795 Will Tosh and Queer Shakespeare (Revisited)

Summary

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The History of Literature

Episode 795: Will Tosh and Queer Shakespeare (Revisited)

Host: Jacke Wilson
Guest: Will Tosh, Head of Research at Shakespeare’s Globe
Release Date: April 23, 2026

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Overview

This episode explores the intersection of William Shakespeare’s life and works with queer history and desire. Jacke Wilson welcomes Will Tosh, Head of Research at London’s Shakespeare’s Globe and author of Straight: The Hidden Queer Lives of William Shakespeare, for an accessible, nuanced discussion about queerness in Shakespeare’s time, its presence in his works (especially the sonnets), and the significance of reclaiming this history both in scholarship and performance. The episode also begins with a heartfelt reflection on the mythic origin story of Ray Bradbury and his encounter with “Mr. Electrico”—a narrative about inspiration and the hidden forces in creative lives.

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Notable Segments & Timestamps

• Ray Bradbury & Mr. Electrico: 01:49 – 16:10
• Introduction to Queer Shakespeare and Will Tosh: 16:10 – 20:17
• Interview with Will Tosh: 20:17 – 62:48

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Ray Bradbury’s Origin Story and Literary Inspiration (01:49 – 16:10)

• Jacke recounts Bradbury’s repeated story of meeting "Mr. Electrico," whose electrifying presence and words—“Live forever”—sparked Bradbury’s lifelong devotion to writing and imagination.
• The reality of the story is less significant than its inspirational power. Bradbury’s myth (even if unprovable) is central to his identity and the creative dreams literature can ignite.
• Memorable Quote (Bradbury via Jacke):

  "Give the gift of life with our books, say to a girl or boy at age 10, hey, life is fun. Grow tall." (06:30)

• The segment draws a parallel to Shakespeare’s lack of “testimonials” and the way we seek to reconstruct truths from art, suggestively leading into the Shakespeare discussion.

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2. The Problem of Queer Shakespeare (16:10 – 20:17)

• Jacke sets up the episode’s central concern: the persistent question about Shakespeare’s sexuality, particularly in light of the sonnets addressed to a young man (“the fair youth”) and their long and controversial history of censorship or denial.
• The framing isn’t whether Shakespeare was “gay,” but what queerness meant in context, why it matters to ask, and what that does (or doesn’t) tell us about either Shakespeare or ourselves.
• Memorable Quote (Jacke):

  “One scholar said it would be better if Shakespeare had never written these sonnets. Complicates things so much. Can you imagine anyone who loves Shakespeare wanting less Shakespeare?” (15:25)

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3. Role and Mission of Shakespeare’s Globe – Research & Outreach (20:39 – 24:36)

• Will Tosh describes his role: beyond supporting theater productions, the Globe is a “think tank” engaging with Shakespeare’s historical and contemporary significance, especially relating to social justice and inclusivity.
• The Globe is committed to making Shakespeare’s works and the rich scholarly insights accessible to everyone, not just academics.
• Mission statement:

  “We sort of have a responsibility to treat him and treat his work with respect and make Shakespeare accessible to everyone. And that really means everyone...” (23:23, Tosh)

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4. Queerness in Shakespeare: It’s Not a Modern Imposition (24:36 – 31:44)

• Jacke foregrounds that recent scholarship isn’t inventing queerness for Shakespeare, but rather undoing centuries of erasure.
• Will Tosh explains:
  • “Queer” isn’t limited to sexual acts; it’s about a spectrum of desires, relationships, and expressions that don’t map easily onto modern identities.
  • The critical concept: queer desire existed in many forms—psychological, artistic, romantic, and physical—even if not named as such.
  • Recent decades of queer scholarship have opened up understanding, but fears of “projecting” modern labels have sometimes stifled historical empathy.
• Notable Quote (Tosh):

  “One doesn’t have to have sex to have a sexuality... Shakespeare is a queer artist because he is meaningfully and manifestly and productively inspired by thinking about queer desire.” (26:02)

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5. The Sonnets and the Case for Shakespeare’s Queerness (31:44 – 40:22)

• A large majority of Shakespeare’s sonnets are addressed to a young man, expressing intense, often eroticized love and desire.
• The early editorial history reveals how uncomfortable generations of critics (especially in the 17th–19th centuries) were. Pronouns and dedications were deliberately changed; critics wished the sonnets “had never been written.”
• Tosh pushes back against the need for biographical certainty (“Who was the fair youth?”):
  • The intensity, language, and innovation signal their queerness regardless of whether they’re “autobiographical.”
• Memorable Quotes:
  • (Tosh):

    “It’s possible, I think, for modern readers... to go like, oh, really? Are we not reading too much into the sonnets? They’re just conventional poems of the time. ...for the best part of 300 years, the critical scholarly establishment knew full well what those sonnets implied and did their best to either suppress them or argue away the fact that they contained queer sentiments.” (36:31)

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6. Queer Life in Elizabethan England (41:16 – 48:27)

• Shakespeare’s era featured a complex landscape for queer desire:
  • Permissible friendships: Intimate, even passionate same-sex friendships were socially accepted and celebrated.
  • Theater as Queer Space: All-male acting troupes frequently explored gender, desire and fluidity (e.g., Rosalind as Ganymede in As You Like It).
  • Neoclassical Influence: Education in the classics included direct engagement with queer histories and myths.
  • Prosecution Rare: Laws against sodomy were severe in theory but difficult to enforce, leading to few actual convictions.
• The shift toward policing and compulsory heterosexuality came much later.
• Notable Quote (Tosh):

  “Human feeling has a history. ... People like me did not pop into existence in the 1870s having not been around.” (29:28)

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7. Risk, Publication, and Erasure: Other Queer Writers & Shakespeare’s Choices (48:27 – 54:25)

• Richard Barnfield, a contemporary, published still more overtly homoerotic poetry and suffered professionally and personally for it—possibly a cautionary example for Shakespeare.
• Shakespeare’s sonnets weren’t widely discussed on publication, suggesting a mixture of embarrassment and cultural blind eye, but later centuries brought direct censorship.
• Memorable Quote (Tosh):

  “No one could care less. Barely anyone says anything about [the sonnets], and it’s quite hard to know why, unless people are just a little bit embarrassed and just think, oh god, what am I going to say?” (48:59)

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8. Performance Implications and Queer Readings (54:25 – 57:21)

• Tosh argues that recognizing the queer energies in Shakespeare’s plays shouldn’t be seen as imposition:
  • Plays like As You Like It and Twelfth Night are “a candid and full throated exploration of gender and sexuality.”
  • Modern productions gain depth and authenticity by embracing—rather than erasing—these complexities.
• Memorable Quote (Tosh):

  “Feeling that exploring queer desire in Shakespeare’s plays is some sort of modern imposition is a misguided feeling. ...Shakespeare’s plays are themselves redolent of the queer structures and institutions and ideas of Shakespeare’s own time. And it is artistically very rewarding to explore those energies.” (55:09)

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9. Making Queer Shakespeare Accessible (57:21 – 62:29)

• Tosh’s book is intended as an act of “synthesis and gratitude” to decades of queer Shakespeare scholarship, but its main goal is accessibility.
• He eschews jargon, aiming for a narrative that welcomes the general reader into the vivid, human, and textured queer culture Shakespeare inhabited.
• The book focuses on the first half of Shakespeare’s life, leaving room for a potential sequel.
• Memorable Quote (Tosh):

  “I don’t have any jargon in my book and I think I’m safe in making that function. ...There is, I hope, a story that makes a compelling case for why the queer culture of Shakespeare kind acted so powerfully on him and on his work.” (60:40)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the Sonnet Censorship:
  (Jacke):

  "[Critics] would be so opposed to the image of Shakespeare that’s coming through in the sonnets that... they would rather not have them at all." (36:14)

• On Early Modern Queer Experience:
  (Tosh):

  “You don’t have to have sex to have a sexuality.” (26:02)
  “The feelings I feel as a gay man and a gay scholar are fine comparison in the past, they do. People like me did not pop into existence in the 1870s...” (29:28)

• On the Meaning of Queerness in Shakespeare:
  (Tosh):

  “What I really wanted to do with this book was show beyond a shadow of a doubt that Shakespeare is a queer artist because he is manifestly inspired by thinking about queer desire.” (26:02)

• On Performance Choices:
  (Tosh):

  “If you don’t acknowledge that Sebastian and Antonio are lovers, the story doesn’t make much sense... exploring those energies… you'll just make a better production, it'll just be better.” (56:59)

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Summary Table of Major Topics & Timestamps

| Segment | Main Topics & Questions | Timestamps | |------------------------------------------|---------------------------------------------------------------|---------------| | Bradbury & Mr. Electrico | Literary inspiration, myth vs. fact, testimonial in art | 01:49–16:10 | | Queer Shakespeare Introduction | Framing the question, history of censorship | 16:10–20:17 | | Will Tosh on Globe mission | Research, outreach, inclusivity | 20:17–24:36 | | Queerness as Artistic & Human Heritage | Historical empathy, resisting erasure, sonnet evidence | 24:36–40:22 | | Queer Life in Early Modern England | Legal/cultural frameworks, theater’s queerness, classical ed. | 41:16–48:27 | | Risks & Publication History | Barnfield, consequences, embarrassment, revisionism | 48:27–54:25 | | Implications for Performance | Modern productions, complexity, authenticity | 54:25–57:21 | | Accessibility & Purpose of Tosh’s Book | Bringing scholarship to all, narrative strategy, no jargon | 57:21–62:29 |

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Final Thoughts

This conversation is an invitation to wrestle with the abundant complexity and queer energies of Shakespeare and his works, and to let go of the anxieties that have made readers and critics cautious for centuries. Tosh and Wilson argue convincingly for embracing not only the historical realities of Shakespeare’s world, but the rich rewards of letting those realities inform our reading and performance today.

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Next Episodes Teased

• “Women of the Renaissance”
• “Norman Mailer and the Letters of Ernest Hemingway”

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Guest Book Plugs:

• Straight: The Hidden Queer Lives of William Shakespeare by Will Tosh
  (Available for pre-order, US release: September 17)

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For More:

• historyofliterature.com
• Facebook

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Summary prepared for listeners seeking a rich, accurate sense of the full episode’s engaging discussion on literature, history, sexuality, and Shakespeare’s ongoing significance.

Transcript

[Jack Wilson]

The History of Literature Podcast is a

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I really look my best when someone else makes the decisions. Hey, we can all see you two way mirrors. Just share your size, style and budget, and your stylist sends personalized looks right to your door. Stitch Fix get started today@stitch fix.com I want to hug you. I'm going to hug you. I'm coming. I'm coming in for a hug. Hello, this is Jack. Emma and I are heading out for our History of literature podcast tour and so I'm taking a break from podcasting for a few weeks. During our vacation, we're going to play

[Jack Wilson]

some episodes from guests from the tour

[Co-host or Producer]

so so you can be part of the fun. Our tour's first stop is in London, where we're scheduled to attend a performance at Shakespeare's Globe Theater, and we will be greeted there by the Director of research, Will Tosh. Will was on the podcast back in episode 630, back in 2024. This episode also has the story of Ray Bradbury searching for his Mr. Electrico. I hope you enjoy it. We start today with Ray Bradbury, the popular Author of Fahrenheit 451 and many other books and stories as well. He was a writer who could crank it out. Kind of a Stephen King type, I would say. Someone who's not trying to win prizes so much as the hearts and minds and attention of everyday Readers. And he was very good at it. He said once, if Norman Miller liked me, I'd kill myself. Something like that. Didn't want the respect. He didn't want to be a writer's writer. Wanted to be a reader's writer. And so he was. That's not to say he was simple minded or easy. His ideas are great. They flowed out of him, those ideas, along with a sense of adventure and a sense of wonder. An electricity, one might say. Where did this come from? Where did this drive, this energy come from? Well, he had an origin story himself. He told the story often. It's a beautiful story, and I'm going to repeat it here. It's been hard to find the factual evidence for this story. He might have made it up. Some people say that he. He must have. But he insisted that it was real, it had really happened. And hey, the historical records don't preserve everything. I went to a lot of carnivals in my day in the Midwest. In fact, I worked at a lot of them. And you know what? They don't survive in the historical record. They disappear into the night. There are no chroniclers writing down everything that happens at every carnival in every small town every summer. The moments so important to me have vanished. I can't find them in any history book or newspaper or historical record. And that's just looking back 30 or so years. Ray Bradbury was looking back 70 plus to a time when history was even less preserved than it is now. So maybe it did happen. Maybe it was real to him. But I'd like to think it was real, real based in reality. In any case, the point is what it meant to him and how he passed that story along to us. This comes from this iteration of the story, comes from the Paris Review. The interviewer says, does literature then have any social obligation? And Bradbury says, not a direct one. It has to be through reflection, through indirection. Nico's cousin Sakis says, live forever. That's his social obligation. The Saviors of God celebrates life in the world. Any great work does that for you. Olive Dickens says, live life at the top of your energy. Edgar Rice Burroughs never would have looked upon himself as a social mover and shaker with social obligations. But as it turns out, and I love to say it because it upsets everyone terribly, Burroughs is probably the most influential writer in the entire history of the world. Why do you think that by giving romance an adventure to a whole generation of boys, Burroughs caused them to go out and decide to become special? That's what we have to do for everyone. Give the gift of life with our books, say to a girl or boy at age 10, hey, life is fun. Grow tall. I've talked to more biochemists and more astronomers and technologists in various fields who, when they were 10 years old, fell in love with John Carter and Tarzan and decided to become something romantic. Burroughs put us on the moon. All the technologists read Burroughs. I was once at Caltech with a whole bunch of scientists and they all admitted it. Two leading astronomers, one from Cornell, the other from Caltech, came out and said, yeah, that's why we became astronomers. We wanted to see Mars more closely. I find this in most fields, the need for romance is constant. And again it's pooh poohed by intellectuals. As a result, they're going to stunt their kids. You can't kill a dream. Social obligation has to come from living with some sense of style, high adventure and romance. It's like my friend Mr. Electrico, interviewer. That's the character who makes a brief appearance in Something Wicked this Way Comes Right. And you've often spoken of a real life Mr. Electrico. Though no scholar has ever been able to confirm his existence, the story has taken on a kind of mythic stature. The director of the center for Ray Bradbury Studies calls the search for Mr. Electrico the Holy Grail of Bradbury Scholarship. Bradbury, yes. But he was a real man. That was his real name. Circuses and carnivals were always passing through Illinois during my childhood.

[Will Tosh]

And.

[Co-host or Producer]

And I was in love with their mystery. One autumn weekend in 1932, when I was 12 years old, the Dill Brothers combined shows came to town. One of the performers was Mr. Electrico. He sat in an electric chair. A stagehand pulled a switch and he was charged with 50,000 volts of pure electricity. Lightning flashed in his eyes and his hair stood on end. The next day, I had to go to the funeral of one of my favorite uncles. Driving back from the graveyard with my family, I looked down the hill toward the shoreline of Lake Michigan. And I saw the tents and the flags of the carnival. And I said to my father, stop the car. He said, what do you mean? And I said, I have to get out. My father was furious with me. He expected me to stay with the family, to mourn. But I got out of the car anyway and I ran down the hill toward the carnival. It didn't occur to me at the time, but I was running away from death, wasn't I? I was running toward life. And there was Mr. Electrico sitting on the platform out in front of the carnival. And I didn't know what to say. I was scared of making a fool of myself. I had a magic trick in my pocket, one of those little ball and vase tricks. A little container that had a ball in it that you make disappear and reappear. And I got that out and asked, can you show me how to do this? It was the right thing to do. It made a contact. He knew he was talking to a young magician. He took it, showed me how to do it, gave it back to me. Then he looked at my face and said, would you like to meet those people in that tent over there? Those strange people? And I said, yes, sir, I would. So he led me over there and he hit the tent with his cane and said, clean up your language. Clean up your language. He took me in and the first person I met was the illustrated man. Isn't that wonderful? The illustrated man. He called himself the Tattooed man, but I changed his name later for my book. I also met the strong man, the fat lady, the trapeze people, the dwarf and the skeleton. They all became characters. Mr. Electrico was a beautiful man, see, because he knew that he had a little weird kid there who was 12 years old and wanted lots of things. We walked along the shore of Lake Michigan and he treated me like a grown up. I talked my big philosophies and he talked his little ones. Then we went out and sat on the dunes near the lake. And all of a sudden he leaned over and said, I'm glad you're back in my life. I said, what do you mean? I don't know you. He said, you were my best friend outside of Paris in 1918. You were wounded in the Ardennes and you died in my arms there. I'm glad you're back in the world. You have a different face, a different name, but the soul shining out of your face is the same as my friend. Welcome back. Now why did he say that? Explain that to me. Why? Maybe he had a dead son. Maybe he had no sons. Maybe he was lonely. Maybe he was an ironical jokester. Who knows? It could be that he saw the intensity with which I live. Every once in a while at a book signing, I see young boys and girls who are so full of fire that it shines out of their face. And you pay more attention to that. Maybe that's what attracted him. When I left the carnival that day, I stood by the carousel and I watched the horses running around and around to the music of beautiful Ohio.

[Will Tosh]

And.

[Co-host or Producer]

And I cried. Tears streamed down my cheeks. I knew something important had happened to me that day. Because of Mr. Electrico, I felt changed. He gave me importance. Immortality, a mystical gift. My life was turned around completely. It makes me cold all over to think about it. But I went home and within days I started to write. I've never stopped 77 years ago and I've remembered it perfectly. I went back and saw him that night. He sat in the chair with his sword. They pulled the switch and his hair stood up. He reached out with his sword and touched everyone in the front row, boys and girls, men and women, with the electricity that sizzled from the sword. When he came to me, he touched me on the brow and on the nose and on the chin. And he said to me in a whisper, live forever. And I decided to. He decided. Ray Bradbury decided to. And so far he has. My kids read Fahrenheit 451. They've read it, and it's likely that their kids and grandkids will be reading it to and on and on. The impressions we make serve survive us, or at least can survive us long after we're gone. Which is why we try to leave impressions based in love and excitement and joy rather than misery and hate and selfishness. There's enough of that, and future generations will surely produce enough on their own to supply their needs. They might need our help with a little compassion being handed down from us to them. We don't know if Mr. Bradbury actually met a Mr. Electrico. That still seems to be the Holy Grail of Bradbury's scholarship. We do have his testimonial of it, which I find persuasive. Sometimes the testimonial comes not from an interview but from a text. Such is the case with Shakespeare, where if we believe that the man from Stratford wrote all the plays and sonnets that are generally attributed to him, we're stuck without any interviews or autobiographies or testimonials by contemporaries. It's just a handful of references in legal documents and a few other incidental sources. We know when he was baptized, for example. We know his father made leather gloves, things like that. And yet what we have is some of the greatest insights into human psychology ever recorded. We have a delight in language and a facility with it that rings down through the ages like music, so that we can feel it dance within us. It should be a great full throated celebration. The mightiest yawp ever yawped and yet, people being people, they sometimes limit just how yawping our yawps can be. In particular, they say, love Shakespeare. Gotta keep Hamlet and Othello and Lear and Falstaff around. Of course. But these sonnets with this fair youth. Shakespeare didn't, ahem, like young men in that way, did he? No, no, not our national bard. That wouldn't quite do, would it? One scholar said it would be better if Shakespeare had never written these sonnets. Complicates things so much. Can you imagine? Can you imagine anyone who loves Shakespeare wanting less Shakespeare? And yet it is. They explain away and excise and censor and do what they can to keep the obvious but inconvenient truth from being discussed. I can hear the Emilia Bassano fans saying, well, well, here's a way to square that circle. That man you love from Stratford doesn't have to be queer. If these plays and poems are written by a lady like Emilia Lanier, AKA Emilia Bassano, problem solved, people. But let's set that aside. We could explore that with Jodi Picoult, as we did last week. And you can explore even more of it by picking up Jody's book by any other name. Today we have a scholar who says Shakespeare the man can open up new dialogues for us, new areas of discussion, new ways of understanding love and sex and what it all meant for him and others and what it means for ourselves. As we all go about the business of trying to find the love that makes sense to us, to us, to

[Jack Wilson]

each of us, to all of us.

[Co-host or Producer]

Shakespeare knew about all kinds of love, the love that steadies itself over time into something long and enduring, the hard work, the low candle kind of love steady with an occasional flicker. And he knew about the love that's more like an explosion, all heat and light, a supernova. You can't take your eyes from the gravitational power that can turn into a black hole and pull you and your Juliet or your Romeo into it with you, the question arises, was Shakespeare gay? Will Tosh, head of research at Shakespeare's Globe in London, has been fielding that question a long time. His new book explains what his answer

[Jack Wilson]

is to that, but also tells us

[Co-host or Producer]

it's an easily answered question, but it's not really the right question to ask. He will explain all that when he joins us after this.

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[Jack Wilson]

who's the head of Research at Shakespeare's Globe in London. He was educated at the University of Oxford and Queen Mary University of London, and he's written several books. He's here today to discuss his new book, Straight the Hidden Queer Lives of William Shakespeare.

[Co-host or Producer]

Will Tosh, welcome to the History of Literature.

[Will Tosh]

Thank you so much, Jack. It's a pleasure to be here.

[Jack Wilson]

So we're going to get to a million dollar question, although I'm going to question whether that is actually a million dollar question. We'll talk, but before we get there, I was wondering if you could tell us a bit about being the head of research at Shakespeare's Globe.

[Will Tosh]

Of course.

[Jack Wilson]

And you're actually at the Globe right now in an office, which is fascinating. Wonderful. What does that mean exactly, to be the head of research there?

[Will Tosh]

Well, indeed, as we speak, I am in our offices on Bankside in London. Shakespeare's Globe, as lots of your listeners I'm sure will know, is a multi headed beast or perhaps a multi legged stool. We're obviously an extraordinary theatre. Two extraordinary theaters, the Globe and the Slam, wanna make a playhouse. But we also have an enormous education and research program serving not only school students and teachers and adult learners, but also undergraduates and postgraduates and researchers and academics the world over. So we're really a kind of think tank of Shakespeare and early modern drama, both in its own time. We've done lots of work on the staging of Shakespeare's plays or the assumed staging of Shakespeare's plays. Lots of work on what we can learn from a practice's research approach to thinking about Shakespeare's drama. But we also focus on Shakespeare today and Shakespeare and Shakespeare's work in our own cultures, both domestically in the UK and globally. And one of our real focuses at the moment is Shakespeare and social justice and thinking about ways in which the accumulated years that Shakespeare has been at the heart of English and British public life and then American and global public life have not always been kind to Shakespeare's work. Shakespeare has inherited all sorts of things that have become associated with his work that have shorn up nationalism, systems that oppress and restrict. And also, of course, Shakespeare's own time saw the emergence of a lot of those notions and ideas which we're trying to unpack now. So we really like to think about how Shakespeare can still be useful in that work and how we can enjoy Shakespeare and keep his work current by acknowledging that sort of history of usage and abusage.

[Co-host or Producer]

Right.

[Jack Wilson]

Well, it is wonderful. I mean, my question was going to be whether the research was mainly to support productions and answer questions for directors and the set designers and so on. But it sounds like it's much more expansive than that. And it is kind of a. I guess it's because the Globe had the resources to do it, or maybe because

[Co-host or Producer]

people were looking to the Globe to

[Jack Wilson]

have these questions answered. But you, you wound up having kind of a mission of promoting Shakespeare and being sort of Shakespeare's ambassadors to the

[Co-host or Producer]

world, so to speak.

[Will Tosh]

I think that's a really good way of putting it. I think it's a sort of mixture of both, really, Jack, in the sense that Shakespeare is such a powerful cultural force and such an astonishing mine of insight and human experience that we sort of have a responsibility to treat him and treat his work with respect and make Shakespeare accessible to everyone. And that really means everyone, and that means doing some work with Shakespeare in order to enable us to do that. But that's your first question. We also do a lot of work with our colleagues in the theatre department, and we support directors and theatre companies in their own explorations of the sentiments and ideas and ideologies of Shakespeare's time. And we then sort of, as it were, you know, share that work with the world to the best of our ability, either in blog posts and social media and speaking to sad media and print media and getting out and talking to broadcasters and podcasters like yourselves, and indeed, in writing books that speak to scholars and students, we hope, but also are absolutely fully intended for the general reader and for the general public. You know, one of the things we really want to do is make scholarship, something that is like Shakespeare, accessible for everyone.

[Jack Wilson]

Well, that is a nice transition to your book, which I understand is kind of written for a general audience, and I have some questions about that later to talk about what it's like to bridge the world of scholarship. But let's get the elephant in the room out of the way, which is a lot of people would probably see the title the Hidden Queer Lives of William Shakespeare, and think, okay, I know what this book is going to be. It's going to be about the question, was Shakespeare gay? And I think the way that I like to think about this is you said in the introduction something like, it doesn't take a whole book to say, probably. And instead, the reason why this is an interesting question is not because it's something that we have strong reason to believe, but maybe can never, will, never able to confirm, as with so much else in Shakespeare's biography, but that there's a couple of things here. One is that it might be helpful to understand what that would mean in the Elizabethan context, and maybe more to the point, maybe that isn't quite the right question to ask, and there's a problem with framing the question that way. So let's save the latter and start with the former and think before we turn to a question like, was Shakespeare gay?

[Co-host or Producer]

What should we know about Elizabethan society

[Jack Wilson]

that would help us to put that question in context.

[Will Tosh]

Well, it's such a great question, isn't it? And of course you're right to say that it's the question that's sort of motivating the book. But you're also really right to say that isn't the book isn't really a cold case. It's not me setting out to show one way or the other who Shakespeare slept with or when or kind of in, you know, what position. I also sort of think like not to get sort of, you know, too down to brass tacks too soon, but one doesn't have to have sex to have a sexuality. And I think that sort of, that sort of skewed quite a lot of discussions about historical queer experience or experience outside of the kind of erotic mainstream. And the thing that I really wanted to do with this book was show sort of beyond a shadow of a doubt that Shakespeare is a queer artist because he is meaningfully and manifestly and productively inspired by thinking about queer desire. And that is in a variety of different ways. That is a sort of asexual, romantic, same sex friendship way, that is in a very embodied, eroticized same sex relationship way. And that is in all sorts of other unions and connections that have a kind of queer current which don't necessarily map precisely onto modern labels of identity. But nor did we expect them to because we're talking about a time four centuries or more in the past, which I suppose links with your. Your second really important question about what we should be alert to when thinking about past experiences of sexuality. And this is a huge topic of historical and cultural research, as I'm sure lots of your listeners know. There's been certainly four decades really getting on for five decades of extraordinarily important and interesting and high level philosophical and ethical and historical and literary exploration of what the history of sexuality is. And there have been various eras and movements and changes about what the general received are. Even in my own time I've been through a PhD training into being an academic and I have seen the kind of goalpost slightly shift in terms of what people are happy to kind of take as their assumption. Basically since the 70s, 80s, 90s, 00s and teens and now 20s, we've seen the assumptions around the historical stability of the idea of that personal sexuality shifts and change. So I identify as a gay man. Lots of people around the world have similarly clear identities. To use that language has a relatively short history, a history of a century and a half something. And that's Often hindered historians and other scholars in terms of recovering historical experience of queer desire. Because people didn't use the terms that we use today. They don't necessarily think in absolute identitarian terms about their sexuality. The way they thought about their own erotic self was impacted by lots of things that many of us don't any longer feel particularly important, Although some of us do. That might be issues around religion and guilt and carnal excess or restraint. All those different sorts of forces that come to play. That doesn't mean people didn't have what we would recognize as queer desires. That's a bodily thing. That's not a learned behavior. As we prove beyond reasonable doubt in our own time. That's an inborn part of who you are. So I've always been slightly unsatisfied by the sort of obedient scholarly rule that says we can't seek in the past the people who felt like you felt because they wouldn't have considered themselves like you. And I want to push back against that a little bit. Because I think human feeling has a history. And I think the feelings I feel as a gay man and a gay scholar are fine comparison in the past, they do. People like me did not pop into existence in the 1870s having not been around. So I came to write this book feeling that although the sort of world of queer Shakespeare scholarship Has been an absolute gift to the world, it has also slightly muddied the picture when it comes to people outside of that scholarly community. We're not quite sure whether we're allowed to say people were queer in the past or not. And I just wanted to say, yeah, we are. It's fine. We are allowed to say that because people felt and people felt. And they acted on those feelings in various ways, either culturally and artistically or romantically and relationally or physically and carnally are all free in all sorts of interesting combination. And that was the world I wanted to depict in Great Acting.

[Jack Wilson]

Well, and I don't know how much resistance there is among people who know Shakespeare and are immersed in his work. But if anyone feels as if this is sort of unfair or projection or historically inaccurate. I mean, we do have the sonnets. And I mean, it's kind of one of the things I wanted to ask you about was the ways maybe we could just jump there. The ways that the sonnets have been bowdlerized or baudelairized, however you say it, or the way that the fair youth has been edited out over the years kind of demonstrates the way people have. This isn't an example of someone like you looking for little scraps of evidence in order to build a case out of nothing. It's almost the other way around. It's people who have done all kinds of work to try to erase this question from the picture.

[Will Tosh]

Well, thank you for that, Jack. I think that's a really good way of putting it. And again, I'm sure your listeners will absolutely know the backstory to the summits. But these are a collection of poems ultimately published in 1609, towards the end of Shakespeare's working life. And there was some question mark over precisely how they made it to the press and who was sort of ultimately responsible for them being published. But there's no real question mark. But they reflect Shakespeare's work and Shakespeare's intellectual arrangement of the numbered sequence of poems. And although, again, there is some discrepancy over which poems have a really clear gendered pronoun and which don't. I mean, honestly, it's pretty clear that of the 154. I'm just going to hope I get that number right. Sonnets, 127 of them, the vast majority about about sort of 3/5 of them, are addressed by the poetic speaker to a beautiful young man. And it's an incredibly intense and overwhelming relationship for the speaker of the poem. It is eroticized, not explicitly all the time, but on numerous occasions. It is psychologically obsessive relationship. It's a relationship complicated by certain early modern ideas around what a relationship between men should look like and what it shouldn't. So the speaker is of a socially inferior position to the addressee, and that causes him all sorts of problems. And it's one that gets imbricated and folded into another erotic relationship with a female addressee. He's sometimes known as the dark lady. Both dark lady and fair use a term applied later. It also seems to be the case in some of the descriptions in the dark baby poems that the mistress, probably the imagined mistress, is understood to be a woman of color. So there's this really extraordinary combination for Shakespeare's time of a set of love poems where in each case the addressee is in striking contrast to the traditions of late Elizabeth and early Jacobean love poetry. And the traditional subject of that sort of love poetry is a blonde ice queen who doesn't look at the speaker, who is a sort of unattainable, idealized beloved. And what Shakespeare does is say, well, that's quite dull. What I want to do is turn that around and have as my love object and an Exquisite, golden, beautiful man and a woman who is sexually painful and her appearance acts in contravention some of those sort of. Sort of racist ideals around blonde beauty. So it's an astonishingly bold move on Shakespeare's part, artistically and I think sexually, he's being incredibly daring and upfront about what he's doing with his love poems. Now, obviously, a kind of. The next question is, well, who were these people? Who was the young man? Who was the woman? Ultimately, and this is probably a really embarrassing confession, ultimately, I don't really care because I think the tone of the lyric poem, sonnet, it's first person, it's spoken, it puts the reader in the position of the speaker's eyes. It's designed to sound autobiographical, but it doesn't necessarily have to have been. And I think Shakespeare was, let's all agree, a good enough writer to draw on feelings and experiences that are his and turn them in a different direction or take them in a different direction that turns them into poetic literature rather than self, you know, auto fiction. I don't feel that we need to have proven who the fair youth or the dark baby are in order to recognize what's queer about what Shakespeare is doing. Right.

[Jack Wilson]

And yet in 1640, a publisher changed the sonnets, changed sweet boy to sweet love, and changed pronouns. And you mentioned in 1711 there was a republication that said, here's 154 sonnets, all of them in praise of his mistress. And what I was really struck by, there were critics later who said, boy, it's impossible not to wish that he'd

[Co-host or Producer]

never written the sonnets.

[Jack Wilson]

Which is really kind of astonishing when

[Co-host or Producer]

you think about a critic who would

[Jack Wilson]

be a fan of Shakespeare but be so opposed to the image of Shakespeare that's coming through in the sonnets that. That they would rather not have them at all.

[Will Tosh]

Well, I think this also really speaks to your earlier point in the sense that it's possible, I think, for modern readers and all of us today who are not overly bothered about these things to go like, oh, really? Are we not reading too much into the sonnets? They're just conventional poems of the time. And I might, I suppose, rebuttal to that would be for the best part of 300 years, the critical scholarly establishment knew full well what those sonnets implied and did their best to either suppress them or to argue away the fact that they contained queer sentiments. And we certainly see that in those early editorial interventions. So the addition you mentioned in 1640 by John Benson, and it's not actually A kind of thorough sanitization, that edition. There are only a handful of kind of pronoun and cycle changes, but there are enough to really turn the tone, if you like, from something that, that's meaningfully queer. Something that sits much more within a kind of conventional heteroerotic. And by the 18th and 19th century, critics are much more overt about their discomfort around what the sonnets appear to suggest. And they're uncomfortable because just as. And the sonnets are actually quite late in entering the Shakespeare canon. I mean, they're not reprinted after 1609, until 1650. They're not included in the first Folio. Plenty of well connected, educated Shakespeare Fans in the 17th century didn't know Shakespeare wrote sonnets. So it was sort of possible, you know, not to be aware of them as a thing. But as they come into the canon of English literature and the canon of Shakespeare's writing, Shakespeare himself is also at that time being elevated to the level of national poet and soon sort of globally significant poet and symbol of English exceptionalism. And the sonnets are a real fly in the ointment because they don't say, here is the sort of riding great white English imperialist who we can export around the world. They say, here is an anguished, self reflective, verbose poet obsessed with his queer desire for a young man. And that's not what people want. The sonnets always have that sort of ambivalent relationship to Shakespeare's corpus more broadly. And it's only really in the 20th century and beyond that scholars came to the sonnets with a kind of opener or more open mind about their complexity, their obscurity, their misogyny. The Dark lady poems are deeply, deeply misogynist and also racist. And the sort of patriarchal logic that lies behind in fact the queer poems as a way of sort of linking together to the two men, to the exclusion of the woman. So they're, you know, they're an astonishing work of art. They're an astonishing work of art that reflects, I think, in some ways they're a sort of psychosexual dossier of an early 17th century, late 16th century English man with, as I'm trying to argue in the book of kind of strong queer sensibility, but not solely or maybe a kind of, maybe a bi sensibility, you know, that is finding a way to express in art and poetry those complex feelings of affection, intimacy, erotic closeness, desire, self hatred, aggression, fear that are compounded within, trying to. Compounded within trying to live a life in the 1590s and 1600s. That composed of both queer and ethnic desire.

[Jack Wilson]

Okay, let's take a quick break and then come back with more from Will Tosh. Okay, we're back. So, Will, what would this have meant for Shakespeare as a person and as a poet and writer to be dealing with these feelings at the time that he was. Was same sex desire often prosecuted? How was it treated? Was he living in pockets of London or England where this he wouldn't have felt so particularly unique? Or what do we know about the milieu here?

[Will Tosh]

So I think this is where a kind of an awareness that queer desire in the past is not the same as queer desire in punishment or not that that is one thing either, of course, but it's really important because I think one of the things that's hindered a kind of sort of appreciation of the kind of what I'm calling the queer world that Shakespeare knew is the sense that it was all one thing. And it was either licit or illicit, present or absent, punished or unpunished. And I think it's more than one thing. I think it's a number of different contexts and sets of feelings and discourses and actions, all of which are queer in different ways, all of which have a different relationship to legality and permissiveness and the opposite. So sorry, that sounds deeply, kind of like academic and complex, but let me try and explain what I mean by that. That Shakespeare society had various ways in which queer desire in men and queer desire in women was expressible and sometimes even supported, that is, in, for example, the expression of intimate desire between friends of the same sex in highly romantic and ardent terms. In fact, exactly the kind of terms, the same terms that were later directly applied to what we now call companion of marriage. So when we now talk about, you know, my soulmate, my other half, when we talk about one's straight partner, in Shakespeare's time, that exact same language was used about your same sex friends. So that was a discourse that was very much permitted by society. Another discourse or context might be the theater, where commercial theatre companies like Shakespeare, Lord James Linton and the King's Men were all male. There were women absolutely involved in the business, but not on stage. And female roles were taken by boys, adolescent boys, young men. Writers absolutely were aware that there were queer energies and attractions in putting adolescent boys, young men in female attire and having them play women conclave. And they played up to those energies and those connections, be it in a play like Shakespeare's, as yous like it, where the main heroine, Rosalind, dresses as a boy when she Flees the royal court and goes into the forest. And she takes as her sort of pseudonym gaming. It's a mythical figure, mythical figure who was swept up by Jupiter from the fields outside Thoi to be Jupiter's cupbearer on Mount Olympus, because he is so beautiful. And so Ganymede becomes a sort of the standout metaphor for queer desire, but also the name typically for a boy either abused for sexual purposes or hired or kept. So Rosalind dressing as Ganymede is a big old sign that there are queer energies firing off from that, from that position. And indeed what Ganymede then does in the forest is in the guise of a boy, seduce a man called Orlando. So all sorts of things are kind of going on there that have a very strong queer current. Another discourse might be the world of classical literature. Shakespeare and his fellows are completely fluent in Latin. They're educated in Latin. They have access to the fruits of the European printed Renaissance with books coming in all over Europe. And there are texts by, for example, the Greek, the Romano Greek historian Zach, which details the specific natures of age hierarchized homosexual relationships in ancient Greece and indeed in Rome, other writers, such as the late Vatican writer Lucian, who wrote these sort of extraordinary dialogues about the relative merits of love for boys or love for women. Now, Shakespeare isn't so hot on Greek, but he's certainly able to read Latin. And these texts are translated into Latin. Well, it's English, some of them. Shakespeare's not an idiot, you know, he's reading this stuff like he's reading other works of classical literature. And he is being confronted with another way of thinking about sex and desire and sexuality, which differs to his own world in some respects. But he's also being told very clearly. Knowledge of this material marks you as an educated English gentleman. So there is a sense in which that knowledge of hidden queer desire in the classical path is constitutive of an identity, a modern English identity. And I could name other sort of discourses and contexts where queer desire finds a home. Where there is a form of state repression is in the criminal law, because the criminal law makes the act of sodomy punishable by death, which is the ultimate sanction. Can't be much worse than it. It's a crime that's allegedly laid out in the Bible and it's a crime that certainly has strong religious associations but is in non religious legislation. Now the thing about that legislation is that it's unbelievably unwieldy and very, very difficult to prosecute. And again I don't want to go into vast amounts of bodily detail, but the Buggery act, which is what the antisodomy legislation falls under, says that for Bulgari to be prosecuted in a court requires proof of both penetration and emission of semen. And proof means there are two eyewitnesses for that taking place. Now, given that in most cases the only two.

[Jack Wilson]

Yeah, you'd have to be one of the two.

[Will Tosh]

Well, quite. And so the, the numbers people prosecuted for sodomy in Shakespeare's life are minuscule. It really is a very unprosecuted practice. Now that's not to say that this was a time of sort of great queer civil rights with everyone doing anything they wanted. It wasn't, but it was a point when people didn't, I think, look constantly over their shoulder, afraid of being arrested by a plain clothes policeman in a public convenience. That is not the world. That world comes later. It's a few, it's 100 years down the line. It's coming, but we're not there yet. So that's the kind of harder bit to unpick as a historian because we don't have the criminal records that tell us these people would know guny. We don't have those records. What we have is evidence of a vibrant and active urban community and these creative cultural works that explore queer desire. So I guess what I'm doing in the book partly is putting these two things together and just very slightly raising my eyebrows. Just like put, put these things together, put them in the same field as you. What are we missing when we aren't thinking about queer desire in society and life and also queer desire on the page? I think stuff is going on, let's just put it that way.

[Jack Wilson]

Well, that was going to be. My next question is how free Shakespeare would have been to write about what he wanted to write about. And it seems like there's a couple of things here that would open him up to feel fairly free. One of them would be that that standard being so high, it's not as if he was writing about penetration and emission of semen with respect to any kind of relationship. That wouldn't have been probably something that would have occurred to him to write about.

[Will Tosh]

Yes, look, I think what we actually see with the sonnets is that he is kind of sailing quite close to the wind, I think, in terms of what is broadly culturally acceptable. And I say that partly because the sonnets come out quite late, some years after we assume that Shakespeare wrote most of them and also some years after the sort of major craze for sonnets had passed. So they were a bit of a kind of late entry onto the scene. But they also come out after the publication of poems by another writer who isn't very well known and needs to be better known, who is contemporary with Shakespeare, in fact, a few years younger, some years younger, called Richard Barnfield. Richard Barnfield had a fairly short career as a really very productive and successful poet, lyric poet in London, mid-1590s. And three of his major poetic works are strikingly homoerotic in a way that is even more overt than Shakespeare sonnets and indeed than Shakespeare's phase. And what Barnfield seems to do, in fact, is innovate the idea of the queer songs. So it seems to be Barnfield, who is the first person in English to publish a sonnet in which both speaker and addressee are male, and the first person to take that idea of the sort of idealized, unreachable female beauty and gender swap that character. So it's a queer relationship. He comes out with a series of sonnets in 1595 called certain sonnets. And that collection follows an earlier pastoral, longer poem called the Tears of an Affectionate shepherd, in which he introduces the characters, the characters in his sonnet sequence who are called Daphnis and Ganymede. Again, now I really recommend listeners go away and look at some of Barnfield because the poems are beautiful. They're really accessible and easy to follow, especially if you're familiar with Shakespeare's style. They're in a very similar kind of mode and tone. And they are quite explicit about the erotic, bodily nature of Daphnis's desire. Now, they also don't necessarily end in consummation. There's quite a lot of yearning going on and quite a lot of desire, but not a huge amount of on the page sex. But they are very, very emotionally and erotically explicit. And it seems to be the case. It's not 100% clear, but it seems to be the case that Barnfield gets into trouble with these other. He gets into trouble with the sort of audience, the printed, the print audience of his work. And it seems also to be the case that he is disinherited by his family and suffers personal consequences for overstepping the mark, taking overt queer desire out of the world of Latin literature or classical literature, where only educated men can access it, bringing it into popular populist English poetry. And it seems like that's a bad move for him. Seems like he suffers there right now, I would say that Shakespeare's delayed response in having his sonnets published may have something to do with that. That Shakespeare sort of sees what the potential consequences are for poems that just exceed what's acceptable and goes, oh, maybe I don't risk it. So I think probably he is aware of a limit. I think there is a limit. I can't say as a historian, literary historian, scholar of the era, what that limit is. I don't think yet anyone can. But I think it's really important that we see that there are artists at the time, writers at the time, who are exploring the self, the erotic self in that way, putting stuff out there and seeing what the pushback is. I think for Barnfield that pushback was quite damaging. I think for Shakespeare the pushback was minor or more minor. But really interestingly, when the sonnets are published in 1609, honestly, no one could care less. Barely anyone says anything about, and Shakespeare is a nationally famous poet, but barely anyone says a word about the summit. And it's quite hard to know why, unless people are just a little bit embarrassed and just think, oh God, what am I going to say? And it's not long before, as you mentioned, Jack, you get the next generation of editors like John Benson coming in and tidying them. So something is happening with the sonnets being published in 1609, with this kind of, you know, move into the later 17th century and then into the 18th century when those barriers, those really rigid barriers of compulsory heterosexuality, compulsory white heterosexuality come smashing down and sort of put a stop to what Shakespeare is doing both in his plays and his poetry and what Barnfield is doing as well. There's a change, there is a change later on. And that I think is really. Well, it certainly affected the way we understand Shakespeare's work and it's affected the ease with which we read queerness that is there and has been.

[Jack Wilson]

Do you think that knowing what we know now about Shakespeare, or maybe I should say what has kind of always been known, but maybe we're a little bit better prepared to accept what that means and to kind of want to learn more about it rather than just to sweep it off the stage. Do you think that certain plays should be performed differently than they have been? Or do you think that it's more an issue of directors or actors should be able to. Should be free to make different choices and audiences should be better prepared to accept the implications of non straight interpretations without letting their historical biases get in the way?

[Will Tosh]

I mean, the short answer is yes. I mean, the slightly more nuanced answer is we're not in the business at Shakespeare's grave of policing how people perform Shakespeare. And I'm certainly not in the business of doing that as an academic employed by a theatre. Having said that, I think it is certainly the case that feeling that exploring queer desire in Shakespeare's plays is some sort of modern imposition is a misguided feeling. I mean, putting on a Shakespeare play today, by definition is a modern imposition. That's what we're doing. We're bringing Shakespeare's plays into the current moment. It's not that one shouldn't impose modern things on Shakespeare, but the fact is Shakespeare's plays are themselves redolent of the queer structures and institutions and ideas of Shakespeare's own time. And it is artistically very rewarding to explore those energies. So if we think about a play like we've already talked about, like as you like it, to not enjoy the fact that that play is a candid and full throated exploration of gender and sexuality is really missing a trick. Think about a play like Twelfth Night with the shipwrecked Viola and her lost twin brother Sebastian. The fact that Sebastian comes into the play ready made with a male lover called Antonio, who is absolutely part of the love pentangle or whatever it is among Viola and Olivia and Orsino that is part of the story. And if you don't acknowledge that Sebastian and Antonio are lovers, the story doesn't make much sense. So there are, I think, I think it is important that those relationships and those energies are really acknowledged in Shakespeare's day. Partly because you'll just make a better production, it'll just be better.

[Co-host or Producer]

Right?

[Will Tosh]

Yeah.

[Jack Wilson]

I've always found with anything to do with Shakespeare that the more complex and the more layered and the more complicated and the more there is to think about and dive into, the better it is. I mean, I want to watch all of these plays multiple times, but I don't want to watch the same performance 10 times. I'd rather see some different things that make me think about some more things.

[Will Tosh]

Yeah, yeah, absolutely, absolutely.

[Jack Wilson]

So you write that your book, as far as you've been able to establish, is the first full length book about Shakespeare, Queer World that isn't intended primarily for scholars and university students. And I just wanted to ask what you see. Shakespeare scholarship has opened up for us in the past 50 or so years and what you see your book as being able to bring to the rest of us, for those of us who haven't been in academia and been able to benefit from, you know, all of the articles and books that have been written for more of an academic audience.

[Will Tosh]

So Straight Acting is, in a very significant way, an act of synthesis and gratitude of a whole body of scholarly work and to the scholars who conducted it over the past five decades. So much of this book is a kind of distillation of work by other scholars with us and not with us in the uk, in the US and elsewhere, who have completely transformed, as far as I'm concerned, the study of Shakespeare and early modern drama and really revivified, in so many ways, an approach to the literature and culture of that time. And I'm so grateful to be part of that academic world. And I feel very, very lucky to have had the chance to put out this kind of book because there has been a sense, I think, that the world, he said, generally the world has not been massively interested in kind of queer Shakespeare scholarship in the decades up till now. I think it was a fairly. It was allowed to be a fairly niche interest, but I don't think queer desire is particularly niche, actually. There's a lot of us out there, and I feel that Shakespeare is a gift to all of us. And an understanding of Shakespeare's queer world is also the gift. And I wanted to find a way to bring some of that insight, some of that scholarship to a wider audience. There are challenges with that because like any scholarly body of work, it's a work that is technical at a high level. There is a scholarly language which is necessary for the advancement of ideas which are sometimes hard to translate. I don't have any jargon in my book and think I'm safe in making that function. I don't use scholarly terminology beyond narration and world building. And so I suppose one of the challenges for me was to find a way to bring the insights of four decades, five decades of queer Shakespeare scholarship into the body of a work which is structured around a biographical narrative and booked to descriptions of place and time. So that slightly structured kind of. That's what is sort of determined what I include and what I don't. And I ended up writing a book that focuses more or less exclusively on the first half of Shakespeare's life. So although my final chapter goes on a bit of a kind of journey towards the end of Shakespeare's life, I basically stopped the story in 1599, which is when the Globe Theater is being built on Mount size, which seems like a fairly perverse thing for me to do as head of research at Shakespeare's Globe in 2024, Got My Story before I get on to the good stuff. But actually it makes sense in terms of the world I want to depict. It also means that, you know, there's scope for a volume too, if people like it. But that for me was a sacrifice that was really worth it because I didn't want at any point a reader to feel that they were getting lost in the weeds of literary theory and jargon. There isn't any in this book. But there is, I hope, a story that makes a compelling case for why the queer culture of Shakespeare kind acted so powerfully on him and on his work.

[Jack Wilson]

Well, it is definitely a story that can be told without jargon. It's such a human story. One of the things that's endlessly fascinating about Shakespeare is how he stands for us as such a creative story spirit and a creative force and perhaps a genius and just one of the pillars of Western civilization. And so anything that gives us more to unpeel when it comes to Shakespeare and to see what he was dealing with and what he was faced with and how he responded to that and how that made its way into his poetry and plays, to me is a book to be grateful for. And I would also be grateful for a volume two. And I would guess that you're colleagues at the Globe would probably wouldn't mind if you dipped into the years after the Globe was built as well.

[Will Tosh]

They wouldn't mind that they might have something to say about my going away from my desk when I left you on a book. We'll see if I can persuade them to let me go.

[Jack Wilson]

Okay. Well, Will Tosh, the book is called Straight the Hidden Queer Lives of William Shakespeare. Will Tosh, thank you so much for joining me on the history of literature.

[Will Tosh]

It was such a pleasure. Thank you for having me.

[Jack Wilson]

Okay, that's going to do it for this episode of the History of Literature. My thanks to Will Tosh for joining me.

[Co-host or Producer]

You can pre order Will's book now if you'd like. It will release in America on September 17th. Straight acting the Hidden Queer Lives of William Shakespeare. Available for premier Pre order until September 17th and for regular order after that.

[Jack Wilson]

My thanks also to Ray Bradbury and

[Co-host or Producer]

Mr. Electrico, wherever he may be. There's a great article from Smithsonian magazine that talks about all of these. They look for Mr. Electrico. They also don't find him, but they talk about the possibility that it was that he existed. They talk about all these other electrical wonder workers, as they were called, who were. Who appeared in carnivals all over the country at around this time. So there's no need to get too up in arms about a misremembered or invented detail or two. Let's let Mr. Electrico have his day. Speaking of having one's day, we will celebrate some women next time. Women of the Renaissance. We're going to give them their day. Some women who wrote and were largely forgotten. Forgotten.

[Jack Wilson]

Next week, that's, that's Thursday.

[Co-host or Producer]

And then next week we will leap forward from Elizabethan times to the 20th century with Norman Mailer and the letters of Ernest Hemingway. And if you happen to wonder how it is, we can promise four episodes in two weeks after doing just three episodes every two weeks for so, so many months. Well, that's part of our own electricity wonder working as we have re energized ourselves and are planning to put out two episodes every week. We're back to our old schedule, the pandemic era initiated schedule. We'll do that for the foreseeable future. There are just too many books and ideas and topics to cover, and we're kind of in a mad scramble to see if we can make this podcast think work, frankly. You think we'd, you think we'd know

[Jack Wilson]

by now, but the numbers are not

[Co-host or Producer]

as good as we would like. And we have to figure out if this is something we should, we should press forward with or if we should allow it to slip into the ether along with Mr. Electrico and his wondrous sizzle. I'm Jack Wilson, hoping that all your sizzles are wondrous and that your wonders are sizzling, for that matter. Thank you for listening and we'll see you next time.

[Will Tosh]

Sam.