shakespeare stages.

Context sharpens the edge. Bradley, writing in a late-Victorian climate that prized moral character as social ballast, insists that Shakespeare is harsher and more psychologically modern: the self is not a courtroom where virtues and vices take turns testifying. It’s a single witness whose story contradicts itself. The judge’s vocabulary lingers (source, produces, implication), but the verdict is unsettling: tragedy isn’t the defeat of good by evil. It’s the discovery that the boundary between them is drawn through the same heart, and that’s why the suffering feels earned rather than random.