Daily Inspiration Quote by Andrew Coyle Bradley

Bradley is doing something sly: he grants you the tidy moral of King Lear just long enough to yank it away. Yes, Lear is vain, rash, autocratic; a sober-minded reader can accept the basic claim that actions have consequences. But Bradley’s real target is the complacent reflex to make suffering add up neatly, to treat catastrophe as if it were a perfectly calibrated sentence handed down by the cosmos.

The pivot is his distinction between “deserved to suffer” and “deserved to suffer what he did suffer.” That extra clause is the whole argument. It exposes how moral language gets abused when we retrofit meaning onto extremity. Lear’s punishment isn’t proportional; it’s annihilating. To insist on desert here isn’t just a misreading of Shakespeare, Bradley implies, but a kind of ethical pathology: the need to believe that torment is always earned, that pain is evidence of guilt. The phrase “do violence not merely to language” is a judge’s move, but also a critic’s. He’s indicting a misuse of words that smuggles in a cruel theory of justice.

Context matters: Bradley, writing in a Victorian critical culture that often treated Shakespeare as moral instruction, refuses the comforting sermon. Lear is tragedy, not a courtroom fable. The subtext is bracingly modern: once you start calling horror “deserved,” you’re halfway to excusing it. Bradley’s “healthy moral sense” is a plea to keep empathy intact even when the character is guilty - and to recognize that tragedy works precisely because it breaks our thirst for moral bookkeeping.