Jodi Picoult shares some of the inspiration behind her latest novel By Any Other Name.
Like many other English majors, I loved Shakespeare. I loved his language, and I loved the way he created protofeminist characters. One semester I had a Shakespeare professor who spent all of ten minutes one semester discussing the question of his authorship. I dismissed it, like most people do. Then, a few years ago, I was reading The Atlantic and came across an article by Elizabeth Winkler about this very thing. In it, she pointed out that Shakespeare had two daughters that he did not teach to read, and who signed with a mark. Something struck a chord in me – how could the playwright who had created Portia and Katherine and Rosalind and Beatrice not teach his own girls to read? I just didn’t buy it.
It made me do a deeper dive into the authorship question – particularly into Emilia Bassano, whose name Winkler mentioned in the article and of whom I’d never heard. All of the things that don’t make sense about Shakespeare — that he would have been the only playwright of the time who didn’t collaborate, that he never travelled outside England yet wrote in great detail about places like Italy and Egypt and Denmark with details not available in guide books at the time, that he didn’t play an instrument yet had over 3000 detailed references to music and music theory in the plays, that he was self-educated yet died without a single book or manuscript to his name, that no other writer of the time lauded him when he died even though he was quite famous by then — made perfect sense when you learn about Emilia’s life. It got to a point where I thought, “Oh come ON, this can’t be another coincidence.”
Emilia was born to an Italian family that was musically adept, and in fact they were the recorder consort for Henry VIII and Elizabeth I. They were hidden Jews, practicing their religion secretly. At age 7 she was given to a countess as her ward, and the countess gave her a thorough legal and classical education. At age 12 when the countess married, Emilia was stuck with her brother, who happened to be the ambassador to Denmark and who took a trip to the Danish court that summer where he met Tycho Brahe (whose supernova opens Hamlet) and Brahe’s cousins Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. At 13 she became the mistress for the Lord Chamberlain of England, who was 56 years old, and who controlled all theatre in England — from reading the drafts of plays to attending rehearsal to going to opening nights. Through him, Emilia would have met all the players in the theatre world. After ten years, she became pregnant and was married off to her wastrel of a cousin, who squandered her money. When Emilia was in her forties, in 1611, she became the first published female poet in England - a remarkable feat. But writers don’t just appear in their forties. I believe she was writing earlier than that to get money, and using an allonym. That allonym? William Shakespeare.
How much of an injustice do you think has been committed against Emilia Bassano if she is indeed the author?
JP: A huge one! Look, the fact that Emilia was England’s first published female poet is itself worthy of acclaim, and yet no one has ever heard of her. Add to that the fact that back in Elizabethan England, women could not write for public consumption, and that the only way she might have gotten her work out there was by eliding her name from history — and you start to realize that she is just the tip of the iceberg. All sorts of women back then were practicing science in their kitchens and gardens, and men wrote up their discoveries and took the credit. One of the most ridiculous arguments I’ve heard against the possibility of woman writing some of the plays attributed to Shakespeare is that “There were no women writing then.” That’s not true. Women like Mary Sidney Herbert and Elizabeth Cary were writing and using their brother’s/husband’s names, or were creating plays that were performed in their own homes. The issue is that women and women’s voices were not given equal time in the record of history, which is always written by men. Absence of evidence is not always evidence of absence.
This novel is creative, but is deeply rooted in fact. I reread the plays, did a deep dive into the primary sources of Shakespeare’s life and then Emilia’s (most of what we know about her is through the journals of a total hack astronomer/physician she saw to help with her infertility, and which is now in the Ashmolean). I interviewed a lot of academics and Shakespearean scholars and Elizabethan scholars, the head historian at the Globe Theatre, modern playwrights and directors and other authors who’ve written about Emilia. But fleshing out Emilia as a fully realized character was all my doing. My hope was to bring Emilia to life for you, within the confines of the truth. Moreover, the other half of the novel is a fictional descendent of Emilia’s, a female playwright named Melina in 2024, who has written a play about Emilia and can’t get it produced in a male-dominated modern theatre world. The modern element of the book contextualizes the historical part of it - how much has changed for women? How much has not?
I want everyone to know who Emilia Bassano is. Whether or not you think she wrote some of the Shakespearean plays, she was an incredible woman who deserves a legacy.
By Any Other Name
by Jodi Picoult
No.1 New York Times bestselling author Jodi Picoult brings to life the woman many believe was the real playwright behind the work of William Shakespeare alongside a contemporary story of a New York author suffering the same fate of being silenced.
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