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    Shakespearean Tragedy

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    This document discusses A.C. Bradley's analysis of Shakespearean tragedies in his book Shakespearean Tragedy. It notes that Bradley assumed art seeks unity and resolution of differences, and looked for a single vision and controlling principle across Shakespeare's plays. However, more recent critics give attention to disordered elements, subversions of resolution, and works that cause dislocations and dialectical oppositions, such as Jonathan Dollimore's analysis of Edmund's role in highlighting how King Lear refuses the notion of man as a tragic victim and affirms that human values are informed by material conditions rather than antecedent to them.

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    Shakespearean Tragedy

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    This document discusses A.C. Bradley's analysis of Shakespearean tragedies in his book Shakespearean Tragedy. It notes that Bradley assumed art seeks unity and resolution of differences, and looked for a single vision and controlling principle across Shakespeare's plays. However, more recent critics give attention to disordered elements, subversions of resolution, and works that cause dislocations and dialectical oppositions, such as Jonathan Dollimore's analysis of Edmund's role in highlighting how King Lear refuses the notion of man as a tragic victim and affirms that human values are informed by material conditions rather than antecedent to them.

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    This document discusses A.C. Bradley's analysis of Shakespearean tragedies in his book Shakespearean Tragedy. It notes that Bradley assumed art seeks unity and resolution of differences, and looked for a single vision and controlling principle across Shakespeare's plays. However, more recent critics give attention to disordered elements, subversions of resolution, and works that cause dislocations and dialectical oppositions, such as Jonathan Dollimore's analysis of Edmund's role in highlighting how King Lear refuses the notion of man as a tragic victim and affirms that human values are informed by material conditions rather than antecedent to them.

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    © All Rights Reserved
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    14 views1 page

    Shakespearean Tragedy

    Uploaded by

    parlate
    This document discusses A.C. Bradley's analysis of Shakespearean tragedies in his book Shakespearean Tragedy. It notes that Bradley assumed art seeks unity and resolution of differences, and looked for a single vision and controlling principle across Shakespeare's plays. However, more recent critics give attention to disordered elements, subversions of resolution, and works that cause dislocations and dialectical oppositions, such as Jonathan Dollimore's analysis of Edmund's role in highlighting how King Lear refuses the notion of man as a tragic victim and affirms that human values are informed by material conditions rather than antecedent to them.

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    of 1

    XXVI Shakespearean Tragedy

    leaping into Ophelia's grave (v. i. 243) he did not mention,


    the authority of these details being taken for granted. Any
    careful student of the four major Shakespearean tragedies
    needs to be alert to the existence of alternative texts at all
    times, and Bradley's concern for these matters, although
    useful, does not absolve him or her of this responsibility; it
    does, however, keep the issues more in focus than many later
    studies which pay them little or no regard.
    The respect in which Bradley may seem to stand at greatest
    distance from the present is in his assumption that art seeks
    necessarily for unity and for a resolution of differences. In
    looking for clues to the nature of Shakespearean tragedy, he
    took for granted that this would depend on a profound and
    single vision, developing from play to play and governing the
    plan of each. He wrote of this controlling principle as an
    'idea' and a 'mystery', and he assumed that his task was to
    pluck this heart out of the texts and out of his experience of
    the plays in performance. Indeed his book is a record of this
    effort and it is therefore at odds with recent studies which
    give special, or 'privileged', attention to disordered and dis-
    cordant elements, and to subversions of conventional resolu-
    tions. While Bradley saw Shakespeare as a highly individual
    author, he did not present him as one who was impelled to
    cause 'dislocations' and set up 'dialectical' oppositions within
    a play. For example, he did not highlight the role of Edmund
    in King Lear, as Jonathan Dollimore has done, in his Radical
    Tragedy (1984), so arriving at this conclusion:

    The notion of man as tragic victim somehow alive and


    complete in death is precisely the kind of essentialist mys-
    tification which the play refuses. It offers instead a
    decentring of the tragic subject which in turn becomes the
    focus of a more general exploration of human conscious-
    ness in relation to social being - one which discloses hu-
    man values to be not antecedent to, but rather informed
    by, material conditions. Lear actually refuses then that au-
    tonomy of value which humanist critics so often insist that
    it ultimately affirms ....

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