Artists and scholars on queer Shakespeare

We’re celebrating Pride this month by sharing some of our Shakespeare Unlimited podcast interviews and blog posts with artists, scholars, and writers about queer Shakespeare over the centuries.

Queer Shakespeare, Then

Poet Richard Barnfield: Shakespeare’s Queer Inspiration
Before the 20th century, only two English writers—both Elizabethans—had published same-sex love sonnets about men: Richard Barnfield with the shepherd Daphnis and Ganymede, followed by William Shakespeare and his fair youth. “Barnfield is the one who indicates to Shakespeare what you can do with a queered Petrarchan sonnet,” explains Will Tosh, director of education at Shakespeare’s Globe, London. “He’s the one who shows Shakespeare what’s possible. Shakespeare takes that challenge and runs with it.” Learn about Barnfield’s meteoric rise in literary London in the 1590s and the influence of his groundbreaking poetry on Shakespeare.

Scholar Will Tosh: The Hidden Queer Lives of William Shakespeare
How did Shakespeare engage with the complexities of gender and sexuality in his time? Was Shakespeare’s portrayal of cross-dressing and same-sex attraction simply for comedic effect, or did it reflect a deeper understanding of love and attraction? In Straight Acting: The Hidden Queer Lives of William Shakespeare, scholar Will Tosh moves beyond the question, “Was Shakespeare gay?” to explore how sex, intimacy, and identity were more complex—and more queer—in Elizabethan England than that question suggests. He portrays Shakespeare as a queer artist who drew on his society’s nuanced understanding of gender and sexuality to create his extraordinary plays and poems.

Charlotte Cushman: The First American Celebrity
One of the most famous American theater artists of the mid-19th century, Charlotte Cushman was known for her Lady Macbeth and Oliver Twist’s Nancy, but she was acclaimed for her performances as Romeo and Hamlet, playing Shakespeare’s leading men with an emotionality and vulnerability that took audiences by surprise, including Queen Victoria. In her personal life, Cushman dressed in masculine clothing and lived publicly as a queer woman. enjoying numerous love affairs with female artists. Her ten-year relationship with Matilda Hays was publicly recognized and even described as a “female marriage” by Elizabeth Barret Browning.
Read an excerpt from Lady Romeo  |  Charlotte Cushman in the Folger Collection

Queer Shakespeare, Now

Novelist Julia Armfield: Reimagining King Lear in a Drowned World
How does King Lear resonate in a world reshaped by climate change? Julia Armfield explores this question in Private Rites, a novel set in a near-future London reshaped by rising sea levels. Following three sisters grappling with their father’s death, the novel weaves together themes of inheritance, power, and familial wounds—echoing Shakespeare’s tragic monarch while carving out a distinctly modern, queer perspective. From the storm in King Lear to the watery depths of her fiction, she reflects on how queerness, horror, and the climate crisis intersect in literature. Private Rites was longlisted for the inaugural Climate Fiction Prize in 2024.

Scholar Leonard Barkan: Reading Shakespeare Reading Me
When most of us read, scholar Leonard Barkan reminds us, we bring our own experiences to the text, asking personal questions like “What about my life?” and “How does this make me feel?” His book Reading Shakespeare Reading Me combines memoir and literary criticism, analyzing ten Shakespeare plays and locating their parallels in the intimate details of his parents’ marriages and early lives, his coming of age as a gay man, and many of the deaths, loves, achievements, and disappointments that have made up his time on Earth. Barkan is the Class of 1943 University Professor at Princeton University.

Actor Simon Russell Beale: Shakespeare, from Hamlet to Titus
Called “the finest stage actor of his generation,” Sir Simon Russell Beale has played just about everyone in Shakespeare’s canon—Hamlet, Lear, Macbeth, Falstaff, Malvolio, Iago—and most recently, Titus Andronicus. Drawing from his memoir, A Piece of Work: Playing Shakespeare & Other Stories, Beale reflects on the Shakespearean roles that have shaped his career and how his approach has evolved over time. “If you take in each individual tiny little moment from scratch, you might end up discovering things that you didn’t expect to discover,” he says of his process. “It’s finding little details.” Beale has been included in the Independent on Sunday Pink List, a list of the most influential gay men and women in the UK.

Director Greg Doran: Forty Years of Directing Shakespeare
Greg Doran’s career as a Shakespearean director began in the late 1970s, when he was a teenager. By the time he stepped down as the Artistic Director of the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2023, Doran had directed every play in the First Folio, helmed era-defining productions of Shakespeare’s plays and worked with actors such as Judi Dench, David Tennant, Patrick Stewart, and Doran’s late husband Antony Sher (who we interviewed as he was preparing to play Lear). Doran’s memoir, My Shakespeare, tells the story of his life through the plays he has directed. It’s a portrait of an artist at work, and also an intimate account of Doran’s deep artistic partnership with Sher.

Playwright James Ijames: Fat Ham, a queer Hamlet
James Ijames’s Fat Ham won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. It’s been produced on Broadway where it received five Tony Award nominations followed by productions at theaters across the US. In Fat Ham, Ijames takes the outline of Hamlet and transposes it to the present day American South. Instead of “funeral baked meats,” Fat Ham serves up barbecue—expertly cooked by Rev, the Claudius character. The queer, Black Hamlet character is named Juicy. Opal, the Ophelia character, as well as her brother Larry, the stand in for Laertes, are also queer. With Fat Ham, Ijames brilliantly transforms Shakespeare’s premise into much more than a parody or an adaptation.

Actor Derek Jacobi: Playing Hamlet
Sir Derek Jacobi talks with us about the Shakespearean role for which he is best known, Hamlet, which he has performed more than 400 times in his career. In part 2 of the interview, Acting Shakespeare, Jacobi talks about his remarkable career, including the advice he received from Richard Burton, a disappointing rejection by the Royal Shakespeare Company, sharing the stage with Laurence Olivier, performing King Lear in 2010, his collaborations with Kenneth Branagh, and a struggle with paralyzing stage fright that drove him away from the theater for two years in the 1980s. Jacobi, along with his Vicious co-star Ian McKellen, was a Grand Marshal of the 46th New York City Gay Pride March.

Actor Ian McKellen: Hamlet, Richard III, Macbeth, and Gandalf
Sir Ian McKellen talks with us about some of his most famous roles: playing Macbeth opposite Dame Judi Dench, King Richard III with a screenplay he co-wrote, and Gandalf the Grey in The Lord of the Rings films. In the second interview, Playing Hamlet, McKellen compares playing Hamlet in his thirties… and again in his eighties. In between? Edgar, Romeo, Leontes, Macbeth, Coriolanus, Iago, Richard III, Prospero, and King Lear. Plus, of course, Magneto and Gandalf. McKellen, along with his Vicious co-star Derek Jacobi, was a Grand Marshal of the 46th New York City Gay Pride March.

Composer Be Steadwell: Creating a Sonic Landscape for Twelfth Night
Steadwell shares how The Cure, Elizabethan traditional ballads, the underground club scene in Berlin, and queer ball culture all inspire the 13 songs they composed for Folger Theatre’s 2025 production of Twelfth Night. Steadwell’s work—whether composing for a Shakespearean play, crafting earnest love songs that speak to queer experiences, or writing a magical realism novel, Chocolate Chip City, about Black queer women confronting gentrification in Washington, DC—transforms personal narrative into a powerful artistic statement.