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Straight Acting
- The Many Queer Lives of William Shakespeare
- Narrated by: Will Tosh
- Length: 10 hrs
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Straight Acting
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Summary
SARAH WATERS, author of Fingersmith
'Brilliant - so vivid and so sharp, fantastically clever and consistently fascinating'
KATHERINE RUNDELL, author of Super-Infinite
Was Shakespeare gay? The answer is both simpler and more complex than you might think . . .
Shakespeare's work was profoundly influenced by the queer culture of his time - much of it totally integrated into mainstream society. From a relentless schooling in Latin and Greek homoeroticism, to a less formal education on the streets and in smoky taverns, from the gender-bending of the early comedies to the astonishingly queer literary scene that nurtured Shakespeare's sonnets, this is a story of artistic development and of personal crisis.
Straight Acting is a surprising portrait of Shakespeare's queer lives - his own and those in his plays and poems. It is a journey back in time and through Shakespeare's England, revealing a culture that both endorsed and supressed same-sex desire. It is a call to stop making Shakespeare act straight and to recognise how queerness powerfully shaped the life and career of the world's most famous playwright.
'Magisterial and saucy . . . This fresh account kickstarts the queer canon of English literature: Shakespeare won't go back in the closet again'
EMMA SMITH, author of This Is Shakespeare
Critic reviews
'Will Tosh's tour through the spaces of Shakespeare's childhood, youth and early years as a dramatist is utterly captivating. Marshalling his deep knowledge of the period and of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, he convinces us of the queerness of these times - and queerness not in the margins but in familiar structures of thought and feeling, in the everyday places where men learned, socialised, slept and were entertained, and in what Shakespeare wrote and had performed. He shows us that queerness wasn't just in a dance with the normal in Shakespeare's Stratford and London, it was in a profound sense part of what was normal. He thus pushes us to question how a sense of queerness weaves through our present and how it should figure in the ways we think about, stage and represent Shakespeare and his astonishing work now' (Prof Matt Cook, Jonathan Cooper Chair of the History of Sexuality, University of Oxford)
'A remarkable work of scholarship. Will Tosh brings Shakespeare's world to life, revealing the queer connections between his life and works in an amusing and accessible manner' (Paul Baker, author of CAMP!)