Daily Inspiration Quote by Andrew Coyle Bradley

Bradley is quietly warning you against a critic's favorite vice: mistaking the autopsy for the living body. When you "examine the construction of a play", you occupy a workshop perspective where joints show, seams matter, and causality can be diagrammed. But the audience member sitting in the dark experiences something else entirely: momentum, surprise, dread, relief. His point is not that craft is irrelevant; it is that craft becomes a different object once you start taking it apart.

The phrasing does courtroom work. "It must be remembered" has the gentle force of a judge instructing a jury: not a suggestion, a procedural safeguard. Bradley builds in an assumption about human error - that analysis naturally narrows vision, that the mind, once it starts counting beams, forgets what it felt like to stand under the roof. The subtext is a critique of pedantry: criticism that congratulates itself for identifying a device while missing the device's purpose, which is to produce "whole dramatic effect", a phrase that insists on totality, not parts.

Context matters. Bradley writes in a late-Victorian moment when Shakespeare criticism was getting more systematic, more architectural, and often more moralistic. His reminder is a defense of experience against overconfident method. He is asking readers to practice a kind of double consciousness: to analyze without forfeiting the naïve vantage point the play was built to command.