By Any Other Name by Jodi Picoult
BY ANY OTHER NAME
JODI PICOULT
Young playwright Melina Green has just written a new work inspired by the life of her Elizabethan ancestor Emilia Bassano. But seeing it performed is unlikely, in a theater world where the playing field isn’t level for women. As Melina wonders if she dares risk failure again, her best friend takes the decision out of her hands and submits the play to a festival under a male pseudonym.
In 1581, young Emilia Bassano is a ward of English aristocrats. Her lessons on languages, history, and writing have endowed her with a sharp wit and a gift for storytelling, but like most women of her day, she is allowed no voice of her own. Forced to become a mistress to the Lord Chamberlain, who oversees all theatre productions in England, Emilia sees firsthand how the words of playwrights can move an audience. She begins to form a plan to secretly bring a play of her own to the stage—by paying an actor named William Shakespeare to front her work.
REVIEW
By Any Other Name is Jodi Picoult’s first foray into historical fiction and is an intriguing take on the idea that some of Shakespeare’s famous plays and sonnets were actually written by a woman named Emilia Bassano who was the first woman to have a book of poems published in England. In the afterword, Picoult explains how she first came across Emilia’s name in an article by Elizabeth Winkler linking her with Shakespeare and it inspired the writing of this book.
The book is divided into two timeline narratives with Emilia Bassano in the sixteenth century and her descendant, Melina Green, in the present day. Both Emilia and Melina have aspirations for being playwrights but both are restricted by their gender. In Emilia’s time, women were not allowed to write plays and she is encouraged by her best friend, Kit Marlow, to broker a deal with William Shakespeare so her plays will be produced under his name. Shakespeare’s attempts at writing his own plays have so far met with failure so he jumps at the chance of presenting Emilia’s work as his own. The chapters with Emilia are full of Easter eggs, such as quotes or plot lines, that will be immediately recognisable to fans of Shakespeare and they go a long way in helping to sell the idea that Emilia was the author of certain plays.
Moving forward to the present day, it is depressing to realise the world hasn’t really changed as we follow Melina Green’s attempts to get her plays produced in a male dominated arena. When Melina discovers she is a descendant of Emilia Bassano and discovers the Shakespeare connection, she gets the idea of writing a play based on Emilia’s life for a competition but she decides not to enter the finished product as she knows the men involved in the competition are misogynistic. After a night of drowning their sorrows, Melina’s best friend and fellow playwright, Andre, edits Melina’s name so it appears more masculine and submits the play. However, things become increasingly complicated when the play is selected for production and Andre has to keep up the ruse that he is the author. When the truth is revealed, it backfires badly on Melina and her budding success as a playwright seems to be over before it has even begun.
By Any Other Name is a really intriguing book and it certainly makes you think twice about Shakespeare’s works and about the man himself who seems to have been quite an unsavoury character. Picoult expands on her theories in the afterword and explains why she believes Shakespeare wasn’t capable of writing these plays due to his lack of education and world experience. While Picoult admits there is no evidence that Emilia wrote any of the plays, she is quick to point out that there is no evidence to suggest she didn’t either. She highlights names and places in plays like Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet that can be linked to Emilia Bassano far easier than to William Shakespeare. And then there are the women in the plays, strong characters who find their voice in a male dominated world and Picoult argues these women could only have been created by a female writer. Food for thought.
