This article aims at comparing and evaluating psychological and poetic approaches, the two dominant critical methods of the 20th century Shakespeare criticism, and historical approach, another form of the 20 century critical method, has been mentioned whenever necessary. Bradley`s Shakespearean Tragedy which was the culminating product of psychological approach or character criticism was attacked by poetic approach later known as the New Criticism which argued that a Shakespeare play is a dramatic poem and should be dealt with as such but not as a character-novel. F.R. Leavis, L.C. Knights, D.A. Traversi-core members of the so-called Scrutiny group-and American New Critics were more or less successful in bringing about a general disparagement of Bradley`s point of view as well as his psychological approach. Among them Knights was perhaps most effecient and persuasive in effecting the relegation of Bradley. In his ironical title ``How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?`` he argued that the most important thing in a play is the words on the page and that images and their verse setting should be given full consideration to. According to him, to stress character or plot is to impoverish the total response of a play and to detach a character from its natural surroundings is fatal to the proper understanding of the play. More often than not, champions of poetic approach went too far and reduced Shakespeare`s plays to images and irony, explaining them as if they were a self-contained universe without any extraneous reference. As no critical method is absolute and foolproof, both psychological and poetic approaches were attacked by scholarship or historical criticism, which argued that Shakespeare should be interpreted in terms of Elizabethan political philosophy, stage conditions and dramatic conventions. Bradley``s line of criticism, however, not only survived the salvo from both the historical and New Critics but also continued to prosper as critical works of so many devout Bradleyites and anti-New Critics witness. In conclusion, the ideal critical method could be obtained by integrating all the existing methods.