Episode 119: Shakespeare in Love and the Queer World of William Shakespeare with Dr. Will Tosh

This week Dr. Will Tosh drops in to talk about the many complexities of Shakespeare's relationships, Shakespeare's role as a working writer, and the competitive landscape of playwrights of the time, along with Will's new book, Straight Acting: The Many Queer Lives of William Shakespeare.

About our guest:

Dr. Will Tosh is interim Director of Education (Higher Education and Research) at Shakespeare’s Globe, where he is responsible for undergraduate and postgraduate course, events for adult learners, and the Globe’s scholarly research programme. Will researches and writes about the literature and culture of Shakespeare’s England, and his work at the Globe includes dramaturgy, new writing development, and public engagement in person, in the media and online.

Will holds degrees from the University of Oxford and Queen Mary University of London, and has worked at Shakespeare’s Globe since 2014. He developed the Research in Action format of public scholarly workshops, and helped to curate the Antiracist Shakespeare webinar series from 2021-24. He is the host of ‘That Is The Question’, the Globe’s award-winning YouTube series. Will is the co-director of the Shakespeare Centre London (based jointly at the Globe and King’s College London), and a mentor for the Early Modern Scholars of Colour network. He has served on the programme committee for the Shakespeare Association of America.

Will is the author of Playing Indoors: Staging Early Modern Drama in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse (2018), and Male Friendship and Testimonies of Love in Shakespeare’s England (2016), which revealed the intimate social circle of the Elizabethan spy Anthony Bacon. His most recent book is Straight Acting: The Many Queer Lives of William Shakespeare, which was published to wide acclaim in 2024. Will writes and reviews regularly for academic journals as well as the Times Literary Supplement and other news publications.

Transcript

Jason Herbert (00:00.036)
tell you, it makes me feel very fancy to feel that I have this countdown here. here's a story I usually tell. I know you've used Riverside before, but the story I always tell is that, you know, it records separately. So if there's internet issues or whatever. And I was living in Florida when I first started this podcast and I was using Riverside and inevitably I lost power because we had just a horrible, horrible storm come through. And I was recording on a film called Lincoln and with two amazing scholars, right? You know this film, right?

Will Tosh (00:26.51)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jason Herbert (00:29.502)
And as we come back in, have my two friends, Megan Kate Nelson, Lizzie Trubinsky, who were on the pod. I lost power for like five minutes. So they just kept going. And I come back in and they're ranking the hottest presidents. And I'm like, Jason, who do you think is the hottest? And I'm like, I don't know Garfield, obviously. So, you know, but the whole time I was like, what have you done to my infantile podcast?

Will Tosh (00:43.172)
Mmm

Will Tosh (00:50.83)
What's happened in the five minutes that you're away? Well, I did a podcast with Al Storer a weeks ago on Riverside, which once it got working was great. It took a while to wind up. Yeah.

Jason Herbert (00:58.564)
Mm-hmm.

Jason Herbert (01:02.904)
Right.

Jason Herbert (01:06.296)
to get going. It happens, right? Like sometimes, you know, I tell you, sometimes like, I wonder if I did these podcasts live because you know, the, more high production people out there, you know, can bring people in and things like that. I sometimes wonder what that would be like to be in person. We've tried to do this from a bar one time in Denver, which was fun. And everyone was drinking heavily, but you couldn't hear a damn thing. Anybody was saying, no, it's fine. But one day, one day we'll figure it out. So yeah.

Will Tosh (01:29.732)
I hear a thing. Well, one day, one day.

Jason Herbert (01:35.428)
All right. I got to tell you. So I got this relationship going with Basic some time ago where I just reached out to him and said, hey, you if you guys have anything you want me to take a look at or whatever. And they said, here, take a look at our catalog. And I'm flipping through on my my screen. Right. And I see and I see this book, my friend, right here, pop out at me. And I was like, what is this? You know, you wrote this book.

Straight Acting, The Hidden Queer Lives of William Shakespeare. And Will, I've never read a book on Shakespeare before I read your book.

Will Tosh (02:14.934)
I think this is a good one to break the surface. Let's just put it that way.

Jason Herbert (02:22.342)
man, do I ever feel that way? And I have to tell you, and you say this actually in, towards the introduction where it's like, Hey, this is, this is a, you know, this other scholars have written, but this is a scholar. This is a book for everybody. I kind of felt like this was a book that was a really cool introduction to Shakespeare to get me thinking about Shakespeare as I'm reading through it, you know,

Will Tosh (02:41.296)
I'm really glad you said that. I love reading books. I mean, I'm a Shakespeare academic, I've always loved reading books about Shakespeare that are for a general reader. And I read lots when I wasn't an academic and when I was training to be an academic. think writers like James Shapiro or Emma Smith or Catherine Duncan Jones, these amazing writers who can bring loads of scholarship to bear on really interesting stories about Shakespeare's life.

Jason Herbert (02:47.428)
Right.

Will Tosh (03:11.172)
I think it's the greatest skill because lots of people do love Shakespeare's plays and they're really interested in his life, but some scholarship can be inaccessible, can be hard to literally get your hands on and then quite hard to follow when you're reading it. So I really wanted to write something that was enjoyable by people who didn't have a huge background in Shakespeare studies but wanted to find out more about the person.

Jason Herbert (03:37.796)
Yeah, you know, and we'll get into this obviously more during the pod, right? But, you know, I felt like Shakespeare, at least for me in my own growing up, you know, I grew up in a very rural place in Kentucky here in the U.S. Yeah. And, you know, the introduction to Shakespeare is, you know, it happens in middle school and high school and things like that. And, you know, you read some stuff or things like that. But I always feel like this might be a guy who, at least American audiences, might take for granted, Will, you know.

And we can talk a little bit later on about other interpretations of his work. They're all over pop culture. You when we were deciding what film to do, we could have chosen a whole bunch more. And I actually want you to come back to do it. I want you come back to do 10 Things I Hate About You. I was reading your book. I'm like, I have to have him come back to do another one these because I just knew you were going it. my gosh. my gosh. Right. But I felt like Shakespeare's this guy who it's almost easy to take for granted and make assumptions about because he's just like, OK.

Will Tosh (04:20.676)
Yeah, definitely. That'd be a great one. Yeah.

Jason Herbert (04:34.338)
Shakespeare, and then you get to read this book. And it's so cool to think about him in a way. And you talk about this as like, you know, how Shakespeare had, you know, his work and he and himself had been, you know, un-gayed over the centuries. So there's so much here to talk about. But before we talk about this will, I want to talk about the other will, and that's the will before me. That would be you, Dr. Will Tosh. So you want to introduce yourself to our audience and tell us what you do?

Will Tosh (04:59.5)
Of course. Hi everyone. Thank you for listening and watching. I am Will Tosh. I am Director of Education at Shakespeare's Globe in London, which is a wonderful reconstruction of the 1599 Globe, as well as a wonderful model of an indoor theatre called the Sam Wanamick Playhouse, and a beautiful campus on the banks of the River Thames, where I helped to run our higher education and research programmes, work with our theatre artists and writers and

writing research about Shakespeare's life and work and trying to of spread that message to as many people as want to listen or read and watch.

Jason Herbert (05:36.642)
That's what we're doing tonight or today, whatever time it is, because I'm in Colorado, you're in London. I have to ask you, how did you come into this line of work? know, were you always thinking, I want to study Shakespeare, this is my guy. You know, what's your path?

Will Tosh (05:38.413)
Thank you.

Will Tosh (05:51.824)
Well, so I had a brief career working in theatre many, many years ago and did work on some early modern drama and some some some Jacobean revenge tragedies. I didn't actually do a huge amount of Shakespeare, but did lots of similar stuff. And then I moved away from theatre and went and did a PhD on on the kind of emotional relationships between.

Huda spies, later Elizabethan spies, who were kind of working on the continent of Europe. And I looked at the relationships between these men and kind of how they talked about their feelings. that, I finished that and went to work at The Globe when our indoor theatre opened and I ran a research project on performance in that indoor theatre. So those two strands kind of came together, my background in theatre and my knowledge of

on my training in kind of late 16th century life and culture. And in that space is obviously Shakespeare. So I then, know, in the 10 years I've been at the Globe have spent a lot of my time thinking about Shakespeare's plays and learning, relearning to love them all in various different ways. But I find all of them fascinating. And the world that he was part of and the kind cultural creative world that he was part of is

Yeah, very deeply in.

Jason Herbert (07:18.958)
Well, you before we jump into this film, I want to ask you, you know, the germination of this project itself. You you talk about, hey, you in the book you say, hey, there are other works, obviously people study Shakespeare for years and years and years, but you wanted to bring this to a larger audience, to maybe a wider audience, a different kind of audience. I'm wondering, like, what was the germination? We thought, wait a second, there's a story here to be told and that you were the, you know, you were the person to tell the story.

Will Tosh (07:43.342)
Well, I mean, we've been very unfair to your listeners and watchers. I don't think I've said what this book is about. So this book is called Straight Acting, The Hidden Queer Lives of William Shakespeare. It's called The Many Queer Lives of William Shakespeare in the UK. So if I stutter on that title, forgive me. I'm trying to translate in my head. So this is a study of the queer culture that Shakespeare was part of. that for me is kind of a hidden history in the sense that there isn't

Jason Herbert (07:50.041)
Peace.

Jason Herbert (07:56.1)
Will Tosh (08:12.836)
still a kind of huge amount of accessible public history on the backstory of queer desire in times before the 19th or 20th centuries in the UK, in the US and elsewhere in Europe. Shakespeare for me is an artist of queer desire. He writes about same-sex desire exquisitely and beautifully in his plays and his poems. And he's a

He's a writer who also lived at a time when culture, broader society, made space for queer desire in ways that we're not very aware of or familiar with. And it wasn't a of queer friendly culture like some of us live in today. was very much not the same as the world that I live in in London. And lots of your listeners will live in the United States and elsewhere.

Jason Herbert (09:05.166)
Mm-hmm.

Will Tosh (09:11.544)
But nonetheless, it was a culture and a time that acknowledged same-sex desire as something that was part of being human. And there were mixed feelings about it and complex feelings about it. But Shakespeare, as a writer, was able to explore those sorts of emotions and those sorts of desires, which is what he does in his place in this book. So I really wanted to take a lot of that research that has happened. There's been extraordinary work on early modern queer culture.

in 40 or 50 years of scholarship, I really wanted to turn some of that scholarship into a story about Shakespeare's life and the kind of life and world that he knew and wrap that into what we understand Shakespeare's biography to be. Which isn't quite the same thing as coming out and making a big song and dance about Shakespeare being queer, although I kind of think he is, but it's...

Jason Herbert (10:05.909)
Hahaha.

Will Tosh (10:06.848)
It's to kind of paint that picture of a world which we have as a kind of modern culture, we have really de-gayed, you know, we've really de-queered in the way we think about the past. And that's what I want to do. I want to kind of just tilt that light a little bit and show something a little bit different about a time that some people might think they know quite

Jason Herbert (10:26.936)
Mm.

Jason Herbert (10:30.318)
You know, I love that you did this because I felt as I'm reading through the book, like I'm getting to being reintroduced to this person who I thought I knew, and I'm certainly not a Shakespeare expert, but there were so many assumptions, Will, that I make about, you know, about Shakespeare as a straight man, I just go, okay, he writes Romeo and Juliet, he writes this, this is about men and women. And then I start to read your book and I'm like,

there's this part here where you introduce you like, wait a second. His best stuff is not about men and women. It's about same-sex couplings.

Will Tosh (11:08.226)
But he writes beautifully about all sorts of relationships and he writes exquisitely beautifully about straight relationships. But I would also say that I suppose what we think straight relationships are aren't the same in 1600. You know, that the way in which a society, Shakespeare society understood patriarchy, men and women, the kind of the embeddedness of misogyny means that we sort of like...

Jason Herbert (11:11.745)
Sure.

Jason Herbert (11:32.951)
Mm.

Will Tosh (11:34.84)
maybe chuck ourselves a little bit if we're taking Shakespeare's portrayal of straight relationships and heterorotic desire as our kind of baseline for what love is. And the same goes for queer relationships. I'm not saying we should all follow Shakespeare's example on how to conduct queer relationships, but just they are there and they're particular to that. And I suppose the film we're going to talk about right now is right there in the center of that sort of

that the way in which modern culture co-opts Shakespeare to speak for what particularly what straight love is in a way that we might want to unpick a little bit.

Jason Herbert (12:09.581)
Yeah.

Jason Herbert (12:16.996)
Yeah, I felt like as I was watching this film, I was like, man, there's a lot of unpacking that we need to do with this. you know, you're absolutely right. I just had on the podcast my terrific friend, Kit Hamm, who just wrote a terrific book. you do love Kit. Kit, love Kit. Kit's still listening to this pod. What's up? Kit and I shared tea together. There was one of the people I was talking to you about who is from across the pond, but did such amazing work.

Will Tosh (12:28.344)
Yes, I'm looking at it very well. Yeah.

Jason Herbert (12:46.808)
demonstrating that all of this has always been there. And again, another person making this stuff really accessible. Should we jump into the film and just kind of go from there, do you think? And we can just go? All right, let's do this. Okay, so I have to tell you, this was actually the very first time I had seen Shakespeare in

Will Tosh (12:58.574)
Let's do it.

Will Tosh (13:06.596)
No way! You haven't seen it before! How's it?

Jason Herbert (13:08.836)
Yes, sir. No, you know, okay. So I have to tell you, it was, it's a film that I'd always kind of, and part of the love I have of this podcast and what we've been doing on HATM for the last six and a half years is it gives me the excuse and sometimes forces me to go and see these films that I otherwise would be like, I'll get around to it. Right. And of course you're familiar with Shakespeare in love. You know, this film comes out, you know, it wins in 98, for best picture of kind of famously defeating, saving private Ryan. There's still, still people still talk about this film.

Will Tosh (13:35.268)
Mmm.

Jason Herbert (13:38.964)
but I'd never seen it. So I sat down and watched it with your book in hand, taking notes copiously. was like, okay, what am I seeing here? And I felt that that was kind of good in this regard because it's like everything was to me was super fresh. Being able to like read your book and then watch this. so I have so many questions about about William Shakespeare based on like rumors, stories I've been told, you know, the little I know this is

Will Tosh (14:02.916)
Yeah, yeah.

Jason Herbert (14:05.892)
You know, well, I feel like I want to come to you as a complete ignorant person and ask you all of these questions today. so let's do this. Let's, let's start by seeing the very first time we see Shakespeare, it's in the shape of Joseph Fiennes. this very live, obviously very handsome guy. and I'm wondering who is William Shakespeare in 1593? Like when we first get to know him, like, can you give us a little background about who this man actually was up until say this point?

Will Tosh (14:09.156)
Bye.

Okay.

Will Tosh (14:26.212)
Mmm.

Will Tosh (14:36.388)
So, yeah, Joseph Fiennes' Shakespeare. I would say, and I will say that Joseph Fiennes' inky fingers are possibly the best thing about this film. I mean, there many good things about this, and I actually really like, I really love Shakespeare and all, but that sort of grubby, inky sort of grime over his hands as he's writing it is fabulous. I loved it. So, it's like this film is so interesting in what it does with history and...

Jason Herbert (14:55.501)
Right?

Will Tosh (15:05.688)
biography and we first see Shakespeare, we're introduced to the theatre and then we get this wonderful kind of view of him in his lodgings, he's in his apartments, he's in his lofts, he's got this very roomy, rather stylish looking kind of like bachelor hat. Very beautiful Josephines with his lovely eyes and his beautiful hair and it's 1593, we're told that in the title cards aren't we at the start of the film.

Jason Herbert (15:18.552)
Yes.

Will Tosh (15:35.044)
and Shakespeare is a sort of struggling writer. It's such a weird time to start a film about Shakespeare's career in the theatre, because in 1593 the theatres are closed because of a terrible plague. So nothing is happening in 1593. There's no theatre at all in London and Shakespeare probably isn't in town. So that's the sort of first thing that we note watching the start of Shakespeare.

Jason Herbert (15:52.952)
Lovely.

Will Tosh (16:03.236)
And the other is actually 1593 is a really major year for Shakespeare, like a really big year, because it's the first time that anything he writes gets published. None of his plays are published in 1593. His first plays get published in 1594, not with his name on the title. But in 1593, he does publish something. He publishes his long poem, Venus and Adonis, which is not a play, it's not a drama.

It's a kind of extension of this little story in Ovid's Metamorphoses, which is this collection of Greek and Roman myths. And it's about Venus, the goddess of love, who is massively hot for this incredibly beautiful young hunter, Adonis. Comes onto him super intensely, and Adonis is very much like, don't have anything to do with you. Goes off on a boar hunt and gets killed, and Venus is very sad.

Jason Herbert (16:38.265)
Mm-hmm.

Will Tosh (16:59.108)
So Shakespeare takes this quite short little story in Ovid's Metamorphoses, expands it tenfold into a thousand line long poem. And he's writing it because he hasn't got any theatre work, because the theatres are all closed. Publishes it in 1593 and it goes stratospherically popular. So by the end of 1593, Shakespeare is super famous as a master of love.

Jason Herbert (17:14.318)
Mm-hmm.

Will Tosh (17:28.804)
But it's through Venus and Adonis, lyric poetry, of sexy, violent, of slightly queer coded, let's be honest, poetry that gets read by men and women, young people get super sort of excited by it as, you know, very lightly pornographic literature. So 1593 is a key year for Shakespeare, but not the way we see it in Shakespeare.

Jason Herbert (17:59.67)
Okay. How old would he have been? He's mid 20s, upper 20s at this point in time.

Will Tosh (18:03.972)
He's 29 in 1593. Sorry, me just do that maths in my head. on. 1564. Yeah, that's 29, isn't it? Yeah, OK, good. Now, what are numbers? Yeah, totally. Yeah, no, clearly. It's.

Jason Herbert (18:08.375)
Okay.

Jason Herbert (18:13.528)
Sounds right,

Well, my historian, like numbers don't even mean anything to me. What does it matter? I'll just, just use chat GPT. all of my friends, all my friends, professors, all my professor friends, students are just like, Hey, I'll just, I'll just, I'll do this.

Will Tosh (18:30.084)
Yeah, we need to model better practice. Yeah, no chance you'll be too.

Jason Herbert (18:36.388)
I know it. I have to ask you a question. one of the things I, in my limited understanding of Shakespeare up until now has been the question of, you know, who is this guy? And B, is he's really the one bright doing all of these works? I don't always heard these rumors. Like there's actually many people using this name or running this stuff. Can we put this to bed?

Will Tosh (18:49.282)
Mm, mm, mm, mm, mm.

Will Tosh (18:56.482)
We can put this to bed. I mean, what I will say is that certainly in Shakespeare in Love, we see him really as a solitary genius, don't we? He's there writing away in his apartment, and particularly when things strike him, you know, he kind of goes off and has these experiences and then runs home to kind of write the rest of Romeo and Juliet. That's very kind of, you know, quite a modern idea of how literary genius works. Now, Shakespeare was a literary genius, but he did work in a collective.

Jason Herbert (19:05.08)
doing it. Yeah.

Jason Herbert (19:15.086)
Mm-hmm.

Will Tosh (19:24.664)
He worked with theatre companies. He co-wrote with other playwrights. He worked on other people's plays and, you know, gussied them up and refurbished them. And other people did that to his work in later years as well. And, you know, he would get inspiration from other people, but Shakespeare wrote his plays. And there's absolutely no ambiguity around what people in Shakespeare's own time thought he did, which is write his plays and poems.

So those plays that we associate with him are his and they're published as his poems, some of them in his own lifetime. And then the vast majority of them in a big old compilation in 1623 called The First Trollio, which is called Master William Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories, Tragedies. And it's got a massive great picture of him on the front cover and lots of people write poems saying he's great. Shakespeare.

Jason Herbert (19:58.723)
Mm.

Jason Herbert (20:10.585)
Mm.

Will Tosh (20:23.172)
who wrote these plays is great. So there's no ambiguity around his authorship. But there is a kind more complex story about how playwrights wrote plays, which is as a slightly more collective and collaborative activity than the notion of a kind of genius poet, a kind of post-romantic notion of a genius poet that we might have today.

Jason Herbert (20:52.642)
You know, find this, I was trying to think about who a contemporary might be that I could compare Shakespeare to. And I'm going to throw a name at you. And I swear to God, I am not doing this for shock value, but for whatever reason, I keep thinking of Taylor Swift of all people and who shoots to the stratosphere fame, but is a worker. She works, you know?

Will Tosh (21:03.108)
Mm-hmm.

Will Tosh (21:17.444)
Yeah. Yeah.

Jason Herbert (21:20.148)
And I thought a lot as you were just telling me about the ways in which Shakespeare writes his plays or, his contemporaries write their plays. This is a job. This is, this is a, you go to create a thing and sometimes do that in concert with others, right?

Will Tosh (21:26.402)
Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, right, right, right. Right, and Taylor Swift is not a creative comparison. mean, there are all sorts of online memes asking you to guess whether it's Taylor Swift or Shakespeare that writes a certain line. sort of, yeah, in a sense, any literary artist who is channeling cultures, thoughts and ideas, I mean, totally. And I would

Jason Herbert (21:56.612)
Mm-hmm.

Will Tosh (21:57.86)
I would not be surprised if people are still talking about Taylor Swift in 50 or 100 years because he was a cultural source. Of course. And in future years we'll be reading things into Taylor Swift lyrics that maybe Taylor didn't expect to be there. And I'm sure the same thing can be said about Shakespeare. But he's absolutely right. Shakespeare was a working writer. And one of the things actually that Shakespeare in Love again gets right is that kind of interrelationship of

Jason Herbert (22:21.315)
Mm.

Will Tosh (22:27.754)
writing as a business and managing a theatre as a business and producing theatre as a... There's a point where Henslowe offers Shakespeare a share in the company. That's not true quite the way the film presents it, but that's what Shakespeare does. The year after Shakespeare in Love is set in 1594, Shakespeare does buy into the Lord Chamberlain's Men, becomes a co-shareholder, co-owner of the company.

and draws an income as a business owner, as well as an income as a playwright, as well as an income as an actor. So he's very canny when it comes to how he's, look, it's a horrible phrase, but like how he's monetizing his writing and his craft. And he's very lucky to live at a time when it's possible for a, you know,

the equivalent of a middle-class person coming from the provinces with a really good school education, but he didn't go to university, really good school education, to make a living through writing, creative writing, literary writing, which hadn't really been possible even a generation before. Shakespeare, it's a startup industry playwriting at this point. It's still comparatively new.

Jason Herbert (23:34.958)
Mm-hmm.

Will Tosh (23:52.152)
to be a commercial playwright and make a living out of your writing.

Jason Herbert (23:56.908)
know, so many of his plays and his works feature rivalries. And I'm wondering, did he himself have rivals in this era? mean, were there other folks out there? Yeah.

Will Tosh (24:07.92)
Yeah, yeah, the first thing in print we hear about Shakespeare is the words of arrival. So there's a writer, pamphleteer, playwright called Robert Green, who writes a sort of rather sour kind of satire called Green's Roadsworth of Wit in 1592. And it may also have been finished by someone else. Like it's probably Robert Green. We say it's by Green, but you know, it could have been. It's complex.

But in Greensgrove's Worth of Wit, it's a slightly weird text about, it's a loosely fictionalized idea about a wild living person and his repentance at the end of his life. And along the way, there is a reference to an individual who is

99.99 cents certain to be Shakespeare, who is kind of presented as this figure who is a bit of an upstart, who he's called an upstart crow, who comes along and tries to sort of like muscle his way into the writing space and kind of elbow out the kind of smarter, more university educated writers. And also he's an actor and that's a bit sort of, you know, kind of low class and really likes it. And

We know it's supposed to be Shakespeare because he's referred to as a Shakespearean and one of his lines from the Henry the Sixth plays is kind of misquoted as a way to kind of needle him. So from that very first citation in print, he's in a kind of space of competition and envy and

sort of literary aggression. it's not a, you know, this is not a harmonious, a wholly harmonious world. Writers were, you know, writers were kind of aiming for a kind of slice of the pie and not everyone was equally successful. So there was definitely competition and definitely rivalry, even if playwrights also wrote together, worked together, shared writing duties on plays.

Will Tosh (26:31.78)
Yeah, it was a contested space, I think.

Jason Herbert (26:37.86)
I want to ask you about the casting in this film because I'm watching this. I'm like, okay, who's real? Who's not? This is obviously not a biopic. It's not a documentary. Sometimes, you know, I think sometimes when we get into these historically based films, there's a little knock. I was like, this film is not, it's not real. Now listen, I just did a podcast on gladiator two and it was awful. Ridley Scott is Ridley Scott's doing me a favor between making Napoleon and making the gladiator two, because these were films that made me pull my hair out. But.

Will Tosh (26:43.48)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Will Tosh (26:58.037)
Will Tosh (27:05.668)
This makes your job easy.

Jason Herbert (27:09.88)
I love Ridley Scott, my gosh. The man made so many films of my childhood and yet, at the same time, but it seems, so you take a film like this though, which doesn't, it's not pretending to be the retelling of William Shakespeare's life, right? This is kind of playfully using, no. I felt like maybe the parallel to this might be a Knight's Tale, which is kind of using.

Will Tosh (27:10.989)
No, no, no.

Will Tosh (27:27.812)
No, it's obviously it. Yeah. No.

Will Tosh (27:38.016)
Yeah, kind using the draw stir and yeah. Look, think what I think what I think was really interesting about this film is I think it's fairly upfront about its fictional elements. it's and it's it does that I think it signals things with names. So I think it's interesting that the heroine, Gwyneth Paltrow's role is called Viola de Lesseps. So Viola obviously we know as a character named from Twelfth Night and at the end of the

Jason Herbert (27:39.352)
history to kind of play. Yeah, right.

Jason Herbert (27:49.475)
Yeah.

Will Tosh (28:07.352)
film that's echoed in how Viola and Will ultimately part. Lesseps is an interesting choice. Not everyone who watches this film will clock it, but De Lesseps is a French aristocratic name, and it's the name of the person who built the Suez Canal in the 19th century. So it's quite a famous name, but not famous for the time that we're talking about in Shakespeare in love.

Jason Herbert (28:27.98)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Will Tosh (28:34.7)
And similarly with the Earl of Wessex, who is the villainous competitor love interest for Violet. At the time the film was made, that title did not exist. Wessex as a concept kind of didn't really exist. It was an old Anglo-Saxon kingship. And then it was a sort of made up county in the novels of Thomas Hardy. was sort of Narnia.

Jason Herbert (28:58.82)
Mm.

Will Tosh (29:00.93)
And Wessex does exist now. was then made as an aristocratic creation for the Queen's youngest, the then Queen's youngest son, Prince Edward. So the film is sort of saying Wessex and Violet de Lesseps, they're not real, they're made up. But then actually lots of the other people in the film really are. So the film is quite good. The film is quite good, actually. mean, it's not exactly right, but it's quite good at...

giving people more or less the right identities for more or less the job that they do. So Jeffrey Rush playing Philip Henslow, yes, Philip Henslow, yes, around the rose, was evidently a businessman. Don't think he was quite as unsuccessful as the film makes him out. Burbage at the theatre, yes, absolutely. Tilney, who's the master of the revels, yes, that was a real person.

Jason Herbert (29:32.44)
Okay.

Jason Herbert (29:39.588)
Mmm.

Will Tosh (29:53.892)
Obviously Queen Elizabeth I was quite much a real person in an extraordinary performance by Judy Dench. So yeah, actually a lot of those characters are historical and kind of had the life that the film presents.

Jason Herbert (29:56.152)
A little bit.

Jason Herbert (30:00.247)
Ugh, love her.

Jason Herbert (30:10.948)
And I have to tell you, as I'm watching this film, it's my first time watching and I hadn't actually done a lot of prep work. Usually, you know, I'll do a lot of work on the film, say, OK, I'll be familiar, more familiar with the film. I've usually seen the movie that we're doing on the pod and I'll know who's in the movie. In this case, I knew really. You know, Josephine's and I knew Gwyneth Paltrow because that's that's the story, right? And the first thing we see, Jeffrey Rush and I and then I'm looking at Tom Wilkinson and I'm like.

Will Tosh (30:18.148)
Mm-hmm.

Jason Herbert (30:38.562)
Okay, who else is in this film? And it turns out everyone, everyone has sent.

Will Tosh (30:40.036)
Everyone, every British actor of 1997 is in this film. Yes.

Jason Herbert (30:46.005)
and Ben Affleck.

Will Tosh (30:47.79)
And Ben Affleck, yes, yes. Ordinary, yeah, playing Edward Allen, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jason Herbert (30:52.45)
I, yeah, a little bit. And after you talked about Wessex, and I'm looking at Colin Firth going, wait a second, I'm supposed to like you in movies. This feels weird, you know?

Will Tosh (31:03.395)
Yeah.

It's a fun stretch for him, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah, he does it brilliantly.

Jason Herbert (31:08.78)
Yeah, it is. I think he's good. I, know, he's, well, I think he's one those guys where, know, and he's done this really cool thing over his career, where he's starting to play the different roles and he's, it's almost Michael Kane-ish in his career trajectory where he is, he's aged. He started the, you see, start, see him start to take on now the more mentor-esque kind of roles and things like that. what is it? I'm thinking about the, the, the spy, the action spy films. what is it?

Will Tosh (31:12.28)
He's very good. He's very good.

Will Tosh (31:23.78)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Will Tosh (31:31.684)
Mm-hmm.

Jason Herbert (31:37.956)
that he does with Taryn Edgerton. Gosh, I can't recall, but he's so much fun. But to put all of these people kind of in place here, can we talk a little bit about the Rose Theater and talk a little bit about how these London playhouses, I know in 1593, they're not operating, but when they do, aside from that small aspect of the fact that they're not actually doing their job.

Will Tosh (31:53.144)
Yeah.

Will Tosh (31:59.64)
then I'll open. Other than that, yeah.

Yes. Yes. Apart from that small thing. the film is sort of again, like a lot of things in this film, the film is good in principle, kind of getting the various sort of factors at play here. then then quite rightly, because it's a film and not history, just goes, Anna, that doesn't work. So, yeah, these these letters are not open. The theatre companies that are talked about as well, the Lord Chamberlain's men, the Lord Admiral's men, they don't exist yet.

Jason Herbert (32:08.354)
When they are open, how do they operate? Yeah.

Jason Herbert (32:16.74)
Mm-hmm.

Will Tosh (32:34.622)
They don't come into existence until 1594. So they're not around 1594. But that notion that the two of them are these sort of competitor companies, I think it's broadly right for the later years, but after 1594. And there are other companies at play in the earlier years as well, who were sort of merging and breaking up and personnel are kind of moving around between these companies. And you sort of get a feel for that in the film, I think, particularly that sense.

that the companies are competition and they kind of like are angry at each other. But then by the end, when the whole sort of edifice of theatre has been threatened, they really come together and they sort of share their assets and their actors and they put on a performance. And that sort of stuff does happen. The companies merge and go on tour and do things and do things together. One thing we don't see, which is interesting at all in the theatre landscape,

is a form of theatre that by 1593 had only recently taken a pause. And that was indoor theatres, small, rather beautiful, elite little indoor theatres lit by candlelight, where all of the performers were adolescent boys. So that was a really major part of theatre culture through the 1580s. So the sort of run-up to Shakespeare in Love, really major and much more focused around

and sort of well-to-do or elite or aristocratic audience members. So there's that really interesting bit in the start of the film where Viola D'Alessips has been watching Shakespeare's Two Gentlemen of Verona at court with the Queen and all the courtiers sitting around watching this play and everyone else seems unbelievably bored by it but Viola is kind of totally into this film, this play. She's totally into the play, she adores it. And the go-to-homeman complains to her nurse that she's not allowed to go to the public playhouse.

she has to go to court to watch the plays because she can't go to the theater. And that's not really true. Like you get aristocratic women going to the theater quite a lot. And particularly so in those earlier years. So these indoor theaters, Blackfriars and St. Paul's, which were particularly sort of patronized by aristocrats and by elite figures and women included. So there's a sort of sense that the film is sort of saying,

Will Tosh (35:01.464)
Theatre is not for the real poshos, or rather public theatre isn't for the posh people. The posh people go and see theatre at court, which is only half true. Actually, you get a bit of real kind of range of people attending the public playhouse. And someone like Viola could have easily have gone to the...

Jason Herbert (35:22.464)
I want to ask you actually about, we're talking about in the theater, but what about on the stage itself? mean, what's the sexual dichotomy here of performers and social rules as far as male performers, females? Like what, what's going on?

Will Tosh (35:27.084)
Mm.

Yeah. Yeah.

Will Tosh (35:38.444)
It's interesting, so again in that same scene where Viola is complaining to Melba Staunton, her nurse, that she can't go to the theatre, she also rails against the fact that the law says she can't act as a woman. And it is true, women do not appear on the commercial stage as actors. There's no law, there's no law that says they can't do it. And women do act, women act in court, women perform as...

singers and musicians and tumblers, gymnasts, like that, jugglers. Later in the era, French women, French actors to London and appear on stage. There's an astonishing moment when a kind of real life kind of London play called The Roaring Girl features a character called Mole Frith, who is played in the play by an actor.

But at the end of the play, the real Mole Frith got up on stage and played a lute and sang a song. So there are these moments in the era when you see female performance. And women are really involved in the theatre industry as managers, as business people, like people like Jeffrey Rush's Henslow. That sort of figure was frequently a woman. There were women involved as business managers. And there were women involved as

Jason Herbert (36:43.449)
Hmm.

Will Tosh (37:06.5)
as sort of box office managers, as gatherers of money at the door, as laundresses, as tailors and dressmakers. So there's a lot of, it's not just a male world, but it is a male acting company. And so you have some companies of boys, as I've talked about in the indoor playhouses, but those big adult companies, the commercial companies at theatres like the Rose and the Theatre have,

effectively apprentices. So they have boys probably from about the age of 13 or 14 up to their early 20s playing the female roles. Obviously, we see that quite, I think we see that quite well in Shakespeare in Love actually with the character of Sam, who's the boy actor, who's from the very first moment we meet him, we're sort of being led to expect that he's aging out of his casting because his voice is beginning to break and yeah.

that's kind of the case. There's a sense that sort of, actors are, have a kind of a certain lifespan as performers of female roles, but then would potentially age into other casting as they got a bit older. And you see that happening with individual actors through the era, that they start as boy actors, really well in particular roles, and then go and get cast as adult men a bit later on.

Jason Herbert (38:34.584)
Yeah, so there's the whole child actor syndrome as well. Good dating, right? What do you do? You know, it's funny because I just read Josh Brolin's memoir. Yeah. Yeah, you know, well, he's fascinating story, really chaotic home life as a lot of these child actors, sadly, turned out to be. But, he talks about it after he does the Goonies, you know, there's just this incredible because he's everywhere now.

Will Tosh (38:38.488)
Yeah, exactly.

Will Tosh (38:45.813)
interesting. Well, yeah, indeed. it was, yeah.

Mm. Mm-hmm.

Will Tosh (38:59.108)
Mm.

Jason Herbert (39:03.478)
And we think he's always been successful, but there's this huge time period where he just goes to become a day trader for a while. He's got like a regular job because he just, he can't find his place in Hollywood.

Will Tosh (39:06.18)
Hmm.

Wow. Huh. Yeah.

Yeah, and it's by no means certain for a boy actor in this era that they would go on to perform.

Jason Herbert (39:22.66)
Sure. I want to ask you, I want to step away from the filming and actually dive into your book a little bit. Yeah, just a small little talk about your book. And I want to ask you obviously the big question, the question you kind of very playfully put out as right towards the beginning, which is Shakespeare. Was he or wasn't he? You want to jump in and just kind of go from there?

Will Tosh (39:45.572)
Well, I sort of do really. maybe we'll come back to the film when we're talking about this, just because it's such a great example of how anxious and edgy everyone gets when they're about Shakespeare and queer sexuality. yeah, it's a funny thing, isn't it? Because you've cited already this ongoing...

Jason Herbert (39:51.46)
Yeah, absolutely.

Will Tosh (40:09.408)
that isn't really a question about Shakespeare's authorship of his plays. And I think that's kind of an ongoing question that isn't really a question about Shakespeare's sexuality and sexual identity as well. It's like, what's he gay? Was he an art? I know. And I'm both fascinated by that question and also slightly frustrated by it because it seems like a really open-ended question, but actually it's quite a closed-off one. And it's a question that invites a yes or a no and then sort of like no further comment.

Jason Herbert (40:36.185)
Mm.

Will Tosh (40:38.708)
And I think, you know, I said earlier, I think Shakespeare is a queer artist. And that for me, it's a really kind of expansive point to start off at and to say that, I don't know, I don't know what he what he desired or he did. I know he was married. know he had two children, three children. know that he. Exactly, that never happens. And I don't.

Jason Herbert (41:00.1)
It would have been the very first queer person to ever be married and have children. And only one ever.

Will Tosh (41:06.98)
And I have no idea if he had a male partner or if he had a male lover. But what I do know is that he is artistically and intellectually really interested, I would go so far as to say obsessed with the dynamics of same-sex desire and whether that's expressed in really heightened terms of same-sex male friendship, which is not separable from erotics, I don't think.

whether or not these friends are sleeping together, these are eroticised friendships, the language is heavily kind of infused with really kind of bodily yearning. So he's fascinated by that. He's fascinated by the seeming conflict between straight marriage or heterorotic marriage and male friendship and the apparent clash. As in like where, you know, where does the guy place his heart? Like with his friend or with his wife?

And he is also interested, absolutely interested in the articulation of desire between men. He writes 126 sonnets, exploring speakers, the of implemented desire for a beautiful youth. Now,

You could say that doesn't mean anything. Maybe it doesn't. But I don't know that many straight men who write 126 poems about their desire for a beautiful youth. Like, I think it means something. Do know what it means? And fundamentally, I don't massively care. But I do, I am really interested in the queer art that he produces. And I feel like that queer art has a resonance in a queer self somewhere. But hey, he lived 400 years ago, so.

We're going to we're going to we're going to we're going to struggle to unpick it. But I do I think that that sort of that that that queer sensibility is a really major part of his writing. And because we've been so hung up on saying, well, we've got to prove that he's gay before we have that conversation. We can't we haven't we haven't really addressed it. So I'm happy to kind of shove the was he or wasn't he question away and think about the queer art.

Jason Herbert (43:12.9)
You're

Will Tosh (43:22.274)
And look, once he talks about the queer art for 10 minutes, I think we'll all kind of agree that he was probably a bit queer.

Jason Herbert (43:27.374)
Yeah, I felt like this is a really cool way to think about this by kind of going, well, let's set the question aside and just look at the answers here. And then it's like, it almost felt real, like not to spoil the book, but it's like, obviously. mean, that was, it feels that way. mean, maybe.

Will Tosh (43:43.128)
Well, kind of, right? Yeah. mean, that's but I think that's sort of I think that's sort of the best compliment. You know, I think if if if if people come away from the book and go, well, why did you even need to write that? Of course, you were like brilliant. I'm thrilled. I'm thrilled by that.

Jason Herbert (43:57.494)
I'm

But this was also a thing where I came to it and I had no assumptions about the queerness of Shakespeare to begin with. I was like, of course, before I thought deeply about this going, well, he's responsible for the great loves of our lives, right? What am I great? One of my favorite songs in the history of the world is actually Romeo and Juliet, but it's not by Shakespeare, it's by Mark Knopfler and Dire Straits who write this beautiful take on this. My point being that the man is influenced, our conceptions.

Will Tosh (44:12.996)
Mm-hmm.

Will Tosh (44:30.66)
That's me.

Jason Herbert (44:31.392)
of heterosexual love for years and years and years and years, right? But I think through that's because of, as you referred to it, this process of un-gaying Shakespeare, that we don't complicate our understandings of love, of relationships, of not even, and like you were saying here, like, cause I'm thinking about, you know, bromances and things like that.

Will Tosh (44:36.644)
Yeah.

Jason Herbert (45:00.856)
Right. And these relationships between, you know, men, women, whomever, right. That are very loving relations, not sexualized, but loving deep, intimate relationships as well. think.

I don't know. wonder if by rethinking Shakespeare's words and works, we start to have sort of color these, our understandings of these relationships different.

Will Tosh (45:25.75)
I will look at yes, I think is the answer. I think I think it's really interesting that. And or 20 years ago, whenever that word romance kind of emerged, we kind of had to coin a cute little portmanteau word to explain something that. Is it safe? But also it was it was marked as unusual. It was marked as though this is this is this needs a new word because we haven't seen this before. And of course, you know, every.

Jason Herbert (45:41.774)
Cause it's safe.

Jason Herbert (45:51.364)
Mm-hmm.

Will Tosh (45:54.338)
most cultures through history have had ways to articulate intense same-sex relationships. And sometimes those are autosized, sometimes not. Sometimes they kind of are, but they're not acknowledged. some, yeah, it's so complex. They're not, and those two things aren't separate. know, there may be sort of points on a line, but friendship and relationship are not totally separate categories. suppose in lots of ways never have been.

And that's very much what we see, what we see in Shakespeare's time. I think to bring it briefly back to Shakespeare in love, I think what's really interesting about, said, I said it's really interesting so many times it's so boring.

And to bring it back to Shakespeare in love, we see the film really working hard to fix Romeo and Juliet as the main script of grown up romantic, heterosexual love. And the bits of the play that are maybe suggesting that the love between Romeo and Juliet is a bit insane and teenage get put aside and not really focused on or thought about. bits of other Shakespeare

Jason Herbert (47:02.231)
Mm-hmm.

Will Tosh (47:07.822)
plays and works that are also dealing in the sort of tropes and stereotypes of love, much like Romeo and Juliet is, are held up as of stale and a bit kind of stagey and fake. So the film starts with Two Gentlemen of Verona, which is indeed an early play. It's written before Romeo and Juliet. But the bits of Two Gentlemen of Verona that we see

the audience watching at court are very kind of hard-boiled and wooden and sort of these sort of lovelorn men kind of know, whittering on about their love in ways that we're not supposed to see as particularly compelling or interesting. Compared with Romeo and Juliet, which the film suggests is written in the inspiration of Will's

Jason Herbert (47:55.396)
Mm.

Will Tosh (48:04.496)
adoration of Viola and their amazing relationship together. It kind of all comes to him in a great big rush. He kind of writes this astonishing, of realist and naturalist portrayal of love. And he's sort of spurred on by the Queen saying, you know, in that wonderful scene where Will's there in disguise, I'll set a wager of 50 pounds that a playwright, which says can or can't now, but a playwright can present the very truth and picture of love.

Jason Herbert (48:32.835)
Mm.

Will Tosh (48:34.532)
So we're told so clearly by this film that Romeo and Juliet is the invention of an artistic representation of true adult mature sexual desire. And I think that's sort of rubbish. And I get it's not true. The play isn't doing that at all.

Jason Herbert (48:54.852)
We're children!

Jason Herbert (48:59.011)
No.

Will Tosh (48:59.064)
But what it's doing is doing what lots of plays and other literary fictions at the time are doing, which is dramatising love and sexuality and desire in all sorts of really exciting and interesting ways. But it's not taking a whole new kind of approach to it. And the film can only do that by denigrating the other stuff that is happening at the same time, like Two Gentlemen of Rona, and sort of ignoring what the play is actually about.

And in other ways as well, think because the play, the film is dabbling in storylines around mistaken identity and women dressing as boys, which is obviously a highly Shakespearean trope. It's just kind of reaching a foot into a bit of a queer space and then like immediately drawing back and going, no, it's 1997 and it's Miramax and we are not ready for that.

Jason Herbert (49:55.812)
We're not ready for this, right?

Will Tosh (49:57.186)
We are not going there. So, and it just, just dallys with it, with the idea that, that Will is, Joseph Fiennes's Will is sort of like weirdly turned on by Vilas, by the person he thinks is Thomas Kent, who is the, the boy, the boy Vilas dresses as. It's like, it's a, can judge, there's just moments where you can see the film is allowing you to think that Joseph Fiennes is a little bit confused before, before they pull back.

And that's an interesting caution, I think. I suspect if that story was made in 2024, the filmmakers would feel free to have much more fun in delving into the kind of queer energies that that would produce. And it shows its age, I think, when you watch it now, that the film is so cautious about suggesting anything other than kind of straight down the line heterosexuality.

in terms of Will and Violet's relationship.

Jason Herbert (51:01.058)
No, and in fact, you know, the thing that I kept thinking about was, wow, they are really adamant about showing Will and Violet in bed a lot in this film, right? This is an overtly, I didn't think I'd see when Paltrow nude in this film. Listen, I grew up in the eighties where, you know, we come up with this idea of all of this, know, the nudity was everywhere in the films. And then there was a purposeful dial back of this. Paltrow, it's almost like they're saying, look how,

Will Tosh (51:08.675)
Yeah.

Will Tosh (51:18.915)
Hmm.

Jason Herbert (51:30.432)
It feels maybe it maybe I'm thinking about this too too too seriously. Well, it's like look how straight will is because there's so much sex with Gwyneth Paltrow. You know, I don't know.

Will Tosh (51:37.828)
That's right. Yeah.

Will Tosh (51:44.964)
I think that's right. it's also, it's sex scenes intercut with rehearsal of Romeo and Juliet. And that's the of, that's the absolute kind of heart of the film. It's the sort of, just before the kind of act four turn, isn't it? The heart of the film is the theatre company are thriving, they're rehearsing Romeo and Juliet, Will's having loads of like really fabulous sex with Viola.

Jason Herbert (51:52.014)
Yeah.

Will Tosh (52:10.596)
he's being amazingly inspired, he's writing this play, she's getting really into it. all and it's I mean it's it's sort of I'm not going to use the term problematic, it's not it's a film. like but it's it is overt about its own sexual politics in a way that that you notice. I would also say as a historian it's way off when it comes to how plays were rehearsed or produced.

in 1593, they didn't have great big group rehearsals for weeks before the play went on. They didn't stand around on the stage going over scenes and mouthing lines at each other. And they certainly didn't kind of spend lots of time practicing kissing on stage like Will and Viola do when she's dressed as Thomas Kent. Like, it just doesn't happen. You learn your part privately by yourself in your room until you're word perfect and then you come and...

all up in everyone else's parts. That's all you do. So, but that the film really needs all that rehearsal to get lots of Romeo and Juliet onto the screen in order to intercut it with lots of shagging to show how real the play is about sexual love. So there's quite a lot of crowbarring, I would say. It's pretty, it's laid on with a trowel, I think to use another Shakespearean expression.

Jason Herbert (53:24.036)
All right. OK.

Jason Herbert (53:38.658)
You know, it's, odd because this film is 25, 26 years old at this point in time. yeah, we're, I'm feeling older now. Well, like every time I have to sit and look at the podcast and see, and see my beard get grayer. and we have a Trump presidency coming again. I'm feeling, I'm feeling that by February, this is going to be white, white as snow, my friend.

Will Tosh (53:44.158)
27.

Will Tosh (53:54.069)
I understand.

Will Tosh (53:58.574)
We're all gonna go great. We're all gonna go great. Well, I remember seeing this film in the cinema. It made a very big impression on me when I was a 16 year old. So yeah.

Jason Herbert (54:09.95)
yeah. I want to ask you, are there parts of this film, because I don't want to sit, like, obviously some problematic stuff or some things that I think that maybe not even problematic so much as like, this is kind of a hallmark of its era. as historians, we go, this is really neat, what they're doing here and the decisions are being made. But are the parts of the film that you really go, hey, I like what they're doing here. This is this because this is kind of speaking to me as a person or as a scholar. Are there other parts of this that really you dig?

Will Tosh (54:22.072)
Yeah, right, right, right, right.

Will Tosh (54:35.716)
Yes, yes. Yeah, I actually really like, I really like this film. I've always loved it. And I loved it 28, seven years ago. And I've seen it several times since. And I loved, I loved rewatching it for this podcast. I think it's, I think it's an incredibly witty, incredibly literate film. I think for a major studio release and a major kind of film for all that it features loads of British actors.

It's... It is pretty uncompromising, actually, in terms of the interest it takes in theatre-making. For all that they present it wrongly, it doesn't really matter. It's interested in modern theatre as much as Elizabethan theatre. It's got a kind of real passion for writing and literary history. There's a lovely detail in the film.

about a young boy who's a part of the theatre company, who's this sort of hopeless, sort of dirty looking young kid who gets kicked off the cast because he's sort of wrong to play the female lead and he goes off in a huff and in the end actually dobs the theatre company into the master of the rebels, Philmy. And in one exchange this boy is asked by Will kind of what he likes about theatre.

And he sort of says in this grumpy way, we liked the blood, he liked the blood, he liked it. And then we were asked what his name is, and he says he's called John Webster. And John Webster is this fabulous Jacobian playwright of the next generation, who does indeed write really kind of dark and violent plays. And it's just so lovely that, it's, you know, Stoppard, he does the script for, or at least one of the versions of the script for Shakespeare and Love, I suspect that's a Stoppardian insert.

That's a lovely thing to do. That's a lovely thing to put into a major Hollywood film. A little reference to effectively a really obscure Jacobean playwright, even though for those of us who work on early modern drama, Webster is not obscure at all. But for your average Hollywood audience, that's a really obscure reference. I think it's fabulous that it's in there. It's a film that really shows respect for and interest in early modern drama, early modern literature, the Shakespeare world.

Jason Herbert (56:34.36)
fun.

Will Tosh (57:01.24)
the ways in which you can tell stories about Shakespeare. I think what they do with Christopher Marlowe is fabulous. It's a lovely, it's a great little cameo. And they set up a story that Will might be responsible for Marlowe's death. And there's a great way that they kind of see that through the film. And then in a really kind of, think, mature and rather admirable way, the film pulls back at the point of Marlowe's death.

Jason Herbert (57:18.69)
Mm-hmm.

Will Tosh (57:31.108)
to say, no, it's not Will's fault. He didn't die through your actions. It was just a terrible brawl in a bar. And I think that's brilliant partly because it shows the film isn't of pandering to conspiracy theory, because there's conspiracy theory about Marlowe's death as well. It's quite a kind of grown up response, which I really admire. So there's sort of maturity actually of this film.

like and I'm really grateful for all that they're getting, you know, other stuff.

Jason Herbert (58:07.938)
You know, I can't help now by thinking about another podcast by Joe Rogan, who would have loved the conspiracy theories around Marlowe's death, but this is not that pot. So.

Will Tosh (58:17.948)
I'm, you will get no conspiracy theories from me. None, not a one.

Jason Herbert (58:21.636)
that's perfect and lovely then, perfect. I want to ask you this because we're talking about Shakespeare, we're talking about him on stage and we've moved forward now, what, 400 years. What about Shakespeare on screen? There is this tremendous body, corpus of work.

Will Tosh (58:42.274)
Mmm. Mmm.

Jason Herbert (58:48.034)
continuing things either direct adaptations of or influenced by Shakespeare. Are there things out there, Will, that you like? You're like, hey, if you dig Shakespeare, or you want to know some Shakespeare, what should you be watching?

Will Tosh (58:52.878)
Mm.

Will Tosh (58:57.924)
yeah, yeah. Low, mean, Shakespeare has been feeding motion pictures since the late 19th century. Like, you know, it is unending. There is a huge amount out there. I've already said that I like Shakespeare in Love as a film, and I really do. And I think in terms of films that relay Shakespeare's world, I think it's really one of the best.

Jason Herbert (59:07.308)
Absolutely. Right.

Will Tosh (59:25.75)
one of the sort of wittiest and most learned, even though it takes selective decisions about what to include and what not. In terms of filmic productions of adaptations of Shakespeare's plays, real classics, I think, still bear up incredibly well. Akira Kurosawa's Throne of Blood, amazing Japanese director, 1957,

his version of Macbeth, extraordinary filmic work. And in many ways, a really wonderful adaptation of the play, a really good take on the play. I would strongly recommend that. I've got a massive soft spot for the slightly over the top early 1990s Much Do About Nothing by Kenneth Branagh. That again came out when I was a child and it's...

Jason Herbert (01:00:18.638)
Mm-hmm.

Will Tosh (01:00:24.812)
very, if you think that Shakespeare in Love contains every working British actor in 1997, much of of it, much of it nothing does as well. And it's them on holiday in Tuscany. So it's like, it's just a great sort of sun drenched. Denzel Washington's in it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's

Jason Herbert (01:00:32.126)
hahahaha

Jason Herbert (01:00:37.252)
Is that the one with did tell?

Jason Herbert (01:00:44.266)
That's the one where you see the memes. Well, I haven't seen this one, but you see the meme saying, is this the sexiest cast in film history?

Will Tosh (01:00:47.268)
That's great.

think it might well be, yeah. And they're all having a marvelous time. They just look super fun. Yeah, so I recommend that. there are some wonderful sort of, yeah, there are some wonderful film Shakespeare's. it's not hard to find a good one.

Jason Herbert (01:00:54.414)
Okay.

Jason Herbert (01:01:06.51)
See, is how I was getting you to volunteer yourself for more pods, well, because I'm going to beg you to come back. What about other works? People like you and me who like to read, crazy as it is, what are the other books that have inspired your own work or that you've found to be riveting yourself?

Will Tosh (01:01:10.553)
Right.

Will Tosh (01:01:15.492)
Mmm.

They're

Will Tosh (01:01:25.678)
So, I I mentioned at the start of our conversation, but it's wonderful, Shakespearean writer called James Shapiro, who I hugely admire, wrote a really extraordinary book about Shakespeare's life called 1599, which is a sort of year in Shakespeare's life, a really crucial year in his artistic evolution. It's the...

year he writes Julius Caesar and Henry V and as you like it and it's the year that the Globe Theatre opens. It's an astonishing year to focus on and James Shacr is the most wonderful storyteller and writer so go away and buy and read 1599. The wonderful British Shakespearean Emma Smith has written extraordinary books on Shakespeare's plays, on Shakespeare's books, particularly on the first folio.

But I would strongly recommend her This Is Shakespeare, which is a wonderful series of fairly short kind of essays on the plays. And a wonderful former colleague of mine at The Globe has written an extraordinary book on the history of race and race making and racism in and around Shakespeare called The Great White Bard, How to Love Shakespeare While Talking About Race.

Jason Herbert (01:02:46.775)
Who?

Will Tosh (01:02:52.142)
and that came out last year. It's a phenomenal book. So that's by Farah Koo and Cooper. Go away and read that one. It will change the way you think about Shakespeare.

Jason Herbert (01:02:52.836)
Cool.

Jason Herbert (01:03:01.144)
I'm gonna have to reach out about this book.

Will Tosh (01:03:03.948)
You will have to read it.

Jason Herbert (01:03:06.052)
Yeah, absolutely. I gotta ask you, our big question at the end of the day, at the end of the pod, is Shakespeare in Love a history movie?

Will Tosh (01:03:10.924)
Yeah. Yeah.

Will Tosh (01:03:18.436)
No, it's historical fiction. It's historical fiction. And that's fine. I love historical fiction. But it's not it's yeah, I don't think it's a history movie.

Jason Herbert (01:03:29.092)
It's awesome, man. I feel like, I gotta tell you, watching the film, I was kind of convoluted, frankly, on what I was seeing in a lot of ways, because I didn't have the understanding, really, in lot of ways, the background, obviously, that yourself has in Shakespeare. And then talking to you about this film makes me, even though I just watched it a couple days ago, wanna go back, no, I absolutely want to, because now I know what to look for and know how to see these kinds of films. And I think in my ways,

Will Tosh (01:03:36.963)
Mm.

Will Tosh (01:03:48.878)
Go back, go and watch it again.

Jason Herbert (01:03:58.392)
In lot of ways, in addition to getting to know other people, it's the joy of this, it's the joy of discovery, of rediscovery in a lot of ways. And I have to thank you for that Will, because this has been just the best discussion. I'm sat here the whole time going, this is so fun. This is so great to sit and talk to you about your work, which I find amazing and interesting. Should we say interesting? That's not interesting. It is spectacular. Are you kidding me? It is absolutely wonderful. I'm so glad you came on. Well, thank you so, so very much for being here.

Will Tosh (01:04:18.798)
Let's say it again. Well, come on. Let's it in again.

Will Tosh (01:04:27.34)
Jason, thank you so much. a great time. I really enjoyed it. Thank you.

Jason Herbert (01:04:31.332)
And.