Will Tosh is Head of Research at Shakespeare’s Globe, London. He teaches, writes about, and researches the literature and culture of Shakespeare’s England, and he leads the Globe’s scholarly research mission. Will’s work at the Globe includes dramaturgy, new writing development and public engagement in person, in the media and online. He is the author of Playing Indoors: Staging Early Modern Drama in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, and Male Friendship and Testimonies of Love in Shakespeare’s England, which revealed the intimate social circle of the Elizabethan spy Anthony Bacon. Will is currently working on a book called Straight Acting: The Many Queer Lives of William Shakespeare, to be published with Sceptre (UK) and Basic (US) in 2024.

Research Interests

Will’s research has two strands: he studies the overlap between Renaissance theories of ‘perfect’ friendship and early modern queer experience (the focus of his first book, and of his next project on Shakespeare), and he develops practices of applied performance research into early modern drama. This second topic has been enabled by his work at Shakespeare’s Globe, and is the subject of his book on the candle-lit Sam Wanamaker Playhouse.

Publications

Books:

Playing Indoors: Staging Early Modern Drama in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse (Bloomsbury, 2018), Male Friendship and Testimonies of Love in Shakespeare’s England (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016)

Chapters:

‘Acting natural: Paul’s boys, John Marston and plausible plants’, in Shanyn Altman and Jonathan Buckner (eds), Old St Paul’s and Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021); ‘Taking Cover: 1616 and the Move Indoors’ in Paul Edmondson and Tian Yuan Tan (eds), 1616: Shakespeare and Tang Xianzu’s China (Bloomsbury, 2016)

Reviews:

Wil writes for the Times Literary Supplement, and his scholarly reviews have appeared in Renaissance Quarterly, History Workshop Journal, Renaissance Studies, The Journal of British Studies, Shakespeare Bulletin and the Bulletin of the Society for Renaissance Studies.