BY ANY OTHER NAME ~ JODI PICOULT ~ REVIEW

(Book for review courtesy of NetGalley)

Ballentine Books ~ August 20

Shakespeare is sacrosanct in the literary world. His work is foundational - Jane Austen rooted her work in Shakespeare. His plays have been rewritten, and one transformed into a '90s teen dram-com classic (Taming of the Shrew = 10 Things I Hate About You.) But little is known of the man himself. The true authorship of Shakespeare's plays has long been debated. He worked within the theater world, but had little education to be a master word smith. He never left England, yet detailed Denmark (Hamlet) and Italy (Romeo and Juliet.) In her new novel By Any Other Name Jodi Picoult dares to claim The Bard was a woman.

Picoult posits that a woman named Emilia Bassano fits a "right place/right time" resemblance to the facts behind Shakespeare's works. Her guardian brought her along to Denmark, where she meant a gentleman named Rosenkrans and a gentleman named Guldensteren. Emilia was educated and well connected. As a mistress of the Lord Chamberlain she was part of the Elizabethan theater world. She most assuredly would have known Shakespeare in her daily life.

The novel centers on Melina Green, aspiring playwright. In college she writes about being taken advantage of sexually as a teen, and a theater critic savages her work. Crushed, she retreats from writing but an email from her father about an ancestor - Emilia Bassano - inspires Melina to pick up her pen and write a play about Emilia's life. She enters the play in a playwriting competition heavily leaned toward male playwrights - under a male name. Will Melina ever be able to find theater success as a woman?

Emelia Bassano was a young girl of Italian parentage trained from an early age to be of service to nobility and royalty. Seriously intelligent, she struggles with the idea that as a woman her intellect is discounted and undervalued. Emilia's natural ability to spin stories and  curiosity about the world and how it works makes her a natural writer. But as a woman, there is no way Amelia could have a career as an author.  Picoult weaves the two women's stories together to show that even 442 years later, women are still not taken as seriously as they should be.