Will Tosh

A year and a day ago I was celebrating, far too giddily, the UK publication of STRAIGHT ACTING: THE MANY QUEER LIVES OF WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, and I’ve continued to squawk about the US hardback, trade softcover and UK paperback. This Pride month I want to celebrate the books I’ve read in the past year that have changed the way I think about queer historical storytelling - the books that I wish I’d been able to read before embarking on mine! First, QUEER AS FOLKLORE by @sachacoward - an epic, welcoming excavation of fairies and unicorns and mermaids and more. Scholarly, enticing, funny, and written with such love and care. Next, CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD: INSIDE OUT by @katherinebucknell - you won’t find a finer biography of a 20th century gay writer. Fact. SOME MEN IN LONDON by @prnparker is the glorious wide shot to Katherine’s forensic close-up: an unrepeatably detailed and textured portrait of postwar queer male life (except Peter did repeat it, in Vol 2!). I adored STRANGE RELATIONS by @loco_mote when I read it in proof: it showed me how to fuse literary criticism with group biography and beguiling, poetic wit. Now, I could have read RACISM AND THE MAKING OF GAY RIGHTS by @lauriemarhoefer as it came out in 2022 - and boy should I have. A case study in how to approach a complexly bad gay from history. I think my most beloved read of the past year was the Proustian (for me anyway) wonder that is THE LIGHT OF DAY by @cwbstephens and @louiseradnofsky - a dazzling journey back to the first years of this century, and then further back to the queer crucible years of the 1960s. And I’m lucky to have learned from Matt Cook over many years, but his latest work (with Alison Oram) on queer histories beyond the metropolis - QUEER BEYOND LONDON - has taught me so much on looking up and out. So happy Pride to all these writers and their many grateful readers 🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈❤️ #booksofinstagram #bookstagram #straightacting #shakesqueer #pridemonthreads #pridemonthbooks

Today my book comes out in North America! It’s an absolute dream come true to bring STRAIGHT ACTING: THE HIDDEN QUEER LIVES OF WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE to 🇺🇸 and 🇨🇦. The subtitle might bear a tweak but the book inside is its UK twin, and here’s a little glimpse of what people have been saying: “Sparkling… bold and fearless… [Kicks] open a door for the next wave of accessible queer histories.” (HISTORY TODAY) “Fluent and witty… confident… highly readable.” (GUARDIAN) “Dynamic… A well-judged feat of public scholarship.” (TLS) STRAIGHT ACTING is the first book on Shakespeare’s queer world aimed at a general readership, and I can’t wait for you to read it. A huge thank you to the wonderful team @sealpress @basicbooks and @hachetteus for bringing it into the world so beautifully 🏳️‍🌈🎭🪶 #booksofinstagram #bookstagram #publicationday #toshtakesmanhattan #straightacting

It’s publication day for STRAIGHT ACTING: THE MANY QUEER LIVES OF WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, out now from @sceptrebooks 🏳️‍🌈 🎭 🪶 I may have been banging on about it for months but it’s now available in bookshops up and down the land (I recommend @the_globe ’s magnificent emporium) and I can’t wait for readers to get their hands on it. Here’s what people are saying already: “Snappy… a necessary provocation” (EVENING STANDARD) “Creative and capacious… lively and accomplished” (LITERARY REVIEW) “Vigorous… lively… thoughtful” (KIRKUS) ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ “A masterpiece that all Shakespeare nerds need in their library… A truly exceptional read” (MIND THE BLOG) STRAIGHT ACTING is the first study of Shakespeare’s queer work and culture for a wide audience. It builds on decades of radical scholarship to tell a new story about his education, art and life that reveals the central - and contested - place of queer desire and identity in early modern England. It’s the book I’ve wanted to write for over twenty years. I hope you like it. #bookstagram #booksofinstagram #shakesqueer #junereleases

I feel to my shame that books about Shakespeare don’t get the showing they merit on this grid (not counting my own, which are grotesquely over-represented) so here is an absolute delight: Marissa Nicosia’s SHAKESPEARE IN THE KITCHEN, which I’ve been eagerly awaiting (I do, after all, spend the majority of my waking hours either at work or making dinner). Nicosia proposes that the ‘physical act of cooking can transform our understanding of once familiar texts’, a mild paradox that is characteristic of the book’s sophistication: historical cooking - a ‘partial act of attenuated time travel’ - is both an estranging act and one that makes the world of the plays more understandable. This is literary criticism performed with a culinary sensibility - and virtuosic culinary skill. Nicosia- find her here as @rare_cooking - weaves a path through the foodways of Shakespeare’s plays, and makes versions of the dishes mentioned or implied in her key texts: a venison pasty from As You Like It, the candied orange succade of Much Ado About Nothing. Some recipes are more estranging than others - her first pass at the sort of posset that Lady Macbeth drugs to stupefy King Duncan’s guards results in a drink both ‘viscous and seminal’. The making is a parallel act of scholarship to the reading. Baking Perdita’s warden pies prompts a reflection on The Winter’s Tale’s interest in suspended animation and other timey-wimey stuff: warden pears lend themselves to long storage, a quality extended even further by being baked inside an airtight piecrust - the Tupperware of its day. And what to make of Cleopatra’s ‘salad days’? Not a youth of raw flavourlesness, certainly: Renaissance sallets were artfully prepared mixtures that gave a cook full rein to impress. Cleopatra’s ‘salad-like self-fashioning’ produced a layered, composed and displayed individual ‘meant to astonish as well as nourish’. @routledgebooks #booksofinstagram #bookstagram #spotlightonshakespeare #rarecooking

Very excited to be part of this year’s @britishlibrary Food Season. I’ll be joining @willtosh3 from the @the_globe food historian Sheila T Cavanagh and actor Simon Russell Beale to discuss the role food has in Shakespeare’s plays. More details via link in bio. #foodseason @the_history_cook @angela_clutton @melissafood @joe.allen.food @britishlibrary @britishlibrary_events

It would have been more fitting had I picked this up in a bookshop in Denver. Well, I passed no bookshops in downtown Denver (*looks judgementally over spectacles*) and PLAINSONG by Kent Haruf came to me via my dad, who has a thing for assertively unadorned prose fiction. Holt is a town of Haruf’s creation lying some hours from Denver, and the setting for most of his novels. PLAINSONG (published in 1999) takes place in a carefully-delineated but unspecified earlier era: references to hand-cranked ditto machines and Nancy Reagan and videotaped daytime TV fix us in the very early 80s; language and landscape and mentality are still stuck in the Dust Bowl. Haruf’s theme is the weary relentlessness of doing the right thing in a world that will only ever think the worst of you: ageing bachelor brothers Harold and Raymond take pregnant 17 year old Victoria Roubideaux into their homestead when her mother rejects her; deeply moral teacher Guthrie raises his boys Ike and Bobby (juvenile versions of the slightly Tweedledum/dee-ish Harold and Raymond?) while fending off the threats of the town’s Biff-like lunkhead. Saviours abound in Haruf’s Holt, and I wasn’t delighted by the relentless comparisons between Victoria and the herds of heifers that also benefit from the brothers’ care, but it’s a deeply human novel about love and thoughtfulness by a quietly expert writer. When I was putting it on the shelf I found another copy already there, purchased or given years previously: a sign of the book’s unassuming qualities, perhaps. Anyway, now I have two: who wants one? @picadorbooks #booksofinstagram #bookstagram #kentharuf #plainsong

Prepare for the most erotically fraught language lesson since Alice took Princess Katherine through some helpful body vocab in Henry V. When twentysomething French tutor Thierry covers le doigt, les bras and l’estomac with Annie, it’s a very short beat before his arms and flat stomach (and broad back and shaven head and glorious youth) have jolted her out of a life-sapping existence as a wife and mother. The title of this absolutely knock-out novel by @sonyawalgerofficial comes from Annie’s garbled attempt to find the French for ‘housewife’ during her first lesson with Thierry. There’s an echo of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, but also a nod to Annie’s profession: her job is to ‘stage’ houses for sale, to furnish and decorate them so they give buyers the impression of artful homeliness. Annie the former artist now constructs illusory wifehouses for a living (failed artistry is also a keynote in the story). I suspect WIFEHOUSE will get compared to Miranda July’s All Fours (passim.) with which it shares some surface similarities - in particular an upwardly-mobile LA setting (even though most of it takes place in Connecticut) and a mother who leaves her family for the sake of her soul. I have to say I felt considerably more enriched and challenged by Walger’s novel. It made me think of Woolf’s judgement of Middlemarch - ‘one of the few English novels written for grown-up people’. There’s a serious literary wisdom behind Wifehouse, and a boldness in its exploration of desire, loyalty, abandonment and purpose. @manilla_press #booksofinstagram #bookstagram #wifehouse #sonyawalger

Happy Shakespeare's birthday, everyone! We've released @willtosh3 , the Head of Higher Education at @the_globe 's episode to celebrate 🥳 A huge thank you again to @waterstonesgowerstreet for hosting this live recording🎙️(and for the wine!) Listen at the link in bio for an episode full of fascinating history, queerness, breeching, sonnets, the Globe's history, and much more ☝️

In the 1970s my grandmother Rosamond - she who discovered an Agatha-Christie-worthy medieval crime saga before she had to give up her career as a historian - started writing biographies of her family members, including this wild account of her mum Madge. Madge worked her steamship passage to South Africa as a bit-part player in Shakespeare, and in the middle of the Boer War she dressed as a boy to take battlefield photographs and send dispatches to the newspapers. Where do I audition for Who Do You Think You Are? #whodoyouthinkyouare #runsinthefamily #dontmesswithmadge

I don’t have a photo of the inside of the marvellous @hoxtonhall (a high-stage music hall from the 1860s, and let me tell you it was *vertiginous*) but here’s a preshow shot from the warren of back-of-house dressing rooms and rehearsal studios, moments before the work-in-progress premiere at @queerscore of IF IT BE SIN, a life-story-in-song of the Elizabethan queer sonneteer Richard Barnfield (lyrics by the man himself, music by @joe_atkins and sung by @harry_waller_ with me… filling in the blanks). I think Barnfield would have enjoyed the Marie Lloyd glamour of it all. He would certainly have loved Joe’s magnificent settings (inspired by sixteenth-century compositions for the virginal, and Kurt Weill kabaret), and Harry’s absolutely beautiful performance. Barnfield was obsessed by music, so it seems very fitting that Joe scored so much of it: 🐝 Some of the very best bits of ‘The Affectionate Shepherd’ 💋 Sonnet 6: ‘Sweet coral lips where nature’s treasure lies’ 🏊🏼 Sonnet 7: ‘Sweet Thames, I honour thee’ 👨🏼‍❤️‍👨🏻 Sonnet 8: ‘Sometimes I wish that I his pillow were’ 🪞 Sonnet 11: ‘Sighing and sadly sitting by my love’ As well as his lyric ‘If music and sweet poetry agree’ and a bit of ‘The Complaint of Poetry for the Death of Liberality’. This was a really special experience: a total joy to work with such gifted creative artists on a project of resuscitation and artistic response. And a huge thank you to @drjesswalk and @_biz.ko and everyone at Hoxton Hall for making it such a happy occasion. It’s not the end of musical Barnfield, I predict (and not just because I appear to have captured our album cover). #queerscore #richardbarnfield #ifitbesin #ohthensini

A joyous evening rehearsing IF IT BE SIN, a new work-in-progress show celebrating Elizabethan poet and contemporary of Shakespeare, Richard Barnfield and his extraordinary poems centred around same-sex desire. Written and presented by @willtosh3 , performed by @harry_waller_ with brand new settings of Barnfield’s poems composed by @joe_atkins who also accompanies. THIS Saturday, 11th April at 8:45pm as part of the @queerscore festival @hoxtonhall .

Full confession: I haven’t seen the movie (yet). But Elorbbie drives the algo much more vigorously than this dreich Penguin Classic cover, and WUTHERING HEIGHTS (book) is about a thousand per cent more deserving of frothing discourse than - I am led to believe - the film. Look, this is not my first reading, although I’d lost my copy and had to hunt high and low to find a new one (scarcity being the happy outcome of a Warner Bros. marketing budget). I loved it at school, felt oddly puritanically shocked by it on a re-read in my 20s, and now I’m knocked sideways by Emily Brontë’s technique. Whiplash fast; not an ounce of fat on the writing; absolutely headlong pace. She’s just so good at the engineering. Take those alliterating, duplicating names (Hareton, Heathcliff, Hindley, Edgar Linton and Master Linton, Cathys major and minor) that stand for the multigenerational-Monte-Cristo revenge obsession at the novel’s heart. And I remember writing boring essays at school about Nelly the apparently unreliable narrator (is she?), but what I notice now is that Nelly’s ‘you’ as she addresses the terrible narcissist Lockwood is also the implied ‘you’ of the refined, clueless, probably southern reader (I am *such* a Lockwood). I’m also Team Nelly, the patient witness to the ‘senseless, wicked rages’ that storm around her, whose pride in her own stoicism is itself a form of conceit (although nowhere near the chronic Main Character Energy of Cathy: ‘I thought, though everybody hated and despised each other, they could not avoid loving me’). It’s an almost magically brilliant book, both equal to the misdirected fandom it receives - in what world is Heathcliff a romantic hero? - and at the same time endlessly, bountifully strange. It’s the perfect book for a decadal re-read, and I won’t let twenty years elapse before the next one. #booksofinstagram #bookstagram #wutheringheights #teamnelly