The notion that Shakespeare was a libertarian-individualist rather than moral author is not new. Nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century critics took this view, which was in part an outcome of Romantic adulation of Shakespeare. Romanticism (‘liberalism in literature’) is committed to freedom. The influence of this perspective on life and Shakespeare is evident in A. C. Bradley's justly influential Shakespearean Tragedy. Published in 1904, the book drew on lectures delivered at Liverpool, Glasgow and Oxford. Bradley belonged to a progressive current in late-nineteenth-century English life. I want to focus here, however, not so much on his socialistic politics as his moral latitudinarianism. Bradley used Shakespeare to foster individualistic, emancipatory tendencies in Victorian civilization. His writing on Shakespeare runs against the era's moralism. Moreover, his use of Shakespeare was not atypical. Shakespeareanism, Elizabethanism more generally, was at this time frequently associated with a relativistic outlook on morality.

The nineteenth century was anxious about the disappearance of individuality in an increasingly anonymous, herd-like society. In 1813 Hazlitt wrote that ‘our distinguishing characteristic [is] the want of all character.’