A.C. Bradley, Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford, was the foremost Shakespearean scholar of the early twentieth century. His study of the four great tragedies, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth, was a major breakthrough in its time and has remained a standard text ever since.
 
The light Bradley throws on many of the plays’ most famous problems is continually surprising and illuminating, such as his famous explanation of melancholy as the cause of Hamlet’s delay, and his astonishing account of Iago and the evil children in King Lear as tragic characters in their own right.