Although literary criticism has moved on since the work of A. C. Bradley, his Shakespearian Tragedy (1904) is still regarded as the greatest achievement of the ‘biographical’ approach to dramatic characterization – and a reprint of that classic work, with a new introduction by John Russell Brown, has just appeared from Macmillan. But the teachings of his close contemporary Stanislavski remain more widely disseminated than disputed, though they spring from very similar assumptions and concerns. Alice Rayner, an assistant professor at University of California, Irvine, investigates what the writings of the two men had in common, how their insights and approaches can be mutually revealing – and how some of their underlying beliefs can be the cause of mystification.