Will Tosh on the Hidden Queer Lives of William Shakespeare

[MUSIC PLAYING] From the Folger Shakespeare Library, this is Shakespeare Unlimited, a Barbara Bocave. [MUSIC PLAYING] Spoiler alert, many characters in Shakespeare's comedy swap genders, cross-strats, and fall in love with members of the same sex. That fluidity that we all have noticed makes the plays easy to mold to our contemporary ideas about gender and sexuality. But what did Shakespeare really think of all of this? Was he playing for easy laughs? Or did he really have a more inclusive and expansive view of love and attraction? Will Tosh set out to answer these questions with his new book, Straight Acting? Tosh is the head of research at Shakespeare's Globe, but he wrote the book for a general audience. It takes the form of a literary biography of Shakespeare, but it also looks at the culture he lived in. And it turns out, a really modern London was a pretty gay place. And just in case you're wondering, one thing the book is not about is whether Shakespeare was gay. We don't know, and we'll most likely never know that. Tosh makes it clear early on in his book that that's beside the point. He's interested in a much more nuanced exploration of Shakespeare as an artist who wrote about gender and sexuality, and was, as Tosh phrases it, informed and inspired by the complex mix of patriarchy, power, homoeroticism, and homophobia around him. Will Tosh joins us on the line from London. Hi Will. Hi, it's good to hear your voice. Oh, well, it's lovely to meet you in my head. Will, did this book start with Shakespeare or queerness in general in the early modern period? Well, that's a really good question, because the long runup to the book was two decades of me thinking about the history of queer desire and same-sex desire in the English Renaissance and wanting to take away at those questions that had puzzled me for quite a long time and find some way to bring the questions, if not the answers, to a broader readership, which I felt hadn't really happened over the many decades, really, of amazing queer scholarship. Well, that's a great answer, because you do such a great job tracking gender formation and aspects of queer subculture that existed in Shakespeare's time and that influenced him from a very early age. So let's start there with the early modern ritual for young boys called breaching. What was breaching? So breaching is this process by which middle-class, middle-ing boys and upper class boys are inducted into their juvenile masculinity. So in early modern England and for some time afterwards, all the infants, very young children, were dressed in dresses and skirts and looked after in female keg of a dominated spaces. This sort of feminising of infants was routine across the middle and upper classes. And there was a transition that was marked at the age of about seven when little boys were given their first pairs of trousers of breaches. And that was seen as a right of passage, a moment of celebration, a point that a boy kind of entered boyhood. And I've always been fascinated, especially given the sort of heated debates nowadays about the performance of gender. I'd always been fascinated by the fact that this much earlier time had been very up front about the socialization of gender, about that happening deliberately. And it being granted to an individual. And then as it were sort of theirs and their families to kind of look after for the rest of that individual's life. OK, and at the same age Shakespeare and early modern boys entered grammar school. And it was all male. And you argue in the book that the curriculum was steeped in homoerotic classics from authors like Cicero. So remind us, Cicero wrote on friendship. What specifically was homoerotic? Cicero's Treaties Day Amicetia on friendship, which presents intimate friendship between men as the apogee, the absolute apogee of human relationship. And that was swallowed whole by the Renaissance. That was just completely sort of absorbed. Does the text spell out this intense emotional feeling or feelings between men? That's allowed and held up as an ideal. But it doesn't actually condone erotic feelings or acts. No, it does. Well, well, it's very clear that the Romans regarded sexual relationships between men as completely permissible in certain contexts. And usually those contexts were very age and status hierarchized. So a boy, a servant, a slave, a foreigner, probably fine, you're socially equal best friend. No, a better not. Best not to complicate it. However, that's in many ways a very great area, particularly when the stress is on the emotional order and intensity between those two people and also on their spiritual and social and ethical identity, in that sense, they're the same person that they share one soul, one heart between two men. And I don't think it's an accident that as the centuries go on, and particularly in the 18th century, companion at marriage, that ideal that straight couples are encouraged to reach for, simply takes sort of lock-stock and barrel the language of perfect friendship, of classical perfect friendship, and applies it to marriage. So soulmate, my other half, all that sort of stuff. That's just sort of lifted from the rhetoric of intimate, of intimate same sex friendship. So that's kind of going through their heads as teenagers, as sort of the main and emotional connection in their life is going to be other men. And the other text that sort of, I suppose, gives pause and sometimes raises an eyebrow is Ovid's metamorphosis, which is, again, widely regarded as Shakespeare's favorite book, it's hugely influential on a number of his plays, and influential as a sort of all-house of imagination and fantasy. So many of the stories in Ovid are about acts of transgressive sexuality, whether that's sexual violence, potentially, in a large number of the stories, but also transgressive queer sexuality, whether that's gender identity in terms of people shifting between gender presentations or same sex desire of which there is a bunch in metamorphoses. So it was just seemed to me so important to note that these are the bedrocks of Shakespeare's education and everyone else's education in this era. - Right, that was the intellectual soup who's kind of swimming in as a child and at a lesson and a young man. And then he marries Anne Hathaway and we don't really know what their relationship was like or, as you say, his life from 20 to 21 is a blank when referred to as the lost years, but we do know he lived in London and you describe early modern London as a hotbed of, really, of queer subcultures. So tell us about that. - I moved Shakespeare pretty swiftly on from youth in Stratford to young adulthood in London because again, this was a social world that is relatively well studied in terms of the homosocial nature of it and the way in which as a kind of growing mercantile popular culture-driven city was in many ways given over to pleasures and proclivities of young men, heteroerotic and homerotic. - And just in terms of the profile of homosexuality in this period, there's also really a lot of homosexual prostitution. It was big business in London. - Well, yes, it's interesting. There seems to have been a queer brothel in Hoxton to a northern suburb of London. There appears to have been an established, a recognized presence of street prostitution by male sex workers who are described in satires in epigrams and poems of the time. Terms for male sex worker appear in contemporary dictionaries. So that culture is evidently there and it's very visible in London and Shakespeare knows what it is, you know, the Society's calls Patroclus Ecclesi's masculine whore in Troidus and Cressida. It's like it is possible for Shakespeare to imagine what that was, but he is also at the time using the gifts bestowed on him by his grammar school education to access a whole slew of classical literature that would not have been handed to him as a schoolboy. You know, for example, Patroclus with the Greeks and Romans contains all sorts of references to the lovers of various Greek and Roman statesmen that Shakespeare would have read about. There are some wonderful references in other early modern texts to the sort of terrible examples of fleshly desire you see in writers like Lucian, which are unbelievably overt and clear about sex between men and what queer male desire meant and what it was. So that again for me was another opportunity to just tilt the lens a little bit and show Shakespeare's life in a way that for me made sense of some of that kind of queer cultural background, whether it was the classics or the world of the street around him. And that for me was a sort of passage into thinking about a play like 12th Night, one of my very favorite plays, and in fact, not so much the mad confusion of the viola Olivia Orsino triangle but the relationship between Sebastian and Antonio, Sebastian, of course, viola's twin brother. Which was always for me being the kind of unsounded depth of it in lots of productions and lots of writing about that play. And for me being able to tie together some of that heritage of the classical world with the live day-to-day experience of intimate male desire opened up that element of the play for me. - I'm thinking that someone listening to this conversation might think, oh, but there were these strict laws against Sademy and, of course, it was against the law. And it made me wonder were those laws enforced in Shakespeare's time? - So this is a $65,000 question at the heart of the book. Sodomy as a sexual crime is very much on the statute book in Shakespeare's time. It had not quite in his lifetime, but not long before, migrated from the realm of religious law into criminal law. And to commit Sodomy was to face capital punishment. And that was, as the law put it, Sodomy committed with man kind or beast. And there was not a lot of experience in English criminal law of criminalizing sexual activity with the exception of rape. It had never actually happened before this law was passed in the 1530s. And that caused all sorts of problems around court procedure and evidence. So in order for someone to be found guilty in a court of law of Sodomy, the act needed to be witnessed independently witnessed to its full completion. So without that being ticked off the evidentiary list, the crime couldn't be successfully prosecuted. In very few cases of consensual sexual activity between men, are you going to get that level of granular, if I can put it that way, witnessed detail? So it's sort of, it's not that it's never prosecuted. There are handfuls of cases that appear in the courts, but very few unsurprisingly, very, very few cases. And interestingly, Sodomy is the only thing that exists on statute. Nothing else you do together in bed or anywhere else falls under law. And I don't think this was a sort of free for all of queer desire, but I do think that there was a lot of gray area. There's a lot of gray area. And I think society and indeed individuals are very good at not noticing the overlap between what they might do and what the law says they can't do. Often because they're not doing what the law says they can't do, they're doing something else. Right. And so I was trying to picture what the education Shakespeare really did acquire throughout his childhood and in London about queer sexuality was. And it's, it seemed like it would be that at least in this period, society would tolerate a kind of don't ask, don't tell. Well, I think that's probably true. And I have to say, one of the provocations for the earlier part of this book when I was writing it, was honestly, and I'm sorry to sound like a total sort of millennial when I say this, but like, without the internet, how did Shakespeare find out what Gasex even was? But like, there is sort of, there is sort of an element I was like, what does he actually know? And that was sort of why I went down this path with thinking about the classical inheritance. Because I can't prove that Shakespeare read these books, but it was possible to buy in St. Paul's Churchyard in London enough material in Latin or French or Italian Shakespeare reads to tell him in quite clear biological detail what people can do together. Like, he could find out whether or not he himself had those desires, he would have had access to that information. So I was able to satisfy myself that he would have been able to find out and knew what it was. Right. And he was a sponge. And it was all going into the place. This is absolutely. Yeah. And to follow up on what you were saying about Sebastian and Antonio, you write that Shakespeare wrote a queer couple in the classical mode in twelfth night. So what is it about them that make them queer in the classical sense? And what kind of, you've analyzed the sexual language in a really evocative way? So this comes out of my thinking about those classical writers. Plutarch is one of them in his collection of essays, "The Moralia," and Lucian is another. And both of them, Plutarch and Lucian write versions of those sort of rather distasteful and rather misogynistic kind of classical texts where language, Mediterranean men lie around and say, "But yes, but what is better? Love for boys or love for women?" And then kind of go into great detail about sort of which they prefer. But it made me think about Sebastian and Antonio as an age hierarchized couple. Antonio is an older, C-Captain, Sebastian is younger. And because Vyla and Sebastian are twins, it is fair game to take all forms of description of Vyla as a description of Sebastian. So we have a very clear sense of what Sebastian looks like. His sort of epicine beauty, his sort of thrilling kind of indeterminacy in terms of where he sits in the gender binary. So you have a sort of very recognizable classical model of an older man and a more youthful younger lover. And within that, we have this sort of very ardent, very moving actually description of their love for each other. Antonio is very open about the intensity of his desire. He talks about my desire, more sharp than phyloid steel. And the way in which Antonio is emotionally destroyed by what he thinks is Sebastian's betrayal, even though it isn't, it's Vyla, not understanding who Antonio is, is very searing. And their reunion at the end is actually features language, which is a bit more, almost a bit more ardent than the reunion of Sebastian and his sister. Or indeed, the marital unions between Vyla and Orsino and Olivia and Sebastian. And you're glossing over the sexual ponds. And well, I was just going to get to the sexual ponds while I was actually the kind of elevated stuff first. But no, we'll go straight for the smut. I'm going right to the sweat. As for you. As for you. And there's some wonderful sexual smut in their scenes together. There's this one bit where they've just arrived in Illuria. And Antonio gives Sebastian money. And Sebastian says, "I'll be your purse holder." And purses, it is the beef for scrutum, your purse bearer. Yeah. He talks about being had by Antonio at the local inn. And those are as kind of cheap as they sound, like I'm not making any great claim for those gags. But they're there. And they're there in this highly intense and eroticized presentation of their relationship. So for me, for me, that's sort of the high point, I think, in terms of Shakespeare's depiction of that level of intimacy and eroticized male intimacy. OK, we have to talk about the theater, because the theater, perennially, of course, the epicenter of Bohemian and countercultural life. And of course, it was a key destination in this period of Shakespeare's early time in the city around 1580. And the theater at that moment was in St. Paul's Cathedral, the home to Paul's Boys. And you have this really interesting conversation about the hit of 1588, which was Galatea. And you write that with the Paul's Boys, and you can tell us more about them. Galatea established London Theater as a place of queer and trans possibility. So unpack that for us. So the theater at St. Paul's is certainly in the 1580s, a very established part of sort of high level London society. It's an elite little theater built into a building attached to St. Paul's Cathedral. Queen Elizabeth's favorites were there. Well, yes, she never visited the theater but she has that troop of actors visit her frequently. And they are children, they're all choristers. They're in the range of the youngest of 8, 9, 10, oldest, 17, 18, 19. But the house playwright is the very wonderful John Lilly, super significant predecessor dramatist to Shakespeare, and the origin point for the thing that lots of us first learn about Shakespeare's comedies, which is they're full of girls playing boys. They're full of cross-dressed heroines and all sorts of broadly comic consequences of girls wearing trousers and running off into the woods. And John Lilly's Galatea is sort of the ear text for that. He's the first dramatist to do that. He's the first dramatist to recognize that when you're asking an audience to hold in their mind the real bodily presence of a young male performer, while they are playing a female character, who happens to have disguised herself as a boy, you have instantly a sort of titillating irony that plays into the presence in that playhouse already of homerotic energies that the managers of the playhouse are well aware of. And that's what I think is happening in Galatea. I think it's what Shakespeare takes as a lesson and he runs with it. And we see a kind of extension of the setup in Galatea in-- - As you like it. - Yes, you have this sort of celebration of Galatea in, as you like it, where you have the sort of astonishing moment of Rosalind disguised as Ganymede being wooed by Orlando, who allegedly doesn't know that Ganymede is Rosalind, but you know, disgust. And enacting a kind of queer wedding on stage as these two male appearing figures plight their trust to each other. - Well, before I let you go, I want to ask about this fascinating poet, Richard Barnfield, who had an influence on Shakespeare sonnets, but he isn't very well known. - But he should be, yeah, go ahead. - He is a decade or so younger than Shakespeare. And his standout work in 1594 is a long two-part pastoral poem called The Tears of an Affectionate Shepherd, Sick for Love, which is effectively an expansion and a rewriting of Virgil's Second Eclog. And Virgil's Second Eclog was a notorious poem about the love of a shepherd for a boy. And very well known at the time, and lots of anxious ink was spilt by early modern writers trying to explain precisely what that kind of love was. And Barnfield just, exactly, exactly. And Barnfield just marches straight in there and does a really long English version with his versions of Daphnis and Ganymede. And it's a really fun poem. It's really, it's quite a lot of it. And it is filled with a very heavily eroticized, heavily, I mean, I'm gonna say euphemized, but I mean, really, there's not a lot of euphemism going on in sort of the way that Barnfield allows Daphnis to talk about the things that he desires in his relationship with Ganymede. In the tradition of pastoral poetry, it doesn't really work. So he sort of ends up kind of love-lawn and sad. But Barnfield then reunites Daphnis and Ganymede in a sequence of 20 sonnets, called certain sonnets. And this is sort of game-changing because no one in England had ever thought to make two men the subjects of a love-sonnet before. A Petrokin love-sonnet is very clearly its own thing. It's the distant glacial mistress and she's got golden hair and ivory skin and red lips and she doesn't like the speaker and that's the dynamic of the poem. Barnfield changes that and makes this sort of beautiful distant ivory lover a man. And the speaker also a man. And there are some wonderful sonnets in this sequence. Quite, again, quite overt and quite extreme. There's a wonderful sonnet where Daphnis looks at Ganymede swimming in the Thames and sees him evade the fondling hands of Neptune, because Neptune's obviously really hot for him as well. And another really the most beautiful sonnet in the collection where Daphnis sits down next to Ganymede, who says to him, "What's up? "What's wrong? Why are you so depressed?" It must be love, who is she, who you love? And Daphnis hands over a pocket mirror to Ganymede and says, "We'll just open that." And that's the answer for why I'm feeling so depressed. And Ganymede opens the mirror and as the poem closes the final line, he straight perceives himself to be my lover. And it's the most wonderful poem because it removes the possibility that early modern writers thought about love in different ways when it was a man and a woman. Because Daphnis is saying to Ganymede, "I hear your definition of love, which is a love for a woman, "and I'm going to show you why you're mistaken "but not why you're mistaken about the cause. "Because the love I feel for you is precisely parallel "to the love you think I might feel for a woman." And it's I think it's a really moving poem. I mean that they still don't get together so it's not, you know, it doesn't end happily. But I think it's a very moving poem, a very, I slightly cheekily call it a sort of coming out poem. But in a sense, I mean that. And certainly I found it a very, very moving, moving sonnet. - So this is 1594. And Sonnets are very, very popular at that. This is right after the plague. Sonnets are big. These are printed sonnets published. And they sold well, right? - They sell well. So to say, affectionate, I put it, they cause a little bit of scandal. And the key thing, the key thing is that Shakespeare is just kind of getting going at this point. And Barnfield Sonnets are published first. And he is the one who indicates to Shakespeare what you can do with a queer petrocon summit. He's the one who shows to Shakespeare what's possible. Now Shakespeare takes that challenge and runs with it and does something much more profound and interesting in his collection. But it's really important to underline that Barnfield and Shakespeare are the only English writers, male writers, to publish love sonnets between men. No one else does it before, no one else does it afterwards. It's sometimes been said that, you know, this is a very conventional thing to do for early modern English writers is to write love sonnets to sort of beautiful young men. It really is not. It's very unusual. Barnfield does it first, Shakespeare does it second. And Shakespeare has certainly, well look, Barnfield knows and reads Shakespeare and likes him. Shakespeare evidently knows and reads Barnfield because you can see echoes between particularly certain sonnets, but also affectionate shepherd and his own work, particularly the sonnets. So that, again, for me was such an important hook into thinking about Shakespeare's work in the sonnets, particularly the sonnets that are focused on the fair youth on the young man because I'm not really, I mean, I don't know if I'm being completely honest when they say this, but I'm not really that bothered about a real fair youth or a kind of real biographical story. I'm sort of more excited by the idea of queer artistic inheritance, the idea that Shakespeare sees in Barnfield an amazing possibility for English verse by doing something dynamic and amazing and interesting with the subject and object of these poems and making that his exploration because that says to me that Shakespeare regards that kind of desire as a fabulous topic for serious love poetry. He takes it seriously, he's fascinated by it. Shakespeare got away with it though, but Barnfield didn't. So Barnfield, it's, again, it's really hard to sort of tell the story in every detail because biographical record is patchy. We don't have full evidence of where Barnfield ends up, but it looks really likely that these overtness of what Barnfield was doing, which was being really clear about the speaker's erotic preference and Barnfield also associated himself with Daphnis in print. And there is something exclusionary about the queer interest in both the affectionate shepherd and the sonnets, something much more identifiable from a kind of modern perspective as a sort of exclusive queer identity. He's presenting that very openly to the world. And it looks like he then runs into trouble with his family, his father goes to law and disinherits him. And he shone right there, and then kind of disappear. He disappeared. So his final collection comes out in 1598. Interestingly, a collection that is very concerned with money and not having any money. And then nothing. And it looks quite likely that he gets thrown into penures. He's cut off. He doesn't have support. He doesn't have an income from the theatre industry like Shakespeare does. That is kind of a warning to Shakespeare. And there's lots of arguments and suggestions about why Shakespeare's sonnets don't get published at the height of the Sonnet craze. He clearly has some. They circulate in 1598. We know that much in manuscript. But they're not published until a decade later. And there, to me, seems quite a good high probability that this notion of a young poet coming out with really astonishing and daring queer sonnets and then kind of crushing and burning acts as a deterrent for Shakespeare. Thinking, oh God, you know, is this really that wise? You know, I got to the end of your book. And it's so provocative. So I had a lot of questions. But one of them was, was the early modern period an example of a flourishing of queer subculture? Or is it that if we looked at any period at the arts, would we find a vibrant queer identity or subculture that's just long been overlooked or denied? So I wish I had the wide-ranging frame of reference and genius to answer that question. My gut is that there is lots of work to be done on lots of eras in terms of the space that was made grudgingly or willingly consciously or unconsciously for the expression of queer desire in men and women and in various forms of gender expression across society, but particularly in imaginative literature. But I would also say that I think there is a meeting of streams in the 1590s and 1600s, that is quite unusual. I think it's a combination of a high point of classical reverence for, or sort of reverence for the classical age and the modes of living that that suggested. It's the institution of the theatre, which platforms a certain form of embodied homoerotic desire, but also homoerotic humour and irony. And it is the fashion for highly arousing lyric poetry, so both the Sonnet form, but also the form of classical seduction narratives and transformation narratives mostly drawn from Ovid. And I think that does make this era quite unusual. Look, not a kind of, I don't think it's socially and culturally a flourishing time of queer desire because I think culture, religion, law is still very hostile to forms of gender and sexual presentation that go against God's will. But I think the society finds an enormous amount of spare bandwidth in terms of shared living space, shared beds, shared relationships and shared souls and hearts, and literary imaginative renderings of queer desire, which will have found real expression in lots and lots of people. They just will because that's what bodies and minds do. So I think there is something particular about Shakespeare's England in terms of queer history and queer heritage that I am very keen to draw attention to, and from my point of view, certainly, to celebrate and shout about from the rooftops. Well, Will, thank you so much for the book, and I enjoyed the conversation just as much. Thank you. Well, as did I. Thank you, Barbara. It's been a real pleasure. Will Tosh, head of research at Shakespeare's Globe. His new book, Straight Acting, the Hidden Queer Lives of William Shakespeare, is Out Now from Seal Press. This episode was produced by Matt Frasica. Garland Scott is the associate producer. It was edited by Gail Kernpaster. We had technical assistants from London Broadcast Studios and Voice Tracks West in Studio City, California. We had web production help from Paola Garcia Acunia, Leonardo Fernandez edits our transcripts. Final mixing services provided by Clean Cuts at 3C's Inc. If you're a fan of Shakespeare Unlimited, and you must be, if you're still listening to our credit roll, you are the best. And we'd love you even more if you could leave us a review on your podcast platform of choice to help others find the show. Shakespeare Unlimited comes to you from the Folger Shakespeare Library, home to the world's largest Shakespeare collection, the Folger is dedicated to advancing knowledge and the arts. 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