Jodi Picoult is no stranger to bestseller lists – or controversy. For more than three decades, she has turned out issue-driven blockbusters that zero in on sensitive moral dilemmas including race, LGBTQ+ rights, and the death penalty. “By Any Other Name” takes on another lightning rod topic: the provenance of Shakespeare’s plays.
Picoult’s extensively researched and richly imagined novel embraces the theory that a stable of writers – including a woman named Emilia Bassano – actually wrote the Bard of Avon’s plays. In a fascinating author’s note, Picoult clearly presents her arguments in favor of Bassano’s authorship. She also writes, “I get a lot of hate mail – it’s part of the job when one’s novels cover gun control, abortion rights, Covid, and more – but I’m expecting the antagonism to be off the charts for this novel.
” Apparently hell hath no fury like a Stratfordian Shakespeare loyalist scorned. “By Any Other Name” features a braided narrative about two women playwrights: Bassano, born in London in 1569 to Italian-born musicians who played at the court of Queen Elizabeth I, and Melina Green, a 2013 graduate of Bard College (wink, wink) from Connecticut. In order to have their work produced and their voices heard, both of these women, born centuries apart, need to pretend their plays were written by a man.
Emilia, based on an actual woman who in 1611 became the first published female poet in England, is the more compelling of the two c.