The Society for Theatre Research has awarded Straight Acting: The Hidden Queer Lives of William Shakespeare by Will Tosh (Sceptre) the Society for Theatre Research Theatre Book Prize for 2025.

Straight Acting poses the intriguing question: Was Shakespeare gay? The answer, both simple and complex, is explored from Shakespeare’s childhood schooling to the representation of queer lives in plays and poems. Tosh’s book is a passionate call to readers, to recognise how queerness powerfully shaped the life and career of the world’s most famous playwright.

Author Will Tosh is interim Director of Education (Higher Education and Research) at Shakespeare’s Globe. His work at the Globe includes dramaturgy, new writing development, and public engagement in person, in the media and online. Will is also 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.

Judge Gary Naylor said of the winner:

“Tosh has done the work – and has the receipts, sorry, footnotes to prove it – but his subject leaps off the page, growing from a schoolboy in conditions that make Wackford Squeers look trendy, into a lad about town with other lads in tight friendships (and maybe more) and on into the mature giant of world culture…Tosh’s tale rattles along at a tremendous pace, vivid evocations of Elizabethan London cinematic in the detail, but continually ties the life and work together, acknowledging that there are gaps in the record, but inviting the reader to form their own conclusions with an occasional conspiratorial wink to chivvy us along.

Tosh is more conversational than confrontational in style, the book political but not polemical… It’s seldom one finds such scholarship embedded, indeed, driving a book that one can also recommend as a Christmas present – but you can with this one.”

The prize was judged by theatre critic Gary Naylor, academic Dr Lucy Munro and actress and director Tricia Thorns on a panel chaired by STR Committee Member Howard Loxton. The winner was selected from the following shortlist: 

• Shakespeare and the Royal Actor: Performing Monarchy 1760-1952 by Sally Barnden (Oxford University Press)
• A Piece of Work: Playing Shakespeare & Other Stories by Simon Russell Beale (Abacus)
• What Would Garrick Do? Or, Acting Lessons from the Eighteenth Century by James Harriman-Smith (Methuen Drama)
• Charcoalblue: Designing for Performance by Hugh Pearman (Lund Humphries)
• James Graham: State of the Nation Playwright by Maryam Philpott (Palgrave Macmillan)
• Straight Acting: The Hidden Queer Lives of William Shakespeare by Will Tosh (Sceptre)

2025 marks the 27th STR Theatre Book Prize, which was established in 1998 to celebrate the Society’s Golden Jubilee. The aim of the Book Prize is to encourage the writing and publication of books on British-related theatre history and practice.

Recent winners include Out For Blood: A Cultural History of Carrie the Musical by Chris Adams (Methuen Drama); An Actor’s Life in 12 Productions by Oliver Ford Davies; Stirring Up Sheffield by Colin and Tedd George, and Black British Women’s Theatre by Nicola Abram. Previous members of the judging panel include actors Cleo Sylvestre and Corin Redgrave, producer Thelma Holt, actress-director Yvonne Brewster and critics Michael Billington and Cindy Marcolina.

The winner of this year’s prize was announced on 20th June 2025 at the Royal Court Theatre.

You can read more about the prize on our Theatre Book Prize webpage.

Photography by Marcus Perkins.