A. C. (Andrew Cecil) Bradley

Born in 1851, he was an English literary scholar and critic whose name became closely linked with Shakespeare. He studied at Balliol College, Oxford, and later taught at several universities, including Liverpool, Glasgow, and Oxford.

His reputation rests above all on Shakespearean Tragedy (1904), a book based on lectures about Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth. The book became one of the most influential works of Shakespeare criticism in English, admired for its clear style and for the way it treats Shakespeare's characters as psychologically real.

He was also known for work on poetry and literary thought beyond Shakespeare, but his Shakespeare lectures remain his best-known legacy. For many readers, he represents a warm, serious, highly readable kind of criticism that still shapes how the plays are discussed today.