By Any Other Name: Jodi Picoult’s Dual Time-Period Novel

WRITTEN BY LUCINDA BYATT

With 29 books to her credit – and sales of upwards of 40 million copies – many readers will have read one or more of Jodi Picoult’s novels. Historical fiction was not among her usual genres (an exception being The Storyteller (2013). That changed with the publication of By Any Other Name (Ballantine/Michael Joseph, 2024). This compelling story is written as a dual timeline around the historical figure of Emilia Bassano and a contemporary young American playwright, Melina Green, whose failure to get noticed prompts her best friend to submit her play under a deliberately gender ambiguous name: Mel Green. As Picoult told an audience at the Hay Festival last summer: “It’s really a book about how things have changed for women in 400 years – and how they haven’t.”

Doubts that a single writer could have penned all the “Shakespeare” plays have been around for centuries. The so-called Anti-Stratfordians – or Oxfordians, depending on the candidate in question – have argued the case for alternatives, whether the Earl of Oxford, Christopher Marlowe or Francis Bacon, or a loose collective. Picoult’s novel convincingly builds on the supposition that a woman – or women – should be included in that roster of playwrights. Bassano’s introduction to the theatre began in her teens when she became the mistress of Henry Carey, Lord Hunsdon, closely associated to the Tudor court and responsible for approving (censoring) all plays before they were performed. Bassano later became the first Englishwoman to publish her own verse (composing poetry, preferably for private enjoyment, was acceptable), but writing for the stage, or worse, acting on it were completely off-limits: selling her plays to Shakespeare, who put his name to them, was her only option.

I begin by asking Picoult whether her interest in the debate surrounding Shakespeare’s authorship was recent. “I didn’t even think twice about Shakespeare’s authorship when I was in college – I laughed off the idea of him not writing his own plays. But I fell in love with the plays because of the female characters, which were so three-dimensional. Then I learned he had two daughters who he never taught to read or write – which I didn’t buy at all. The deeper I dove, the more I learned that Shakespeare didn’t have the education, opportunity, or wherewithal to write the plays – but Emilia’s life, without even trying, mapped them very closely.” Indeed, one of the most fascinating aspects of this novel is how Picoult subtly traces events and episodes in Emilia’s life and cultural background that map directly onto the plays. (Conveniently, there is also an appendix of quotes.)

In the contemporary plot, Melina Green discovers that she is descended from the Bassanos, an Italian, probably Jewish family, who moved to London where Emilia was born. Her interest is sufficiently piqued to write a play about her Elizabethan forebear in which the evident barriers of identity and gender mirror her own. As Picoult tells me: “My experience as a playwright who has experienced gender discrimination in theater led to Melina’s storyline. However, the idea of intertwining two women was a decision I made intentionally – I think people read historical fiction and think, ‘Things were terrible but that was then, this is now.’ I wanted to point out that it’s still happening.”

New York Public Library is the setting for some of Melina’s research. What about Picoult’s approach to the period? Typically thorough, her reading included “Multiple professors – mostly women – who teach Shakespeare” – among them Elizabeth Winckler, whose pivotal article “Was Shakespeare a Woman?” first appeared in The Atlantic (June 2019).[1] Picoult also used the AGAS map (online) and the historical documents that discuss Emilia, “namely Simon Foreman’s diary of their sessions, which is in the Ashmolean, and the mention of Emilia’s court case against her brothers-in-law for which Southampton intervened.” The period detail is vivid, including two miniatures by Nicholas Hilliard: one of the youthful Henry Wriothesley, third Earl of Southampton, and the other tentatively identified as Emilia Bassano. Like her character Melina, who examines a First Folio in the NYPL, Picoult also experienced the thrill of handling a First Folio in Eton College Library. “It was incredibly cool to touch something ‘of the time’ – and to think about Ben Jonson writing the prefatory poem and why he might have done that, given that Shakespeare was someone he detested.”

There are multifaceted reflections at play in the novel. Melina finds herself in the same position as her protagonist, Emilia, watching a performance of her work which the audience believe is written by a man. I ask Picoult whether she was interested in exploring this mirroring, also at a personal level. “I do not usually write about autobiographical experiences,” she replies, “although ironically, By Any Other Name is full of them – because I viscerally know what it’s like to be a female writer judged differently from a man. Even at this point of my career when I say I’m a writer, I am asked, ‘Oh, children’s books?  Romance?’ as if those are the only acceptable lanes for women writers.”

When I ask how much more there is to be done about not writing women out of history, especially in the light of the recent explosion of book banning, Picoult says: “We are right back in Elizabethan England, in terms of banning. The language used by the banners is almost verbatim what was used by the Puritans in the Elizabethan era to challenge theater, because they felt it led people astray from God, and that people who saw theater would not be able to tell the difference between a stabbing acted out onstage and one committed in real life. They sought to remove art from society because it encouraged people to think – and that meant they couldn’t control the populace’s thoughts themselves through religion. As for history being written by men – and women being judged on a different scale than men – well, look at the results of the US election. I think that makes the point very clearly that it’s still a problem.” Picoult’s favourite female character in the plays is Portia, that model of equanimity, with the intellect to argue and win a trial. It’s a character that perhaps only a woman could have penned.

About the contributor: Lucinda Byatt is HNR Features Editor and teaches at the University of Edinburgh.

References:

1. Elizabeth Winkler, Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies. New York, 2023.

Published in Historical Novels Review | Issue 111 (February 2025)