Daily Inspiration Quote by Andrew Coyle Bradley

Bradley is doing something quietly radical for a Victorian-era critic: he treats Shakespeare's ghosts and witches less like stage gimmicks and more like structural devices that change what tragedy can do. The phrasing sounds almost clinical - "also introduces", "some of his tragedies" - but the calm tone is part of the move. It invites you to see the supernatural not as decorative spookiness, but as an ingredient in the tragic machinery, as essential as ambition or jealousy.

His key pivot is "supernatural knowledge". Bradley isn't really interested in whether the Weird Sisters are real; he's interested in what it means for a character to encounter information that feels absolute and external to human reason. A ghost in Hamlet doesn't just haunt the protagonist; it authorizes a story (murder, revenge, obligation) with the chilling force of evidence from beyond the courtroom of everyday proof. Witches in Macbeth don't simply predict; they reframe time so the future starts acting like a verdict. That language matters coming from a judge: "knowledge" carries the scent of testimony, credibility, and consequence.

The subtext is an argument against tidy moral readings of tragedy. If fate can speak, if the dead can return, then human agency gets destabilized in a way that feels both thrilling and ethically uncomfortable. Bradley's context - late-19th-century criticism, when Shakespeare was being formalized into high culture - pushes him to legitimize the supernatural as serious art, not crowd-pleasing sensationalism. He is clearing a path for readers to take dread, ambiguity, and metaphysical pressure as central to Shakespeare's tragic realism rather than a break from it.