The Living Monument: Self and Stage in the Criticism and Scholarship of M. C. Bradbrook

Summary

“Elizabethan drama”, Muriel Bradbrook wrote in 1962, “was . . . an embodied art, and existed for performance. To treat it as book art is to do it great violence.” The belief that interpretation of Elizabethan theatre must derive from an informed and flexible sense of its staging remained central to Bradbrook's writing throughout a long career, until her death in June 1993. A discussion of her criticism of Shakespeare and the Elizabethan drama, the main but by no means the exclusive focus of her scholarly work, together with some account of its personal origins, will serve as implicit commentary on developments in critical practice and theatre performance over the last sixty years.

Muriel Bradbrook's first published book (out of an eventual total of more than twenty) was her Harness Prize Essay of 1931, Elizabethan Stage Conditions. The work of a Cambridge graduate student of twenty-two, the book exhibits at the outset the essential characteristics, and charts the essential convictions, that mark her work throughout. With, for a novice, extraordinary imperturbability Bradbrook runs through the critics of the past and finds them wanting as commentators on Shakespeare's stage. Hazlitt, for example, 'though he was interested in the virtuosity of the actor' failed as critic due to his general mistrust of theatre; Coleridge, on the other hand, won't do because 'his historical knowledge was neither detailed nor extensive'. Such limitations are for Bradbrook significant and symptomatic.