Paper Laurels: On a More Diverse ‘Best American Short Stories’

1.
I’m guessing that most readers these days know A. C. Bradley secondhand, through the excerpts and quotes found in the study materials for the Arden series and the other popular editions of Shakespeare’s plays.  This is a shame, because Bradley is a better critic in full than he is in bits and pieces, and Shakespearean Tragedy continues to be an exciting book for anyone interested in literature.

Bradley’s specialty is the passionate discussion of literary characters in vivid, consuming detail.  He feels that exploring the mind and actions of Hamlet or Iago is worth every last bit of effort we can give it.  He has a point—one that applies to the work of many modern writers as much as it does to Shakespeare.  It would be fascinating, for instance, to see the Bradley touch brought to bear on books like Underworld or Infinite Jest.

2.
In the history of literary criticism, Bradley is a worthy successor to Johnson and Coleridge, two of the earlier writers whose names and opinions spring up repeatedly in Shakespearean Tragedy.  Like his predecessors, Bradley still instructs and amuses long after most of the general literary theories of his time have fallen away.

The first edition of Shakespearean Tragedy came out in 1904, and is based on work Bradley prepared for teaching at Oxford, Liverpool and Glasgow.  The volume takes the form of a set of imaginary lectures, largely a series of detailed examinations of the most important characters from Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth and King Lear.

Bradley’s learning is formidable.  He has an easy acquaintance with the imposing German tradition of Shakespeare scholarship, along with an elegant, lightly-worn knowledge of the many influences Shakespeare drew upon for his writing.

At heart, though, Bradley’s method is personal.  He says what he thinks of Shakespeare’s characters, and why he feels they matter to our understanding of life.  Obviously, this approach exposes him to ridicule.  His only real shield against failure is his own insight into people, based on his inevitably dated and incomplete notions of human nature.  In the end, he can’t begin to tell us more about Hamlet or about the world than Shakespeare tells us himself.  Bradley knows this, and his modesty is appealing.  He assumes that good literature always has more to give us than even the best critics can express in topic sentences and abstractions.  And it’s precisely Bradley’s humility—his willingness to embrace his ultimate defeat—that allows him to polish and display certain facets of Shakespeare we aren’t likely to have seen so sharply on our own.

3.
The Hamlet lectures are the standouts here.  Bradley highlights Hamlet’s disastrous failure, which leads not only to his death but to the deaths of many others, including his mother and the young woman he has loved—a domino fall of wasted lives that goes far beyond the intended murder of Claudius.

Mentally and emotionally, Hamlet is both overwhelming and exasperating.  His mind whirls with all the clashing thoughts and passions that come out in the abrupt swerves of his thrilling verbal agility.  Whatever the motives for his delays and decisions, we never doubt his intelligence or the complexity of his feelings.  He has always been one of Shakespeare’s most popular characters, even though I suspect most of us would rather see him from the safety of the audience than change places with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern for some of those abusive conversations at Elsinore.

Bradley confronts us with one of the play’s many mysteries:  Why does Shakespeare show us this smart, resourceful, startlingly changeable young man destroying himself and everyone around him?  Elizabethan tragedy is a long way from our modern appetite for uplifting stories about sympathetic people overcoming adversity.  In Hamlet, nobody overcomes adversity—everyone is crushed by it.  Yet Hamlet remains an exhilarating play, and Hamlet an exhilarating character.  He isn’t likeable in any narrow sense, but his flaws are electric, a high-voltage display of humanity at its most disorienting.

4.
For Bradley, Hamlet’s key mistake is his failure to kill Claudius while the king is praying.  At this point, Hamlet has seen Claudius’s reaction to the play-within-the-play and has confirmed that Claudius is the murderer of Hamlet’s father.  With loving attention to counterarguments and conflicting evidence, Bradley sets forth the different possible reasons for Hamlet’s hesitation, from his stated refusal to kill someone in the middle of a prayer to the less conscious repulsion that Hamlet now feels for all human action.  “His whole mind is poisoned,” Bradley says.  In Bradley’s view, Hamlet is serious about his stated reasons, yet he also follows emotional, philosophical and mystical impulses that he barely comprehends.

It’s characteristic of Bradley that he chooses less to limit the possible interpretations here than to open them up and allow a wide and sometimes contradictory range of options.  Many modern critics are so polemical that they sound like lawyers defending a consortium of tobacco companies.  Bradley, in contrast, takes an inclusive approach that seems nicely suited to fiction in general.  Fiction writers have the advantage of not needing to settle on a single explicit thesis.  Instead, they can grow as many vines and branches of motive and implication as a story allows.  Few authors are better at this than Shakespeare:  it seems to have been a natural part of the way he thought about life.  This is one reason his poetry tends to be so suggestive, filled with images that unfold in many different directions at once.

At any rate, Hamlet’s refusal to kill the praying Claudius is, Bradley claims, the turning point of the play:

So far, Hamlet’s delay, though it is endangering his freedom and his life, has done no irreparable harm; but his failure here is the cause of all the disasters that follow.  In sparing the King, he sacrifices Polonius, Ophelia, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Laertes, the Queen and himself.

Bradley feels that, from this scene on, Hamlet’s melancholy combines with the circumstances around him to bring about the story’s increasingly out-of-control destruction—starting, of course, with the reckless murder of Polonius.  Have you ever wished that, just once, the gun-toting hero of an action movie would accidentally shoot the wrong person during a car chase and spend the rest of the film facing the consequences of his mistake?  Well, that’s a bit what Shakespeare does with Hamlet’s killing of Polonius, which leads to Ophelia’s suicide, the executions of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and the quadruple slaughter of the swordfight scene.

5.
Bradley believes that all this devastation throws into high relief the waste of Hamlet’s special alertness to the world and its mysteries.  “Hamlet most brings home to us at once the sense of the soul’s infinity, and the sense of doom which not only circumscribes that infinity but appears to be its offspring,” Bradley writes.  Hamlet is, in Jamesian terms, an unusually vital vessel of experience, and the waste of his life is a more catastrophic version of the waste of all our lives, all our potentials:

We seem to have before us a type of the mystery of the whole world, the tragic fact which extends far beyond the limits of tragedy.  Everywhere…we see power, intelligence, life and glory, which astound us and seem to call for our worship.  And everywhere we see them perishing, devouring one another and destroying themselves, often with dreadful pain, as though they came into being for no other end.  Tragedy is the typical form of this mystery…and it makes us realize so vividly the worth of that which is wasted that we cannot possibly seek comfort in the reflection that all is vanity.

A passage like this is obviously overreaching, but it’s overreaching in a way that feels entirely appropriate to Hamlet.  Bradley risks bombast in criticism of this sort, but so does Shakespeare in most of his best plays, and critics need to throw off their restraint sometimes and write as freely as Bradley has written here.  We can quarrel with his language, we can disagree with some of his assumptions, but this passage has more than enough insight in it to excuse its flaws.

6.
Bradley loves guiding us through the tragedies scene by scene, giving us his views on the characters’ words and acts.  Every page hums with energy:  Bradley has an expert sense of pace, and carries us along from one brisk comment to the next.

He has much to say on Othello, all of it interesting.  Although most of the criticism is delightfully specific, Bradley also does what Shakespeare surely wanted us to do, and draws from our encounters with Iago a fuller attention to certain forms of cruelty:

To ‘plume up the will’, to heighten the sense of power or superiority—this seems to be the unconscious motive of many acts of cruelty which evidently do not spring chiefly from ill-will, and which therefore puzzle and sometimes horrify us most.  It is often this that makes a man bully the wife or children of whom he is fond.  The boy who torments another boy, as we say, ‘for no reason’, or who without any hatred for frogs tortures a frog, is pleased with his victim’s pain, not from any disinterested love of evil or pleasure in pain, but mainly because this pain is the unmistakable proof of his own power over his victim.  So it is with Iago.  His thwarted sense of superiority wants satisfaction.

Later, in his lectures on Macbeth, he teases out the title character’s thread of dark inner poetry:

Macbeth’s better nature—to put the matter for clearness’ sake too broadly—instead of speaking to him in the overt language of moral ideas, commands, and prohibitions, incorporates itself in images which alarm and horrify.  His imagination is thus the best of him, something usually deeper and higher than his conscious thoughts; and if he had obeyed it he would have been safe.

In addition, Bradley is as good on the tragedies’ secondary characters as he is on Hamlet and Iago.  He stands up for Ophelia against the old charge that her mental collapse is a result of her personal weakness:

…her critics hardly seem to realize the situation, hardly to put themselves in the place of a girl whose lover, estranged from her, goes mad and kills her father.  They seem to forget also that Ophelia must have believed that these frightful calamities were not mere calamities, but followed from her action in repelling her lover.

Similarly, with Kent in King Lear, he clarifies that character’s particular mix of nobility and foolishness:

One has not the heart to wish him different, but he illustrates the truth that to run one’s head unselfishly against a wall is not the best way to help one’s friends.

7.
In the years after his death in 1935, Bradley took some beatings for his belief that Shakespeare’s characters can be treated as people and not as fictional conceits.  Looking back on these complaints now, they seem overstated.  Any extended character study, with its presumption that a character has some independent life or personality outside the text, relies as much on imagination as on scholarship.  Bradley isn’t merely critiquing Shakespeare—he’s writing a fiction of his own.  Still, to critique one fiction with another fiction is both defensible and potentially exciting, and shouldn’t bother readers who enjoy Borges or Nabokov or Sebald.  If we take Bradley as an artist—a role his modesty would probably deny—his fictional versions of Shakespeare’s creations are rich achievements.  Besides, Bradley always sticks closely to the plays themselves, and grounds his speculations in his intimate study of the tragedies’ theatrical and poetic details.

I suspect that Bradley would want us to end by giving less credit to him and more to Shakespeare.  Again and again, Bradley takes up these four tragedies and uses them to bring his personal observations about the world into focus.  He approaches the plays as if they were a collection of powerful lenses, and puts them on when he wants to look at things that are too distant or too obscure for his unaided sight to make out as clearly as he would like.  This is one of the ways that many of us use good writing, and Bradley’s method has a straightforward intelligence to it that still impresses, and always entertains.