Jodi Picoult’s By Any Other Name takes its title from a line in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, and the title leads the reader straight into a dual timeline novel split between the present and the sixteenth century, with interspersed snippets from the script of a play. In the present, a young woman, Melina Green, has written a play about her ancestress, Emilia Bassano, but Melina is unable to get her play produced because of misogyny in the theater world. This timeline is told in two points of view, that of Melina and that of a New York Times theater critic, Jasper.
The historical time line is the story of Emilia Bassano, a real-life woman, who Picoult posits wrote the best of Shakespeare’s plays as Emilia could not publish them under her own name. At age thirteen, Emilia is forced to become a wealthy man’s mistress, and he encourages her mind and her writing of plays and poetry. A well-educated woman, she wrote the first book of poetry published by a woman during the reign of Elizabeth I. This book resonated with me because I recently read Cities of Women by Kathleen B. Jones which is itself a dual timeline novel concerning The Book of the City of Ladies or Le Livre de la Cité des Dames, a medieval book written by Christine de Pizan. This book is mentioned in By Any Other Name, and Emilia has read it. I’ve also recently read Stalking Shakespeare by Lee Durkee in which he obsesses about finding a portrait of the real Shakespeare, and there is some discussion in By Any Other Name of an engraved portrait of Shakespeare that appears in a folio with all his plays. There is a lot of overlap of characters in the three books, and they complement each other well.
I found it totally plausible that Bassano wrote the Shakespeare plays based on the evidence in Picoult’s novel. What hasn’t changed in the centuries between the two timelines of Picoult’s novel is that women are still second-class citizens and still have no true voice in society. White men still maintain their privilege, although Melina must investigate her own sense of privilege in relationship to her black gay roommate. This book covers gender inequity, racial prejudice, domestic violence, and homophobia.
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By Any Other Name (Ballantine Books, (August 20, 2024) is available through:
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