This short, snappy work of popular scholarship by Will Tosh, head of research at Shakespeare’s Globe, is a necessary provocation and a highly selective bid to claim our national poet as a queer icon. Fair enough. As Tosh says in his introduction, red-faced heterosexuals have spent centuries explaining away the many sympathetic depictions of gay or transgressive love that lace some plays and dominate the sonnets and love poems, insisting Shakespeare was “an occasional non-participatory tourist into the strange terrain of queer desire”.
A book that views him through an exclusively queer lens is a much-needed corrective, then, but just as partial as those that insist that the sailor Antonio’s passion for Sebastian in Twelfth Night is purely platonic. Tosh tells us that Shakespeare wore skirts as a child, was educated in homoerotic and gender-fluid Graeco-Roman stories, and lived in a mostly-male milieu where bed-sharing was common and courtly love (amicitia perfecta) between men idealised. So were many, many men of his class and upbringing.
