When a classy line is needed for a modern wedding, “Let me not to the marriage of true minds / Admit impediments” is often pressed into service. Most members of the congregation won’t know that Sonnet 116 was originally addressed by Shakespeare to a young man. Chances are that they won’t care either, especially if the marriage happens to be between people of the same sex. Still, explains Will Tosh in this fluent and witty book, such equanimity is long in the making. He argues that for centuries Shakespeare, our national poet, has been anxiously de-queered in order to make him fit for polite society. This was going on as late as 1977 when AL Rowse, himself discreetly gay, took care in his account of “homosexuals in history” to remind his readers on five separate occasions that Shakespeare was “even more than normally heterosexual”.
Well, was he or wasn’t he? Tosh teasingly frames his readers’ curiosity in this reductive way yet is confident enough to shoot back quickly that it is impossible to say. The evidence of Shakespeare’s lived loves simply isn’t there. What Tosh does know, as a longtime dramaturg and head of research at the Globe theatre, is that Shakespeare’s work is chock full of desire that “was dissident, unusual, or athwart the erotic mainstream”.
