Sceptre snaps up study of Shakespeare's queer culture

Sceptre has acquired Straight Acting: The Many Queer Lives of William Shakespeare by Will Tosh.

Juliet Brooke, associate publisher at Sceptre, pre-empted world English rights from Eleanor Birne at PEW for publication in 2023. Seal Press, an imprint of Basic Books, will publish in the US.

Straight Acting is an alternative biography of William Shakespeare viewed through the lens of the queer world of Elizabethan England. Tosh, research fellow and lecturer at Shakespeare’s Globe in London, shows how strongly Shakespeare was influenced by queer culture of the time, which permeated all walks of life from the schoolroom to the stage and from the Inns of Court to James I’s royal court. Sceptre said: "Shakespeare’s early work—his gender-bending comedies, his erotic verse, his sonnets—is rich with evidence of the queer influences on his writing from Ovid’s Metamorphoses to the work of his contemporaries Christopher Marlowe, John Lyly and Richard Barnfield. Straight Acting will challenge the debate about anachronistic labels and introduce a fresh take on the literary world of Elizabethan and Jacobean England."

Tosh is the author of two academic books, Playing Indoors: Staging Early Modern Drama in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse (Bloomsbury) and Male Friendship and Testimonies of Love in Shakespeare’s England (Macmillan). He had a previous career as an actor and appears frequently as a commentator on TV, on the radio and in online media discussing Shakespeare, the theatre, and early modern culture.

"I was captivated by Will’s proposal," Brooke said. "For all the conversations about the Dark Lady [a woman described in Shakespeare's sonnets] and Shakespeare’s sexuality, there is a real dearth of storytelling and scholarship that goes one step further and explores the world behind the labels. Combining fresh research and playful storytelling, Straight Acting will be a welcome addition to the Shakespeare canon and a vital contribution to queer history.’

Tosh said: "I’m thrilled to be working with Juliet and the phenomenal teams at Sceptre and Basic. Straight Acting started as my answer to 'was Shakespeare gay?' and I have a feeling that the more appropriate question might be “was anyone in Shakespeare’s England straight?”. I can’t wait to share Shakespeare’s complex, alluring and conflicted queer world, and introduce some of his spectacularly daring contemporaries who wrote the kind of homoerotic verse that got them banned from anthologies for the next 400 years."