By Any Other Name: Transcending Time and Truth
Rating: 4/5
Despite having over 40 million copies of her novels in print worldwide, until recently I had never read a single word of Jodi Picoult before. While I’d heard of her most renowned successes like “My Sister’s Keeper”, I never would have thought to pick one up until I stumbled across her latest release “By Any Other Name”. Centred around two women born centuries apart, united by blood, a talent for playwriting and the misfortune of being a girl in a world that doesn’t want to hear our stories told, I couldn’t resist.
The two storylines alternate chapters between Melina Green, an aspiring playwright stepping back into the game after some harsh feedback from a critic spirals into a decade of artistic reclusion, and her ancestor Emilia Bassano. Inspired by research that suggests Emilia could be the true author of Shakespeare’s work, Melina writes a play imagining her muse’s life as a courtesan who must hide behind a man’s name to see her characters on the stage. The irony is, Melina must do just that herself. Her best friend and fellow marginalised playwright Andre submits the script to a competition under a male pseudonym against Melina’s wishes. When her play is not only selected, but is to be produced by the very critic who tore her writing apart all those years ago, she feels the only way to see it succeed is to play out the charade that Andre is the playwright, and she his zealous assistant.
In tandem, Emilia’s narrative spans almost her entire lifetime; from an adolescent girl sold as a courtesan to Queen Elizabeth I’s Lord Chancellor, to a confident (albeit anonymous) wordsmith. As her circumstances grow increasingly precarious, her passion for storytelling becomes her lifeline to provide for her family. Her transformation concludes as a grandmother, looking back at a life of loss, heartbreak and cruelty the likes of which a modern woman might never experience… or might she?
This novel draws such a thought-provoking parallel between the discrimination women face in the arts today, compared with their outright exclusion in the Elizabethan era. It calls into question how much has truly changed, when the people with the money and the influence to bolster fresh talent have stayed the same. Although I did feel that the way Picoult communicated this idea was well-trodden (the dialogue around this topic felt a little hackneyed at some points), ultimately the strength of Emilia’s character is what touched me so deeply while reading.
Initially, while I considered the two storylines to be compelling in their own right, the extremity of Emilia’s plight as the narratives spurred on side by side somewhat reduced the sympathy I felt for Melina. I thought she came off as slightly petulant—I mean, if every creative let one censure of their vision hold them back from making anything new, we’d live in a world completely devoid of art altogether. Yet, it highlighted that while there is still a long way to go with women’s equality in the theatre business, significant progress has been made. Finding the courage to continue writing in the face of scrutiny, in an age where women who call out sexism are branded as “whining”, was a key milestone in Melina’s arc of self-actualisation. Conversely, it solidified for me that the fierceness of women like Emilia, whose voices were oppressed in a wholly more sinister fashion, was nothing short of heroic.
As the years go by, we are enlightened more and more of how women have been at the forefront of some of humanity’s greatest creations and discoveries, only to have the credit stolen by a man. I had already heard of the theory that Shakespeare was not the true author of his plays, but the inference and investigation that Picoult knots into this tale has all but convinced me of its probable fact. Her fascinating Author’s Note, revealing that Emilia Bassano was indeed a real person, detailing the various threads weaving her into the patches in Shakespeare’s spotty history, made the payoff all the more satisfying.
The novel is rife with authenticity, the themes and trials throughout Emilia’s story carefully interlaced with those of the characters and plays she sells to Shakespeare. Her love story with the Earl of Southampton is beautiful in its purity and harrowing in its fated doom. I was deeply moved to learn that in Picoult’s research she may have actually solved the identity of the mystery man in the miniature portrait accompanying that of Emilia’s, reuniting her and her lover in death, after keeping their romance a secret in life. Perhaps it is sentimental, but I felt that there was a poetic justice in acknowledging that a woman who was forbidden agency in almost everything risked it all for love, and that it might give solace to her memory.
I thought that the pacing of the book was deftly handled; the more measured, contemporary style adopted in Melina’s point of view provided some relief from the high stakes tumultuousness of Emilia’s account. The latter completely stole the show for me, but I was greatly entertained by comedic unravelling of the “deep in a lie” trope as Melina forms a friendship with her once arch nemesis Jasper. The subject of diversity is widely explored through these secondary characters and the misconceptions surrounding them, reminding us of the value of different perspectives in art. Jasper is humanised in sharing his neurodivergence, and Melina is forced to check her privilege as it dawns on her that by convincing Andre to be complicit in her ruse, she is standing in the way of a black, gay playwright with as much to prove as herself.
There were a couple of creative choices that prevented me from giving the book five stars, such as the pages of Melina’s script in between her chapters and Emilia’s. I guessed that they were there to serve as a kind of bridge between the timelines, but they didn’t really add anything substantial to the reading experience for me. There were a few instances as well where the speech patterns in Emilia’s chapters lapsed into a slightly more modern expression (which I explained in my first blog post is a pet peeve of mine when a piece is set historically).
The message at the heart of “By Any Other Name” struck me this: the greatest love story you will ever have is the one you have with yourself. Through every hardship, Emilia draws strength from her inherent belief in her own gifts, and in turn her descendent Melina is empowered to do the same. Even if Emilia is not the true face behind Shakespeare’s mask, she was certainly an extraordinary woman—the first ever female poet published in England.
The successful, creative women of today stand on the shoulders of those who defied the prejudices set against them, and we should remain grateful for their bravery.
Jodi Picoult delivered a fascinating interview with Penguin about her process for writing the book that is well worth the read, so I thought I would include it here: https://www.penguin.co.uk/discover/articles/jodi-picoult-interview-by-any-other-name-shakespeare-emilia-bassano
