The Show Must Not Go On

Posted on by Zoe Guttenplan

James Shapiro’s The Playbook tells the story of the Federal Theatre Project (FTP), a New Deal programme that supported around 1,200 artistic productions employing tens of thousands of theatrical workers, and the right-wing Dies Committee in Congress that sought to bring it to an end. These efforts, Shapiro argues, generated a mini culture war in […]

In Search of the Fair Youth

Posted on by Zoe Guttenplan

Will Tosh’s Straight Acting opens with a fleet-footed history of Shakespeare’s sexuality as presented in the scholarly literature and closes with Tosh’s own conclusion that Shakespeare was ‘bi rather than gold-star gay’. In between are seven chapters that reimagine Shakespeare’s life – and the lives of early modern men – as profoundly queer. The result is a creative and capacious book that moves smoothly between recorded and speculative history

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