📝Book Thoughts: Straight Acting by Will Tosh

Shakespeare being some shade of queer is an idea that you really only have two responses for. One being “duh, of course” and the other being “What? I’ve never heard about that?”. Regardless of if you are the former or the later, this book is well worth a read.

My partner bought this book from Toppings Bookshop on a weekend away in Bath almost 2 years ago now. And it sat on his bedside table ever since, but at the beginning of the year we decided to listen to it in tandem. Both being absolute dweebs about the theatre and Shakespeare and of course being practicing homosexuals; the book seemed tailor made for us.

I’d recommend it to pretty much anyone with a latent interest in the Bard however. There must be some obscure German word for “the comfort gained for hearing the relatable human experiences of those who lived hundreds of years ago” and if it exists then this book is emphatically that.

Shakespeare was clearly a millennial, living in Shoreditch in his twenties and visiting the “village” of Islington. The book was most interesting when talking about Shakespeare’s early life and journey to becoming the famous playwright. His school days reading Ovid’s Metamorphoses, days in London being inspired by Marlowe and other contemporaries. It’s lovely to hear references to those who Shakespeare built upon when in modern life he is often presented as spontaneous genius.

Shakespeare generally is one of those figures whose general persona in the popular consciousness is wildly different from his actual bent. I mostly blame the Victorians for this. If your only interaction with the Bard was in the form of school you may think of it as snooty, needlessly verbose and pompous. However in reality only the verbosity is true. Shakespeare’s plays are boardy, funny and most of all common. They were popular performances, they were the schlocky blockbusters of his day.

People reference Henry V St Crispins day speech, but often forget the whole “let’s have a scene all about a welsh man having a fight over a leek lol”. People quote “Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them” without remembering that the line is from a letter tricking a guy into wearing ugly trousers and flirting with his boss.

This book illuminates Shakespeare into a figure I more easily recognise in the creatives and performers I have met in my own life. Passionate and gifted certainly, but also revellers and lovers. It also does well to contextualise how people thought of Shakespeare in his own time; before he was Shakespeare the playwright he was Shakespeare the poet.

To be more specific, he was Shakespeare the erotic poet. There exists no original copies of the pamphlets of “Venus & Adonis” because they were so worn out. It wasn’t just the base eroticism in the poem it is the queerness of it. In contrast to the standards of the time the pursuer is flipped to be Venus rather than Adonis.

Will Tosh does a great job of revealing the queer influences and explicit content in both Shakespeare Poems and Plays. It’s a tricky balance to strike in a book like this, for the gay theatre folks among us much of it is known but to people who’ve never engaged much with Shakespeares queerness it can all feel a bit new. For example The Sonnets; the first 126 of which are addressed to a young man (yes including the one everyone reads at their very heterosexual weddings) is something that feels pedestrian to some, but to others a revelation.

There are large chunks of this book not about Shakespeare too. We learn a lot about Marlowe and a poet Richard Barnfield. It sometimes feels like Tosh really wanted to write a book about them, but made the shrewd financial decision to market it about Shakespeare.

Overall this book was a real delight, both in its base contents and also in the rabbit holes its sent me down. I’d never really noticed Barnfield much but in a couple of collections of queer poetry I have, there he is. I don’t think I’d ever have read or heard of “Venus and Adonis” without this book. I am also now a proud owner of the cloth bound classics edition of Metamorpheses that I’m slowly working my way through.

Not to mention we’ve watched Twelfth Night on Globe Player, two separate recordings of Othello and have booked perhaps a few too many tickets for the year ahead to see the Bard’s work. So I guess this is more of a warning than a recommendation: Reader beware, this may lead to bouts of bardic inspiration.