Postmodern criticism, with its propensity to reduce all ideas to ideology in the service of power, has had precious little to say about morality in Shakespeare's plays. Indeed, the relentless narrowness of its vision is such that ‘it's difficult to avoid the conclusion that a model that's unable to distinguish between a Stalin and a Gandhi is of limited value’ to moral questions. But that does not mean that Shakespeare criticism more generally has not had a great deal to say about the playwright's moral imagination, even if many of the books on this theme have fallen into neglect or been forgotten to time. In this chapter, I will survey the major studies on Shakespeare and morality from 1775 to 1964. There have been several useful studies written since 1964, which I reference elsewhere in this book. In focusing on older criticism here my aim is threefold: first, I wish to build an understanding of how critics from the past have typically thought about and approached the question of morality in Shakespeare's plays. Second, I will be on the lookout for valuable critical insights that I might retain for this study moving forward, especially if patterns of such insight recur across the generations. Third, in the researching of this book I have found that no such survey on this topic exists, so I hope this will be of significant use and benefit to later scholars.

The first major study on Shakespeare and morality was The Morality of Shakespeare's Drama Illustrated (1775) by Elizabeth Griffith, the Irish novelist, playwright and bluestocking. She had collaborated with David Garrick on her successful comedy, The School for Rakes (1769), and accordingly her Shakespearean study is dedicated to him with a prefatory note. Griffith took her cue from Elizabeth Montagu's defence of Shakespeare against Voltaire's attacks, An Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakespeare (1769) – incidentally, the first book of Shakespeare criticism – in which she wrote, ‘we are apt to write Shakespeare only as a poet; but he is certainly one of the greatest moral philosophers who ever lived’.