This essay argues that the traditional (and not just Romantic) association of Shakespeare with nature and passion ties his work to a non-doctrinaire politics and morals. As ‘the poet of nature’, in Dr Johnson’s phrase, Shakespeare is linked to an anti-systematic, open, essentially tolerant worldview. The essay brings this point into sharper focus by recounting how one of the poet’s strangest and most ardent admirers, the twentieth-century French-Rumanian writer E.M. Cioran, understood Shakespeare as an artist fundamentally hostile to philosophy and even to reason itself. For Cioran, Shakespeare, along with kindred authors such as Dostoievsky and Nietzsche, exploded systems and the pretensions of thought. It was Shakespeare’s commitment to the passions and experience, his basic irrationalism, that made his work such a powerful antidote to the murderous and programmatic utopianism that, Cioran believed, had blighted so much of human existence, not least in the twentieth century.

The critic in search of Larkin's ‘sources’ will have a tough time of it. It is hard to imagine Larkin himself enthusiastic about such a quest: he thought poetry should issue out of what he called ‘unsorted experience’ – ‘I tried to keep literature out of my poems’, he said. His literary personality was defined against that of modernist scholar-magpies like Eliot and Auden – poets he respected, but warily. In a review of 1960 he reproached Auden for intellectualism and arch literary game-playing – implicitly, the antithesis of his own poetry, which was to be understood as a record of personal experience.

Hamlet is constructed around the question of what makes a genuine self – what authenticity and freedom are. But Hamlet's creator has himself come to stand for a peculiarly intense mode of self-realization, that of genius. As already noted, Jonathan Bate has shown it was Romantic esteem for Shakespeare, a determination to defend his achievement against the disparagement of neo-classical critics, that invented the notion of genius. Genius ignored rules. ‘No bird soars too high, if he soars with his own wings’, wrote Blake. Genius could never go wrong because it made the law. One of the key figures in this expressivist cultural turn was, as we have seen, the Bardolater Johann Gottfried von Herder. Herder sparked Goethe's love of Shakespeare: there is an intriguing connection between the birth of cultural historicism with Herder and the emergence of a Romantic Shakespeare cult in Germany and England. Herder's opinion that every culture formed a unique pattern and could only be judged from within, and that there were no universal criteria against which all cultures could be compared, is echoed in Coleridge's urging German writers to stop looking to France for literary models: ‘O Germany! Germany! … Why, this endless Looking-out of thyself?’ Germany should be herself. This cultural relativism is individualism at the level of whole societies. Central to it is the notion of organic – as opposed to artificial, imposed or mechanical – order.

Polonius utters the famous words. They sound oddly in the mouth of the crafty Renaissance courtier, a boring, domineering father who dismisses Ophelia's love-choice as girlish nonsense. The advice is dispensed to Laertes, who is departing for Paris (‘these few precepts in thy memory/Look thou character’ (I.iii.58–9)). The word ‘memory’, along with the whole notion of mentally recording or writing down advice or a command, anticipates Hamlet's later resolution to ‘remember’ the ghost. ‘Remember me’ the Ghost exhorts his son (I.v.91). ‘Remember thee!’ vows Hamlet,

Hamlet will ‘character’ in the notebook of his brain the Ghost's command, erase all else – any trivial material – already written down there.

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.’

We could summarize Eliot's objection to Shakespeare by saying that he finds Shakespeare to be a bad influence – morally problematic. The anarchic energies that drive Shakespearean writing end in Nietzscheanism. Whatever the simplifications involved in putting Eliot's case this way, it at least helps us see how his position is connected to Johnson's and Hazlitt's judgements (noted earlier) that Shakespeare is not a moral author. And we have seen how other readers and critics (Gide and A. C. Bradley among them) have taken a similar view of Shakespeare, as presenting a challenge to morality repressively conceived. Such judgements need not stop us believing that Shakespeare is an ‘ethical’ author, of course, but we may need to be clearer about what we mean by that word (and, like Bradley, may want to expand our notion of ‘good’). For instance, we may need to recognize that fidelity to self-realization can be a good – that care for the self can be an ethical command.

One way Shakespeare may present a problem to moral thought is that, like Nietzsche, he seems on occasion interested in exploring those situations in life in which vice becomes virtue, or virtue vice.

The Tempest has an exuberant, inspiring commitment to freedom. But underpinning, and somewhat qualifying, that exuberance is a severe, classical conception of liberty as rational self-government. This explains why the play's mood is joyous and emancipatory yet also rather sombre. However, The Tempest does not exhaust Shakespeare's views on freedom. Writers like Gide did not admire Shakespeare because he was a Platonist rationalist extolling self-government. In other texts Shakespeare is attracted to a bolder, wilder version of freedom, one emphasizing above all individual authenticity. His perspective on individuality encompasses Caliban's view of life as much as it does that of a soberly repentant Prospero. To put this differently: if The Tempest advances a ‘positive’ theory of liberty, other texts put forward a restlessly and anarchically ‘negative’ one. Even as some of Shakespeare's works raise the difficulty of how one comes to know one's true and authentic passion they also affirm desire, however dangerous, uncertain and ultimately incomprehensible it is. In order to begin a discussion of this topic, I need to return to two plays already touched on.

As we saw, A Midsummer Night's Dream addresses directly the question of authentic desire. Both the play's genuine tension and its light-hearted comedy circulate round this problem of how one recognizes true desire. Theseus announces the theme of desire at the beginning of the play.

Associating Shakespeare with freedom, individuality and authenticity is not original: as I hope to have shown, the association has a rich history. In recent times, however, this way of thinking about Shakespeare has waned among academic critics. This is regrettable. It deprives us of a powerful resource – the imagination of a great writer – through which to resist encroachments on personal freedom (which, sadly, are set to become ever more oppressive). That Shakespeare might have a special significance in this context was not lost on two twentieth-century novelists who wondered what a world in which freedom and individuality had been abolished might look like. In the totalitarian setting of Nineteen Eighty-Four, ‘to do anything that suggested a taste for solitude, even to go for a walk by yourself, was always slightly dangerous. There was a word for it in Newspeak: ownlife, it was called, meaning individualism and eccentricity’ (85). Winston's dream about his dead mother at the beginning of the novel brings him to the awareness that ‘Tragedy … belonged to the ancient time … Today there were fear, hatred and pain, but no dignity of emotion, no deep and complex sorrows' (32).