Jodi Picoult was for years queen of the twisty courtroom saga. An impossible ethical choice? An unwinnable case? A dilemma tearing a family apart? Think organ donation drama My Sister’s Keeper, or Nineteen Minutes, about a school shooting – books that turned her into a global brand, the go-to for women wanting readable, thoughtful fiction.
After 28 books, this might be her most controversial plot line yet, since it tackles the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays. By Any Other Name offers a dual timeline story that alternates between that of Melina, a floundering Jewish playwright who is struggling to get her plays put on in a present-day cultural climate still largely dominated by men, and that of Emilia Bassano, famously the first Englishwoman to be a published poet. Through the experiences of both women, she invites us to wonder what little has really changed for female writers fighting for their voices to be heard.
Although records are patchy, sources show Bassano was from an Italian family of court musicians, of possibly Jewish extraction, and became a courtesan to an influential lord at a young age. In Picoult’s telling, she is a Marrano Jew, observing Friday night and Yom Kippur and sitting a version of shiva when her close friend Kit (better known as Christopher Marlowe) dies.
Picoult goes fully in on the very niche theory – widely dismissed in scholarly academic circles – that Bassano wrote many of Shakespeare’s most famous works. Her argument includes the knowledge Bassano may indeed have had of Denmark, which would have enabled her understand the workings of the court dramatised in Hamlet (Shakespeare never went to Denmark), and her experiences of relationships at a young age that, Picoult suggests, spark the seeds of Romeo and Juliet. She doesn’t credit Bassano with everything, but puts her as a key contributor to a stable of ghost writers prevented, for various reasons, from publishing under their own names.
I’m no expert, but it’s an entertaining theory and Picoult is clearly convinced. How, she asks (through Melina) could a man have dreamt up Beatrice, or Portia? How could a poorly travelled Englishman have dramatised Italy, which Bassano would have known a lot about, or written about antisemitism without knowing any Jews?
Accuracy aside, the writing is exhausting, with endless Easter eggs foreshadowing future plays, and multiple melodramatic scenes between Emilia and her aristocratic lover, all pointing to the same outcome.
Emilia is painted as a ferocious survivor and singular talent; lines such as “even with her vast poet’s vocabulary, she could not find a single word to describe how she felt” don’t add to the case. Nonetheless, the story cartwheels along, raising some interesting questions: what does it mean to be a writer without the ability to have your craft recognised? Should we just accept the version of history men have told us?
If you like Tudor fiction, it’s an engaging read, as Emilia recovers from setback after setback, superior to all the men around her.
Where the book is weakest is Melina’s story, a mistaken identity plot designed as an extended complaint about female representation in theatre. While there may well be a fair argument to make about this, I’m not sure this whiny snowflake is its best mouthpiece, and the constant virtue signalling about diversity and inclusion starts to grate quickly.
Still, I’m all for reclaiming forgotten feminist Jewish heroes and I’ll be thinking about Emilia long after I‘ve forgotten Melina. Is there even a grain of truth here? We’ll probably never know, but it is quite fun to wonder.
By Any Other Name, by Jodi Picoult
Penguin, £22
