"In speaking, for convenience, of devices and expedients, I did not intend to imply that Shakespeare always deliberately aimed at the effects which he produced"
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Bradley is swatting away a criticism that still haunts literary criticism: the impulse to treat every artistic effect as a premeditated trick. His phrase "for convenience" is doing heavy lifting, a judicial aside that sounds like procedural housekeeping while quietly narrowing the terms of debate. He admits he has been talking about "devices and expedients" - the analyst's vocabulary of technique - but insists that this language is a tool of explanation, not a claim about Shakespeare's mind at the moment of composition.
The subtext is a rebuke to two camps at once. On one side, the mechanists who make Shakespeare into a calculating engineer of audience response, as if dramatic power were merely the sum of deployable gadgets. On the other, the romantics who want genius to be pure inspiration and therefore bristle at any talk of craft. Bradley threads the needle: Shakespeare used craft, yes; but the effects can exceed intention. Great art, he suggests, can be smarter than its maker in real time.
Context matters: Bradley is writing in the high-Victorian moment when Shakespeare criticism was becoming systematic, quasi-scientific, and often moral-psychological. As a judge by profession, he brings a courtroom sensibility to interpretation: don't infer mens rea from outcome alone. The sentence is basically a warning against convicting an author of calculation without evidence. It also preserves Shakespeare's mystique while keeping criticism honest: we can map patterns, even if we can't subpoena the playwright's private plan.
The subtext is a rebuke to two camps at once. On one side, the mechanists who make Shakespeare into a calculating engineer of audience response, as if dramatic power were merely the sum of deployable gadgets. On the other, the romantics who want genius to be pure inspiration and therefore bristle at any talk of craft. Bradley threads the needle: Shakespeare used craft, yes; but the effects can exceed intention. Great art, he suggests, can be smarter than its maker in real time.
Context matters: Bradley is writing in the high-Victorian moment when Shakespeare criticism was becoming systematic, quasi-scientific, and often moral-psychological. As a judge by profession, he brings a courtroom sensibility to interpretation: don't infer mens rea from outcome alone. The sentence is basically a warning against convicting an author of calculation without evidence. It also preserves Shakespeare's mystique while keeping criticism honest: we can map patterns, even if we can't subpoena the playwright's private plan.
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| Topic | Writing |
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