Straight Acting: The Hidden Queer Lives of William Shakespeare

By Will Tosh, 2024

I enjoy going to the Bard on the Beach Shakespeare festival every summer, and watching a play or two at the Globe Theatre when I’m in London. This book shows how the queer cultures in the England of the late 1500s shaped William Shakespeare’s life and are reflected in his writing.

Tosh says in the introduction to the book that, while it may be fruitless to speculate about Shakespeare’s sexuality, it is very rewarding to look at the queer settings in which he was working. He imagines several scenes to illustrate his themes: the idealized same-sex love in the Greek and Roman classics that school boys learned; the imagery and language (and abuse) around the boy actors on the London stages; the close male relationships among young men learning the law (or not) in the Inns of Court; and the explicit homoeroticism in the written poetry of Shakespeare and some of his contemporaries. However, as Tosh points out, while there clearly was a strong undercurrent of homoeroticism in Shakespeare’s milieu, there was also repression of homosexuality should it become too visible. This helps explain why Shakespeare limited its expression within acceptable limits of stage and print.

Tosh’s descriptions offer several perspectives new to me. It’s not surprising to read that sexual activity (and sexual abuse) was common among the boy choirs and the commercial stage companies, although I’ve not seen it discussed by Shakespeare historians. The references to homosexual activity among the Greeks and Romans are pretty widely known, although I didn’t realize how central it was to the education of young Elizabethan men. As Tosh says, it may have been idealized and downplayed by the instructors, but students know what is really going on. And Tosh shows how Shakespeare reflects this knowledge in his plays and poems. The fact that we’ve gone so long without acknowledging it really reflects mainly on the Victorian commentators who chose to bury it, and on the homophobia that shapes current perceptions.

A few years ago, I saw a production of “The Merchant of Venice” that showed the relationship between Antonio and Bassanio as a queer relationship. It had always seemed inexplicably overwrought as a close but straight friendship, but it makes much more sense as a queer relationship. Tosh’s explanation of idealized male friendship and partnership gives it meaning that helps understand Shakespeare’s other plays as well.

In addition to the sociological setting in which Shakespeare wrote, Tosh analyzes the influence of other writers. Marlowe’s queer history, “Edward II,” showed Shakespeare the possibility of bringing out universal human stories in the plays instead of stock characters. He also shows how the explicit homoeroticism of Shakespeare’s contemporary, Richard Barnfield, opened the possibilities of voicing queer male desire in the sonnets. While Barnfield was first valorized, then rejected, for his explicit queer poetry, Shakespeare’s often more ambiguous language escaped criticism. Tosh suggests that, after seeing how his society turned on Barnsfield, Shakespeare may have deliberately delayed publication of his sonnets, which for years circulated among friends in hand-copied sheets only. After the flamboyantly queer lifestyle of James I of England, a social crackdown on public expression of homosexuality led to censorship. Shakespeare retired to an affluent and comfortable home life in Stratford, perhaps unwilling to risk what he had won.

Tosh says his book “… has been an invitation to think honestly about Shakespeare’s evolution as a queer artist, to examine the factors that helped and hindered his growth, and to consider the ways his culture both endorsed and suppressed queer desire.” I think it succeeds in laying out a queer way to understand Shakespeare’s works in their historical context as well as in our times.