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Will Tosh

@willtosh3

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Director of Education @the_globe ⭕️ | Author of STRAIGHT ACTING (@sceptrebooks @basicbooks @sealpress) | Rep’d by @rcwliteraryagency | 🌈📚🎭

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A year and a day ago I was celebrating, far too giddily, the UK publication of STRAIGHT ACTING: THE MANY QUEER LIVES OF WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, and I’ve continued to squawk about the US hardback, trade softcover and UK paperback.

This Pride month I want to celebrate the books I’ve read in the past year that have changed the way I think about queer historical storytelling - the books that I wish I’d been able to read before embarking on mine!

First, QUEER AS FOLKLORE by @sachacoward - an epic, welcoming excavation of fairies and unicorns and mermaids and more. Scholarly, enticing, funny, and written with such love and care.

Next, CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD: INSIDE OUT by @katherinebucknell - you won’t find a finer biography of a 20th century gay writer. Fact.

SOME MEN IN LONDON by @prnparker is the glorious wide shot to Katherine’s forensic close-up: an unrepeatably detailed and textured portrait of postwar queer male life (except Peter did repeat it, in Vol 2!).

I adored STRANGE RELATIONS by @loco_mote when I read it in proof: it showed me how to fuse literary criticism with group biography and beguiling, poetic wit.

Now, I could have read RACISM AND THE MAKING OF GAY RIGHTS by @lauriemarhoefer as it came out in 2022 - and boy should I have. A case study in how to approach a complexly bad gay from history.

I think my most beloved read of the past year was the Proustian (for me anyway) wonder that is THE LIGHT OF DAY by @cwbstephens and @louiseradnofsky - a dazzling journey back to the first years of this century, and then further back to the queer crucible years of the 1960s.

And I’m lucky to have learned from Matt Cook over many years, but his latest work (with Alison Oram) on queer histories beyond the metropolis - QUEER BEYOND LONDON - has taught me so much on looking up and out.

So happy Pride to all these writers and their many grateful readers 🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈❤️

#booksofinstagram #bookstagram #straightacting #shakesqueer #pridemonthreads #pridemonthbooks by @willtosh3

Today my book comes out in North America! It’s an absolute dream come true to bring STRAIGHT ACTING: THE HIDDEN QUEER LIVES OF WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE to 🇺🇸 and 🇨🇦. The subtitle might bear a tweak but the book inside is its UK twin, and here’s a little glimpse of what people have been saying:

“Sparkling… bold and fearless… [Kicks] open a door for the next wave of accessible queer histories.” (HISTORY TODAY)

“Fluent and witty… confident… highly readable.” (GUARDIAN)

“Dynamic… A well-judged feat of public scholarship.” (TLS)

STRAIGHT ACTING is the first book on Shakespeare’s queer world aimed at a general readership, and I can’t wait for you to read it. A huge thank you to the wonderful team @sealpress @basicbooks and @hachetteus for bringing it into the world so beautifully 🏳️‍🌈🎭🪶

#booksofinstagram #bookstagram #publicationday #toshtakesmanhattan #straightacting by @willtosh3

It’s publication day for STRAIGHT ACTING: THE MANY QUEER LIVES OF WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, out now from @sceptrebooks 🏳️‍🌈 🎭 🪶

I may have been banging on about it for months but it’s now available in bookshops up and down the land (I recommend @the_globe ’s magnificent emporium) and I can’t wait for readers to get their hands on it. Here’s what people are saying already:

“Snappy… a necessary provocation” (EVENING STANDARD)

“Creative and capacious… lively and accomplished” (LITERARY REVIEW)

“Vigorous… lively… thoughtful” (KIRKUS)

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ “A masterpiece that all Shakespeare nerds need in their library… A truly exceptional read” (MIND THE BLOG)

STRAIGHT ACTING is the first study of Shakespeare’s queer work and culture for a wide audience. It builds on decades of radical scholarship to tell a new story about his education, art and life that reveals the central - and contested - place of queer desire and identity in early modern England.

It’s the book I’ve wanted to write for over twenty years. I hope you like it.

#bookstagram #booksofinstagram #shakesqueer #junereleases by @willtosh3

My photography might be hopeless, but take this poor example as a placeholder for a month of really extraordinary events. This was our fifth biennial Shakespeare and Race festival, titled for this year ‘The Future We Make’ and curated by the force of nature that is @hanhbui_said (supported by the magnificent Education Producing team especially @rkknowling and other @the_globe colleagues). The closing of the festival really marks the end of the Globe summer for me, and last night’s Youths That Thunder was an epic seasonal swansong: phenomenal papers by Lydia Valentine and @elicumings.

The two-day symposium earlier in the month on ‘Contested Futures’ was a sweeping examination of Shakespeares across the world and through time. The initiatory event at the start of October, our Research in Action on the Global Early Modern Stage, brought early modern England’s obsession with its own place on the planet vividly to life – thank you @drsarahdustagheer and Matthew Dimmock. I was fascinated by @newearththeatre ‘s OSELO, a Samurai-influenced Othello, and look forward to its full production. And thank you @drwendylennon @robinbelfield and Tinuke Craig for a moving roundtable on Shakespeare and Windrush (another credit for superhost Lydia Valentine). We were also graced with PINEAPPLE, a new play by @anne.odeke about the history and legacy of Ira Aldridge, performed with exhilarating verve by the Globe Young Company.

It seems apt that this morning I sat down to work on a lecture about Othello, and idly thought to look up the name of the editor of the Longman New Swan edition I have possessed since school. I’m ashamed of my own ignorance: Gāmini Salgādo was the UK’s first literature professor of colour, a Sri Lankan-born early modernist and DH Lawrence expert who took up his post at the University of Exeter in 1977, shortly after editing the play and providing its exceptionally informative introduction.

#shakespeare #shaxrace #gaminisalgado by @willtosh3

Felt cute, might delete later - not least because I’m going for Employee of the Month at @the_globe and this might dent my chances.

But it was a huge privilege (and also great fun) to be seconded as dramaturg on AS YOU LIKE IT at @thersc, directed by @daniel_gwyn_evans. It’s a truly beautiful production, and I’ve had the unusual experience of undertaking this work in syncopation with the equally brilliant production of the same play on home turf, directed by @ch4rli3jo3 and Sean Holmes: one play, two visions, all the feels. Do see both if you can.

Press night in Stratford was a blast, and it was a deserved return to RST opening nights for my very hot date.

📷 Tyler Fayose by @willtosh3

There’s a noticeably retro ‘he never married’ tone to this biography of millionaire politician/society host Philip Sassoon, and I suspect it was heavily cribbed by whoever wrote the coy info panels at the newly restored Trent Park museum (Sassoon’s suburban country house, where Errol Flynn prowled and Anthony Eden nipped down from Whitehall for a set of tennis). It’s a shame, as his queerness isn’t far to seek, and Sassoon’s connection to queer interwar life was handled much more sensibly in Chris Bryant’s later Glamour Boys (Damian Collins’s CHARMED LIFE came out in 2016).

Heir to two vast fortunes (his mother was a Rothschild), Sassoon was a surprisingly hard-working public servant: backbench MP, aide-de-camp to General Haig, David Lloyd George’s PPS in the early ‘20s, then junior minister for air in the run-up to 1939. He lavished hospitality on his superiors, turning his various homes into luxury boltholes for the famous and powerful.

His guest book was to die for: film stars and sportsmen, media barons and royals, and a roll-call of Jazz Age A-gays (Lord Berners, Cecil Beaton, Lytton Strachey, Noel Coward, Rex Whistler), to say nothing of the hot young airmen invited each summer to lie around by the pool. All the details - peacocks and flamingoes; obsessive reader of Proust; buttonhole blooms left on each guest’s dressing table - are well enough, but this is an oddly flat biography that shows little desire to delve beneath the surface. And in his willingness to let Sassoon’s queerness remain as a ‘case unproven’, Collins repeats the exclusionary moves of Sassoon’s own elite circle, who never fully accepted him as one of their own.

#booksofinstagram #bookstagram #philipsassoon #portlympne #trentpark by @willtosh3

I certainly hadn’t clocked that the founding figures of the National Trust featured so many complexly queer Victorians (take a bow, Octavia Hill), nor that the institution came into being in 1895, the year of Oscar Wilde’s trials. Michael Hall goes into all that side of things in A QUEER INHERITANCE: ALTERNATIVE HISTORIES IN THE NATIONAL TRUST, and fascinating it all is too, but the really subtle and lovely thing about this book is the argument he weaves about legacy.

As becomes clear in his chapter on E.M. Forster’s bequest of four-and-a-half acres of Home Counties greenwood, the @nationaltrust emerged as an early instrument of queer passing-on - a way for queer men and women to achieve the sort of egalitarian cross-class communion that was so central to early 20th century queer politics by means of a gift to the nation, a giving back to the people, a frustration of dynastic inheritance and private landholding (get Lee Edelman a National Trust membership sticker, pronto…).

This is such a rich, expansive book. The tone is serious, as befits an important story, but Hall allows himself a few rather campy flourishes (hard to avoid when one of your characters is the Marquess of Anglesey). Recording Vita Sackville-West’s observation that the ‘Venetian Ambassador’s Bedroom’ at Knole has a bed big enough for three, Hall cocks an eyebrow to note the ‘equivalent amplitude’ in Vita’s married life. And it seems inevitable that the local nurseryman near Sissinghurst, where Vita cultivated ancient and transgressive roses, turned out to have ‘a particular reputation for fruit…’

@bloomsburypublishing #booksofinstagram #queerinheritance #bookstagram #spinycopse #whathappensatknolestaysatknole by @willtosh3

This was a delicious find at @barterbooksuk in Alnwick: Laurence Housman’s HAPPY AND GLORIOUS, a sequence of forty-seven playlets about the reign of Queen Victoria. It’s a nineteenth-century version of The Crown, but even more so it’s a precursor to The Audience, Peter Morgan’s predecessor play - although much more sprawling.

It’s also more radical. Housman (A.E.’s suffragist, atheist brother) wrote the plays over a twenty year period up to 1940, losing hundreds of pounds in unsuccessful attempts to have them licensed by the Lord Chamberlain. About half of them eventually received permission, once the centenary of Victoria’s accession had passed (the point deemed acceptable for dramatists to depict British monarchs on stage), but three ‘inconveniently truthful’ plays were judged permanently unstageable.

I’m GUESSING that included the episode in which Lord Melbourne discovers that Prince Albert is actually the love child of the Grand Duchess of Saxe-Coburg and her court chamberlain, not a prince of the blood at all - thereby liberating him from the suspicion of inherited Saxe-Coburg diseases and leaving him free to marry the Queen! (Housman was no haematologist: Albert wasn’t illegitimate, and nor was he the carrier of the haemophilia that would devastate the European royal families created by Albert and Victoria’s children).

To be honest, the plays are kind of unstageable anyway: very talky, no sense of arc or indeed much jeopardy that extends beyond each episode. But the Duchess of Kent (Victoria’s mum) is a hot mess, Bertie is a Kevin-type teenager shuffling in corners with his hands in his pockets, John Brown glowers sexily, and the Home Secretary has to explain what a railway ticket is (‘dear me, how humiliating’).

#booksofinstagram #instadrama #happyandglorious #wearenotamused by @willtosh3

In recent weeks I’ve been defeated by some claggily unreadable novels and bathed in many forms of bullshittery, so returning to this was balm to the soul.

I have no patience with those who think Fanny Price is impossibly mouselike and self-effacing. She is precisely the mode of person to be created by the monstrous Mrs Norris’s abuse and gaslighting. It is however a sign of Austen’s brilliance that the story of a pair of censorious fun-sponges (Fanny and her morality-Svengali, Edmund), at war against fashionable urban society and the perkiness of witty conversation, can be so captivating.

I sort of see why everyone hates MANSFIELD PARK’s conservative politics. Its abolitionist stance is so muted as to be nearly undetectable, despite Sir Thomas’s Antiguan plantation taking a crucial role in the narrative. The novel exhibits unrelenting hostility to the change brought about by ‘improvement’, and mostly endorses its own social politics: Austen is merciless in her dismissal of the broken Bertram children (‘the indignities of stupidity, and the disappointments of selfish passion, can excite little pity’) and brings narrative-voice-possessiveness to her depiction of the triumphant virtuous heroine in the final pages - when she is suddenly ‘my Fanny’ (no sniggering at the back).

But Austen is also clearly fascinated by the social and sexual radicalism she represents in the Crawfords. The very wise @jonathankeates pointed out in my A-level English class many years ago that Austen seems to have read Les Liaisons Dangereuses - an astonishing intertext within such a seemingly prudish novel: not only does Henry Crawford’s project to make Fanny fall in love with him cast her as Madame de Tourvel, but his later promise to help some poor tenants on his estate echoes a similar tactic deployed by Valmont. And whatever the Crawfords’ ultimate destiny, they are both glitteringly fabulous creations: I love the fact that Mary is a figure of such rampaging narcissism that her ‘happiness… [is] fearful to encounter’🎯💥

#booksofinstagram #bookstagram #mansfieldpark #janeausten #loversvowsfan by @willtosh3

How should we think about Shakespeare and sexuality today?

In the latest episode of the Southwark Cathedral Podcast, the Dean speaks with Dr Will Tosh (@willtosh3), Director of Education at Shakespeare’s Globe, about his book 'Straight Acting: The Many Queer Lives of William Shakespeare.'

Recorded during Pride Week, their conversation explores how Shakespeare wrote about intimacy, desire and identity, why modern ideas of sexuality don't easily fit the early modern world, and why these conversations still matter today.

Listen to the full episode wherever you get your podcasts! 🔊

(P.S. You can buy the book at the Southwark Cathedral shop!) by @willtosh3