Daily Inspiration Quote by Andrew Coyle Bradley

"Most people, even among those who know Shakespeare well and come into real contact with his mind, are inclined to isolate and exaggerate some one aspect of the tragic fact"

Andrew Coyle Bradley, Judge

About this Quote

A.C. Bradley is taking aim at a familiar intellectual tic: the urge to turn Shakespeare into a single-issue oracle. Even people who “know Shakespeare well” and have “real contact with his mind” still “isolate and exaggerate” one angle of what he calls “the tragic fact.” The line is a gentle rebuke wrapped in patrician calm, the kind of judicial sentence that pretends to merely observe while quietly issuing a verdict.

The intent is corrective. Bradley, writing at the height of late-Victorian Shakespeare criticism, is pushing back against readings that flatten tragedy into one master key: moral lesson, psychological case study, metaphysical despair, political warning. He’s not denying those facets; he’s warning against the critical vanity of thinking you’ve found the facet. “Tragic fact” is the tell: tragedy isn’t a vibe or a theme, it’s an event in human life, stubbornly plural, messy, and resistant to tidy extraction.

The subtext is about authority and humility. Bradley implicitly distrusts interpretive certainty, especially the kind that comes from intimacy (“real contact”) and then hardens into ownership. His phrasing suggests a paradox: closeness to a great mind can make you more, not less, prone to distortion, because admiration encourages cherry-picking what confirms your preferred Shakespeare.

Context matters: Bradley’s lectures helped institutionalize Shakespeare as serious literature in universities. This sentence doubles as a self-policing rule for that new professional class of readers. The warning isn’t just about misreading Shakespeare; it’s about what criticism becomes when it prizes cleverness over complexity.

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About the Author

Andrew Coyle Bradley (February 12, 1844 - May 15, 1902) was a Judge from USA.

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