'Fluent and witty . . . confident . . . highly readable'
Kathryn Hughes, GUARDIAN

'Lively and accomplished'
Sophie Duncan, LITERARY REVIEW

'Engaging, enthusiastic and informative'
Philip Hensher, SPECTATOR

'Brilliant - so vivid and so sharp, fantastically clever and consistently fascinating'
KATHERINE RUNDELL, author of Super-Infinite

Was Shakespeare gay? The answer is both simpler and more complex than you might think . . .

Shakespeare's work was profoundly influenced by the queer culture of his time - much of it totally integrated into mainstream society. From a relentless schooling in Latin and Greek homoeroticism, to a less formal education on the streets and in smoky taverns, from the gender-bending of the early comedies to the astonishingly queer literary scene that nurtured Shakespeare's sonnets, this is a story of artistic development and of personal crisis.

Straight Acting is a surprising portrait of Shakespeare's queer lives - his own and those in his plays and poems. It is a journey back in time and through Shakespeare's England, revealing a culture that both endorsed and supressed same-sex desire. It is a call to stop making Shakespeare act straight and to recognise how queerness powerfully shaped the life and career of the world's most famous playwright.

'Magisterial and saucy . . . This fresh account kickstarts the queer canon of English literature: Shakespeare won't go back in the closet again'
EMMA SMITH, author of This Is Shakespeare

"Fluent and witty . . . confident . . . highly readable . . . Tosh's ambition is to present this rich material to a general readership, imagined here as consisting of the thousands of passionate enthusiasts who flock to the Globe each year, expecting to be educated and entertained in equal measure. It's an expectation that he meets magnificently" - Guardian

"Dynamic . . . A well-judged feat of public scholarship . . . Straight Acting will do much to advance the public sense of how Shakespeare and his world thought and felt about same-sex desire" - Times Literary Supplement

"Sparkling . . . bold and fearless. Taking another step towards uncovering a 'hidden canon' of queer desire, Straight Acting is a fitting tribute to a man who wrote for a future where 'love may still shine bright'. Tosh's book returns this future-focused favour, kicking open a door for the next wave of accessible queer histories" - History Today

"A creative and capacious book that moves smoothly between recorded and speculative history . . . [Tosh] offers persuasive readings of expressions of same-sex desire in Shakespeare's writing. This is by any standard a lively and accomplished biography of Shakespeare . . . His gift, rather, is to bring scholarly rigour to bear on queerness in early modern England. Straight Acting shines the same light on Shakespeare's England as some of the Globe's best productions" - Literary Review

"An engaging, enthusiastic and informative book about one facet, long denied or ignored, of the most teasing and various of all great writers" - Spectator

"Tremendously entertaining . . . Part playful polemic, part queer social history, Straight Acting is a book that casts The Bard's enduring brilliance in a surprising new light" - AnOther Magazine

"Snappy . . . a necessary provocation" - Evening Standard