"Shakespeare's idea of the tragic fact is larger than this idea and goes beyond it; but it includes it, and it is worth while to observe the identity of the two in a certain point which is often ignored"
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Bradley is doing the Victorian critic’s favorite move: politely widening the frame while quietly scolding everyone for staring at the wrong corner. When he says Shakespeare’s “tragic fact” is “larger,” he’s pushing back against any tidy, courtroom-style notion of tragedy as a single cause, a single flaw, a single culpable act. Yet he won’t let the reader toss that narrower idea out. “But it includes it” is the crucial concession: the small, commonsense “fact” (someone makes a disastrous choice; consequences follow) is real, just insufficient.
The subtext is professional as much as philosophical. A judge is trained to isolate the decisive point: motive, evidence, the moment responsibility crystallizes. Bradley is importing that habit into Shakespeare, then warning that Shakespeare won’t stay pinned to the docket. Tragedy, in this view, isn’t only what a character does, but the pressure system around the doing: temperament, chance, social structures, timing, even language itself. Shakespeare enlarges the “fact” until it becomes an environment.
That last clause - “identity of the two in a certain point which is often ignored” - is a sly rebuke to critics who either moralize (reducing tragedy to sin and punishment) or aestheticize (floating above ethics entirely). Bradley wants a hinge: one shared point where the human-scale, blame-adjacent reading and the vast, impersonal Shakespearean cosmos touch. He’s staking out a middle territory: tragedy as both accountable and overdetermined, a collision between agency and forces too large to prosecute.
The subtext is professional as much as philosophical. A judge is trained to isolate the decisive point: motive, evidence, the moment responsibility crystallizes. Bradley is importing that habit into Shakespeare, then warning that Shakespeare won’t stay pinned to the docket. Tragedy, in this view, isn’t only what a character does, but the pressure system around the doing: temperament, chance, social structures, timing, even language itself. Shakespeare enlarges the “fact” until it becomes an environment.
That last clause - “identity of the two in a certain point which is often ignored” - is a sly rebuke to critics who either moralize (reducing tragedy to sin and punishment) or aestheticize (floating above ethics entirely). Bradley wants a hinge: one shared point where the human-scale, blame-adjacent reading and the vast, impersonal Shakespearean cosmos touch. He’s staking out a middle territory: tragedy as both accountable and overdetermined, a collision between agency and forces too large to prosecute.
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| Topic | Writing |
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