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Cloggie Downunder

sure to polarise readers.
“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.”

By Any Other Name is the twenty-ninth novel by award-winning, best-selling American author, Jodi Picoult. At Bard College, Melina Green’s professor encourages her to enter into a collegiate playwriting competition something that will make her feel vulnerable. But the savaging meted out by the young NYT theatre critic judging the entrants ruins her prospects and dampens her creative enthusiasm.

Ten years on, she’s had only minor successes when her dad mentions an ancestor on her mother’s side who lived in Elizabethan times and was the first published female poet in England. Melina is intrigued and goes to her favourite place, the New York Public Library’s Manuscripts and Archives room, to research this fascinating woman.

The more she reads, the more certain she becomes that Emilia Bassano was not only the first published female poet in England. She might very well have been a playwright, too. The playwright, actually. The most famous one in history. It’s the inspiration and impetus she needs to write a new play, which she titles By Any Other Name.

Emilia Bassano was born into a family of court musicians who had emigrated from Italy. After her father dies, her mother goes into service elsewhere, and her patroness’s new husband is heading to Holland, Emilia is traded to a peer by her cousin Jeronimo for his family’s job security. She has lessons with a courtesan and, at age thirteen, Emilia becomes mistress to the Lord Chamberlain, Henry Carey.

But she had been educated whilst with her patroness, and had the opportunity to travel. In the Lord Chamberlain’s study, she gets to see the “foul” copies of plays before they are approved and, attending a performance, she marvels that: “A playwright had taken a fresh, blank sheet of paper and from it, had made three thousand strangers feel.” She begins to write.

But women aren’t permitted to write plays, so eventually she acquiesces to her friend Christopher Marlowe’s suggestion to sell her work to a male playwright. He tells her “It does not matter if they know you. It only matters that they heard what you had to say.”

Soon enough, “She believed words written by a woman about women might allow audiences to see them more fully, to realize that they had thoughts and dreams and worth. The fact that she had to borrow a man’s name to do that was a small price to pay.”

Melina faces almost the same hurdle: even in the twenty-first Century, the work of a female playwright is much less likely to be chosen, especially by white male producers. So her best friend and roommate, Andre Washington, black, gay, also unpublished, submits her work under the gender-ambiguous Mel Green. When it is lauded by the same critic who savaged her earlier work, and fast-tracked for performance, it presents them with a dilemma: be honest about the authorship, or be produced?

Picoult gives the reader a fabulous collision of reality and imagination, interweaving fact with fiction, all of it rich in historical detail, and featuring a marvellously diverse cast of real people and fictional characters. The depth of her research is apparent on every page and her descriptive prose is very evocative.

She tells her story through three narrators and a dual timeline, adding excerpts from the rehearsal script of Melina’s play. Her characters are multi-dimensional and easily attract the reader’s care and concern for their fate. There are parallels and echoes between the two stories, and quite a few twists to make it even more interesting.

She gives her characters wise words and insightful observations: “Love was a religion all its own, one that could damn you or save you or turn you into a zealot” and “When the only stories told are by straight white men, it becomes the norm. People assume that the only stories that will turn a profit are stories about that particular experience— when in fact there are whole untapped audiences who would love to see their lives replicated on a stage” are examples.

The premise that Emilia Bassano, a brilliant woman who had been silenced by societal restrictions, might have written some of Shakespeare’s plays, is convincingly presented, as is the assertion that little has changed in the world of theatre for female playwrights (and those of other marginalised groups). Picoult’s work is always topical and thought-provoking, and this one is sure to polarise readers.
This unbiased review is from an uncorrected proof copy provided by NetGalley and Allen & Unwin.

Mary Ann

The plight of women writers, no matter the era
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You don’t have to be a Shakespeare scholar to throughly enjoy Jodi Picoult’s latest, By Any Other Name. When I was a college student many moons ago, I learned that there were scholars who challenged that William Shakespeare was the sole author of the works attributed to him. Notably, all of the hypothesized authors were men. Picoult presents a more recent view which maintains that a salon of authors, which included women, were responsible for the works accredited to the allonym Shakespeare.

By Any Other Name is a tale of two women playwrights, living centuries apart, pretending to be men, in an effort to negotiate a world dominated by men. The historical timeline is set in 1500’s Elizabethan England. Emilia is orphaned, sold by her family and trained to be a courtesan to the Lord Chamberlain, Henry Hunsdon. As a woman and a Jew of low birth, Emilia was expected to be grateful for the opportunity to be kept so well. In modern-day, Melina (Mel) lives in New York with her roommate Andre where she is still nursing the wound of an early rejection. In an effort to force Mel out of her inertia, Andre secretly submits her play to a writing competition.

The novel is part Shakespearean comedy, part tragedy, inclusive of a clever servant, mistaken identities, love obstacles, and witty wordplay. Scattered throughout the text were Shakespearean quotes and references which embed the reader in the debate at hand. I found myself more engaged with Emilia’s story than I was with Mel’s. I think this was in part because Picoult became too heavy handed for my reading tastes. Nevertheless, I would highly recommend By Any Other Name to fans of the theater, The Bard, and women’s recovered history and contribution to the arts.

TW: domestic violence, sexual assault, unwanted pregnancy, pregnancy complications

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