Time & Perspective Quote by Andrew Coyle Bradley

Bradley is pointing to a sly piece of stagecraft that doubles as a moral argument: Shakespeare manufactures desire for the hero before granting us the hero. The audience is primed the way a jury is primed-by testimony, rumor, and selective framing. People "talk about" the central figure first, which means the hero arrives already burdened with expectation. Curiosity is the bait; anxiety is the hook, because the delay invites a question that is never neutral: will the person match the story we have been told?

The subtext is that character is not revealed in a vacuum. It is socially produced. By letting other voices sketch the hero in advance, Shakespeare dramatizes how reputations are built and how a community's language can pre-judge an individual. When the hero finally appears, we are not meeting a blank slate; we are watching a collision between presence and preconception. That collision is where tragedy often begins.

Bradley writes as a Victorian-era judge turned critic, and you can feel the courtroom instinct in his attention to "exposition" and "awaiting". He treats Shakespeare less like a poet of spontaneous inspiration and more like a strategist of evidence and timing. The method he describes also flatters the audience: it assumes we are active participants, forming theories, weighing credibility, bracing for the moment the accused-or the anointed-walks into view. In a theater, as in law, suspense is authority: whoever controls the order of appearances controls the story we think we are seeing.