Teaching Shakespeare remains exciting because his themes, language, and characters continue to offer new avenues for analysis and interpretation. Visionary scholarship and modern critical lenses allow us to deepen our understanding of Shakespeare while affirming the identities of all students—a necessary approach in a time when 1 in 4 high school students in the U.S. identify as LGBTQ. When we think of queer literature, we may not immediately think of Shakespeare, but the 2024 book Straight Acting: The Hidden Queer Lives of William Shakespeare, invites us to follow the queer-coded lineage of Shakespeare's development as a man and an artist. Told through a combination of biography and imaginative vignettes, Straight Acting brings young Shakespeare to life, tracing his evolution from a free-spirited boy restrained by the harsh expectations of his time to a brilliant playwright embarking on the most successful chapter of his prolific career.
Queer Influences in Literature and Early Modern Theatre
Beginning with Shakespeare’s “breeching"—a moment marked by the transition from the traditional skirts worn by small boys and girls to the pants he would need to begin his formal education at age six—Straight Acting outlines the seminal texts and classical influences that shaped Shakespeare’s perception of himself and the world. While keeping an eye on the components of Shakespeare’s curriculum that challenged traditional understandings of gender and sexuality, Tosh does not shy away from highlighting the ways in which misogyny permeated Shakespeare’s education. "William's ongoing religious instruction was designed to create a generation of Protestant Englishmen sure of their superiority over inferiors,” Tosh writes, “and fully aware of the scriptural precedent for male supremacy over women" (25). Tosh notes that, in childhood, Shakespeare studied a syllabus "devoid of female authors and for the most part uninterested in women's lives" (26). Instead, most of his early education would have been inundated with Latin lessons—a skill that granted Shakespeare access to perspectives on gender and sexuality far removed from his religious upbringing. Pointing to the works of writers such as of Plutarch, Virgil, and Lucian, Tosh explains, "A man's Latinity was his pathway to queer sexual knowledge, should he choose to take it, and ancient literature was the source of the code-words of queer male desire familiar to those with a classical education" (78).
Tosh goes on to discuss early modern writing and stage productions that influenced Shakespeare at the onset of his career, many of which feature queer understandings of gender or sexuality in strikingly blatant ways. Tosh highlights John Lyly’s Galatea (1592), an "imaginative fertiliser [for] Shakespeare's brain" that explored desire and transformation through its portrayal of two girls in love, one of whom becomes a boy (93). "Galatea established the London theatre as a place of queer and trans possibility," writes Tosh, "at least for those inclined to detect it" (94).
Like many playwrights of his time, Shakespeare embraced the storytelling possibilities of cross-dressing, a device that also created space to explore gender fluidity. "In the years after Galatea, up to the closing of the theatres by Parliament in 1642," Tosh writes, "seventy-five surviving plays featured a heroine, played by a boy, in male disguise" (95). While this device makes for entertaining antics on stage, Tosh argues that there was something exceptional about the ability to play with gender in theatre at a time when gender norms were so rigid and severe. "It's likely the theatre acted as a beacon and a haven," he states, "for people whose gender identity and sexuality found fewer safe harbours elsewhere" (102).
Queerness in Shakespeare’s Works and Characters
Modern artists often queer Shakespeare’s plays by manipulating gender and plot, but Tosh argues that no reinterpretation is needed—we need only read what was written on the page. "How often were we encouraged—even allowed—" he asks, "to think about the queer dynamics between Romeo and Mercutio, or Hamlet and Horatio, or Helena and Hermia?" (2). Tosh argues that these dynamics are easy to find, highlighting Mercutio's unspoken longing for Romeo, thinly veiled by his deeply queer-coded teasing and wordplay, as an example. "[Shakespeare] was fascinated by the feelings of the unfulfilled third wheel," Tosh explains, "the low-key queer best friend whose desire for the hero is discernible at moments of particular extremity or tension" (36). Tosh points out that in Act 3 of Romeo and Juliet, Tybalt repeatedly calls Mercutio a ‘consort’ of Romeo's, a term that carried sexual implications (‘to consort’ could mean ‘to have sex’), prompting Mercutio’s sharp, double-edged retort (37). From this perspective, one could argue that it was Mercutio's unrequited love for his friend that led to his tragic death.
Censorship Then and Now
While the queer themes, characters, and relationships are not hard to find in Shakespeare's work, it did not take long for those in power to begin censoring these elements. "As far back as 1640," Tosh writes, "the publisher John Benson released a rearranged edition of Shakespeare's sonnets with some tactical de-queering: here a pronoun switch, there a transformation of 'sweet boy' to 'sweet love'..." (6). Of course, not much has changed when it comes to censoring Shakespeare, despite his modern standing as a beacon of white, Western, male exceptionalism. However, it is not just Shakespeare's queerness that has come under attack. Referencing Florida's 2022 Parental Rights in Education Act, which led to teachers omitting large chunks of text from their Shakespeare lessons due to sexual references, Tosh makes the point that "Shakespeare's work manages to attract suspicion both for its susceptibility to appropriation by queer theatre-makers, and for being unwholesome in and of itself" (3). Perhaps most rampant of all, Tosh blames a general lack of understanding about Shakespeare's life and influences for what he calls "a misguided sense that queer readings of classic texts are some sort of modern imposition" (2).
Straight Acting reminds us that queer scholarship (as well as scholarship at the intersection of race, gender, and Shakespeare) only seeks to uncover what has always been present in the text, buried under centuries of intentional erasure. These perspectives can enrich our understanding of Shakespeare as educators and equip us to tackle complex topics in the classroom that are deeply relevant to our students' lives. Additionally, embracing the complexity of Shakespeare's identity and his work takes nothing away from our ability to see ourselves in the plays, but instead only adds to our understanding of the vast spectrum of human experience.
