STRAIGHT ACTING

Was Shakespeare queer? A researcher makes the case.

Tosh, head of research at Shakespeare’s Globe, insists that the Bard was “a queer artist who drew on his society’s complex understanding of same-sex desire to create some of the richest relationships in literature.” Tosh, who uses the term queer because it “encapsulates far more than it excludes,” bemoans the determination of others “to scrub away any signs of homoeroticism” in Shakespeare’s work, from the sanitizing of relationships like that of Romeo and Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet to the “pathbreaking sonnets of queer desire” that are often read aloud at opposite-sex weddings, “dusted off, de-queered and put to safely straight use.” The author presents a vigorous argument for Shakespeare as “one of our most prolific poets of queer love.” He charts his subject’s maturation as an artist, from his upbringing to his literary apprenticeship in London, “the default capital of homoerotic desire,” to the influence of such figures as the “sexy iconoclast” Christopher Marlowe, whose Edward II, “a study of queer kingship,” had “a transformative effect on the way Shakespeare wrote history plays” and gave Shakespeare “a queer dramaturgy that took seriously the range of ways in which a person might love.” Speculative vignettes at the beginning of each chapter that muse upon Shakespeare’s “artistic evolution” add little, and Tosh tries too hard to be poetic (“The people in a young man’s life were lacquered with a sort of pious sealant”) and funny (The Affectionate Shepherd, a work of romantic literature, was a “supersized” version of Virgil’s second Eclogue, “in every respect bigger, longer and uncut”). Still, this is a lively analysis of Shakespeare’s life and work, with close readings of his plays and claims that will likely spark fresh debate.

A thoughtful portrait of Shakespeare’s sexuality and its effect on his literary output.