A captivating new novel from the New York Times bestselling author of Wish You Were Here and co-author of Mad Honey.
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Two women, centuries apart—one of whom is the real author of Shakespeare’s plays—are forced to hide behind another name to make their voice heard.
In 1581, Emilia Bassano—like most young women of her day—is allowed no voice of her own. But as the Lord Chamberlain’s mistress, she has access to all theater in England, and finds a way to bring her work to the stage secretly. And yet, creating some of the world’s greatest dramatic masterpieces comes at great cost: by paying a man for the use of his name, she will write her own out of history.
In the present, playwright Melina Green has just written a new work inspired by the life of her Elizabethan ancestor Emilia Bassano. Although the challenges are different four hundred years later, the playing field is still not level for women in theater. Would Melina—like Emilia—be willing to forfeit her credit as author, just for a chance to see her work performed?
Told in intertwining narratives, this sweeping tale of ambition, courage, and desire asks what price each woman is willing to pay to see their work live on—even if it means they will be forgotten.
By Any Other Name is an:
Her best one yet. Jodi Picoult has combined her trademark research with an astonishing and heart-rending story, embedded in truth, and turned it into a gripping novel.
I love Picoult’s juggling act of perception and expectation, the genuine depth of her characters, and her ability to make a point without overplaying her hand. After reading By Any Other Name, I want to know more: about Emilia Bassano, about other amazing women lost to history, about inequality in the arts today. This remarkable novel is an awakening, an entertainment, and a story I want to share.
Picoult, known for exploring social issues in her best-selling fiction, returns with a thought-provoking tale of two female playwrights and the similar compromises they make 400 years apart. . . . In the end, both women must decide what price they will pay to satisfy their desires and ambitions.
The acclaimed Jodi Picoult dives right into the did-Shakespeare-write-his-plays controversy with a novel that spans centuries.
A blend of historical fiction and modern-day settings, the novel gives us timelines that intertwine and surprise. . . . This one is definitely for fans of Shakespeare’s work; Picoult has done her research.
[An] inspiring work of feminist literature.
Stunning. So interesting, clever, educational and moving. One of the best books I’ve read in recent times.
Picoult’s fictional take on the real life of [Emilia Bassano]. She quite likely would have known Shakespeare, because they moved in the same circles. Did she write things attributed to the Bard? Who knows. But her own life is interesting enough.
In the present, Melina Green has just written a new work inspired by the life of Emilia, her Elizabethan ancestor. . . . [Picoult] creates a well-observed tapestry that connects these two women across time, through art and circumstance.
You’ll fall in love with Emilia Bassano, the unforgettable heroine based on a real woman that Picoult brings vividly to life in her brilliantly researched new novel. Jodi Picoult’s books always start passionate conversations, and this one is sure to get people talking. Book clubs will embrace this rich, inspiring story.
Perennial bestseller Picoult . . . takes on another hot-button topic sure to ignite controversy and conversation: the question of Shakespearean authorship. . . . [A] timely and affecting tale . . . Picoult’s many, many fans will pounce on her latest incisive, pot-stirring tale, while the Shakespearean theme will attract even more readers.
Picoult creates a richly detailed portrait of daily life in Elizabethan England, from sumptuous castles to seedy hovels. . . . It’s Emilia’s story, and Picoult lovingly brings her to life. . . . A vibrant tale of a remarkable woman.
Perennial best-seller Picoult, who has tackled such heady subjects as same-sex marriage, abortion, and racism, takes on another hot-button topic sure to ignite controversy and conversation, the question of Shakespearean authorship. In this dual timeline tale, struggling playwright Melina Green has written a play about her ancestor Emilia Bassano, who she believes really penned many of Shakespeare’s greatest plays. Frustrated with sexism in the New York theater scene in 2023, Melina pushes her Black male friend Andre, also a playwright, to claim credit for her work when a lauded but arrogant critic expresses interest in getting the play produced. This leads to a Shakespearean—or should it be Bassanian?—comedy of errors. At the same time, Picoult tells Emilia’s story. Forced to become a courtesan at 13, she eventually falls in love with a handsome nobleman, but when she gets pregnant, she’s married off to a brutal man and forced to find a way to earn a living penning poems and plays for a dissolute actor, namely, William Shakespeare. Some readers will undoubtedly quibble with Picoult’s conclusions about the Bard, but they’ll just as assuredly find themselves thoroughly engaged with the struggles of Emilia, Melina, and Andre as writers with the deck stacked against them in this timely and affecting tale. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Picoult’s many, many fans will pounce on her latest incisive, pot- stirring tale, while the Shakepearean theme will attract even more readers. YA: Teens reading Shakespeare in class will be intrigued by Picoult’s premise and the exploration of theater-world sexism and racism.
Had me absolutely captivated . . . I loved all the questions this novel raised about who gets to tell which stories and how complex that can become. Jodi Picoult is a genius.
Who was Shakespeare? Move over, Earl of Oxford and Francis Bacon: There’s another contender for the true author of plays attributed to the bard of Stratford—Emilia Bassano, a clever, outspoken, educated woman who takes center stage in Picoult’s spirited novel. Of Italian heritage, from a family of court musicians, Emilia was a hidden Jew and the courtesan of a much older nobleman who vetted plays to be performed for Queen Elizabeth. She was well traveled—unlike Shakespeare, she visited Italy and Denmark, where, Picoult imagines, she may have met Rosencrantz and Guildenstern—and was familiar with court intrigue and English law. “Every gap in Shakespeare’s life or knowledge that has had to be explained away by scholars, she somehow fills,” Picoult writes. Encouraged by her lover, Emilia wrote plays and poetry, but 16th-century England was not ready for a female writer. Picoult interweaves Emilia’s story with that of her descendant Melina Green, an aspiring playwright, who encounters the same sexist barriers to making herself heard that Emilia faced. In alternating chapters, Picoult follows Melina’s frustrated efforts to get a play produced—a play about Emilia, who Melina is certain sold her work to Shakespeare. Melina’s play, By Any Other Name, “wasn’t meant to be a fiction; it was meant to be the resurrection of an erasure.” Picoult creates a richly detailed portrait of daily life in Elizabethan England, from sumptuous castles to seedy hovels… It’s Emilia’s story, and Picoult lovingly brings her to life. A vibrant tale of a remarkable woman.
You’ll fall in love with Emilia Bassano, the unforgettable heroine based on a real woman that Picoult brings vividly to life in her brilliantly-researched new novel. Jodi Picoult’s books always start passionate conversations, and this one is sure to get people talking. Book clubs will embrace this rich, inspiring story.
1581
Emilia Bassano is allowed no voice of her own, but finds a way to bring her work to the stage secretly. Yet by paying a man for the use of his name, she will write her own out of history. His name? William Shakespeare . . .
NOW
Playwright Melina Green is fed up of never seeing her shows make the stage. Even in the 21st century it appears a woman’s voice is worth less than a man’s. So Melina takes a lesson from history.
And makes a bargain with a man . . .
Women have long been written out of history, but what if they held the pen all along?
At the Globe Theater
In Leicester Square
Melina
May 2013
Many years after Melina graduated from Bard College, the course she remembered the most was not a playwriting seminar or a theater intensive but an anthropology class. One day, the professor had flashed a slide of a bone with twenty-nine tiny incisions on one long side. “The Lebombo bone was found in a cave in Swaziland in the 1970s and is about forty-three thousand years old,” she had said. “It’s made of a baboon fibula. For years, it’s been the first calendar attributed to man. But I ask you: what man uses a twenty-nine-day calendar?” The professor seemed to stare directly at Melina. “History,” she said, “is written by those in power.”The spring of her senior year, Melina headed to her mentor’s office hours, as she did every week. Professor Bufort had, in the eighties, written a play called Wanderlust that won a Drama Desk Award, transferred to Broadway, and was nominated for a Tony. He claimed that he’d always wanted to teach, and that when Bard College made him head of the theater program it was a dream come true, but Melina thought it hadn’t hurt that none of his other plays had had the same critical success.
He was standing with his back to her when she knocked and entered. His silver hair fell over his eyes, boyish. “My favorite thesis student,” he greeted.
“I’m your only thesis student.” Melina pulled an elastic from her wrist and balled her black hair on top of her head in a loose knot before rummaging in her backpack for two small glass bottles of chocolate milk from a local dairy. They cost a fortune, but she brought Professor Bufort one each week. High blood pressure medication had robbed him of his previous vices—alcohol and cigarettes—and he joked that this was the only fun he got to have anymore. Melina handed him a bottle and clinked hers against it.
“My savior,” he said, taking a long drink.
Like most high school kids who had notched productions of The Crucible and A Midsummer Night’s Dream on their belts, Melina had come to Bard assuming that she would study acting. It wasn’t until she took a playwriting course that she realized the only thing mightier than giving a stellar performance was being the person who crafted the words an actor spoke. She started writing one-acts that were performed by student groups. She studied Molière and Mamet, Marlowe and Miller. She took apart the language and the structure of their plays with the intensity of a grandmaster chess champion whose understanding of the game determined success.
She wrote a modern Pygmalion, where the sculptor was a pageant mom and the statue was JonBenét Ramsey, but it was her version of Waiting for Godot, set at a political convention where all the characters were awaiting a savior-like presidential candidate who never arrived, that caught the attention of Professor Bufort. He encouraged her to send her play to various open submission festivals, and although she never was selected, it was clear to Melina and everyone else in the department that she was going to be one of the few to make it as a produced playwright.
“Melina,” Bufort asked, “what are you going to do after graduation?”
“I’m open to suggestions,” she replied, hoping that this was where her mentor told her about some fabulous job opportunity. She wasn’t naïve enough to believe that she could survive in New York City without some sort of day job, and Bufort had hooked her up before. She’d interned one summer for a famous director in the city—a man who once threw an iced latte at a costume designer who hadn’t adjusted a hem, and who took her to bars even though she was underage because he preferred to drink his lunch. Another summer, she’d been behind the cash register at a café at Signature Theatre and behind a merch booth at Second Stage. Professor Bufort had connections.
This whole business ran on connections.
“This is not a suggestion,” Bufort said, handing her a flyer. “This is more of a command.”
Bard College would be hosting a collegiate playwriting competition. The prize was a guaranteed slot at the Samuel French Off-Off-Broadway Short Play Festival.
The professor leaned against the desk, his legs inches away from Melina’s. He set down his chocolate milk, crossed his arms, and smiled down at her. “I think you could win,” he said.
She met his gaze. “But . . . ?”
“But.” He raised a brow. “Do I have to say it? Again?”
Melina shook her head. The only negative comment she ever received from him was that although her writing was clean and compelling, it was emotionally sterile. As if she had put up a wall between the playwright and the play.
“You are good,” Bufort said, “but you could be great. It’s not enough to manipulate your audience’s feelings. You must make them believe that there’s a reason you are the one telling this story. You have to let a bit of yourself bleed into your work.”
And therein lay the problem: you couldn’t bleed without feeling the sting of the cut.
Melina began to pleat the edge of her T-shirt, just to avoid his gaze. Bufort pushed off the desk and circled behind her. “I’ve been acquainted with Melina Green for three years,” he said, drawing close. “But I don’t really know her at all.”
What she loved about playwriting was that she could be anyone but herself, a technically Jewish girl from Connecticut who had grown up as the least important person in her household. When she was an adolescent, her mother had had a terminal illness, and her father was struck down by anticipatory grief. She learned to be quiet, and she learned to be self-sufficient.
No one wanted to know Melina Green, least of all Melina herself.
“Good writing cuts deep—for both the playwright and the audience. You have talent, Melina. I want you to write something for this competition that makes you feel . . . vulnerable.”
“I’ll try,” Melina said.
Bufort’s hands came down on her shoulders, squeezing. She told herself, as she did whenever it happened, that he meant nothing by it; it was just his way of showing support, like the way he had pulled strings to get her jobs in the city. He was her father’s age; he didn’t think about boundaries the way that younger people did. She shouldn’t read into it.
As if to underline this, suddenly, he was no longer touching her. Professor Bufort raised the chocolate milk again. “Show me what scares you,” he said.
That year Melina lived in an apartment above a Thai restaurant with her best friend, Andre. They had met in a sophomore playwriting class and bonded over the fact that Our Town was overrated, that the musical Carrie was underrated, and that you could both love Phantom of the Opera and find it uncomfortably rapey.
As soon as she walked through the door, Andre looked up from where he was watching the Real Housewives. “Mel! Vote on dinner,” he said.
Andre was the only person who called Melina by a nickname. Her name, in Greek, meant sweet, and he said he knew her too well to lie to her face every time he addressed her.
“What are my options?” Melina asked.
“Mayonnaise, Vienna fingers, or take-out Thai.”
“Again?”
“You’re the one who wanted to live over Golden Orchid because it smelled so good.”
They looked at each other. “Thai,” they said in unison.
Andre turned off the television and followed Melina to her bedroom. Although they’d been living in the apartment for two years, there were still boxes on the floor and she’d never hung up any art or strung fairy lights around the headboard the way Andre had. “No wonder you get shit done,” he murmured. “You live in a cell.”
Like her, Andre was a playwriting major. Unlike her, Andre had never actually finished a play. He would make it to the end of the second act and decide he needed to revise the first before he could finish, and then get stuck endlessly rewriting. For the past semester he’d been working on a retelling of King Lear with a Black matriarch who was trying to decide which of three daughters deserved her secret recipe for gumbo. He’d based the main character on his grandmother.
He handed her the mail, which today consisted of a manila envelope addressed to her in her father’s messy handwriting. The relationship between Melina and her father had decayed during her mom’s illness to the point where putting any weight on it was too tender, but in his own sweet and distant way, he tried. Lately, he had gotten interested in genealogy, and he told Melina he’d discovered she was related to a Union general, Queen Isabella of Spain, and Adam Sandler.
Excerpted from By Any Other Name by Jodi Picoult. Copyright © 2024 by Jodi Picoult. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
