‘A lot has changed in 400 years, but a lot more hasn’t’: How Jodi Picoult wrote By Any Other Name

Jodi Picoult is the multi-million-copy bestselling author of 29 books including My Sister's Keeper, Handle with Care, and The Pact. But her latest book, coming out this autumn, is her first work of historical fiction.

Inspired by the true story of Emilia Bassano, By Any Other Name transports us to late 16th-century London, where a young Emilia, the educated ward of aristocrats with a gift for writing, seeks to have her words heard upon the stage – in a world where being a female playwright is all but forbidden. What makes this read especially intriguing, however, is its claim that Bassano – in addition to becoming England's first female professional poet – penned the dozens of plays and sonnets that are attributed to William Shakespeare.

Interlaced with Bassano's adventures navigating the Elizabethan court and bustling theatre business, is the present-day storyline of Melina Green, an aspiring playwright in New York who is struggling to break into the male-dominated world of theatre.

We asked Picoult some questions about what inspired her historical fiction debut, the surprising discoveries she made during her research, and why Emilia Bassano's story still resonates for women in the arts some 400 years on.

When did you first come across the story of Emilia Bassano? What inspired you to explore her life and work in the form of a novel?

Like many other English majors, I loved Shakespeare. I loved his language, and I loved the way he created proto-feminist characters. One semester I had a Shakespeare professor who spent all of ten minutes discussing the question of his authorship. I dismissed it, like most people do.

Then, a few years ago, I was reading The Atlantic and came across an article by Elizabeth Winkler about this very thing. In it, she pointed out that Shakespeare had two daughters that he did not teach to read, and who signed their name with a mark. Something struck a chord in me. I just didn’t buy it. It made me do a deeper dive into the authorship question – particularly into a woman named Emilia Bassano, the first published female poet in England, whose life intersected remarkably with many of the plays attributed to Shakespeare. Emilia’s work wasn’t published until 1611, when she was in her forties. But writers do not appear out of nowhere, and I wondered: what if she was writing all along, and using someone else’s name? What if that name was William Shakespeare?

I wanted to write about this in a novel, because it gave me the freedom to connect all the threads in her history and also to make her a vibrant, rich, three-dimensional woman. Plus, I wanted to hold her up as an example against the current situation for modern women, and gender discrimination in the arts. A lot has changed in 400 years…but a lot more hasn’t.  

Your books are always deeply researched and immersive, but this is your first foray into historical fiction. What was it like working on historical fiction? How did the research and writing process differ for you, if at all?

I know it sounds crazy, but it felt like writing fantasy. I was creating a world, but had to make it something rich and nuanced and also historically accurate. I found myself looking up the strangest things, like the food that Queen Elizabeth served at feasts and whether common folks had panes of glass in their windows, or just shutters. I now know more about the sewage systems of Elizabethan England than I ever wanted to (hint: everyone who thinks you threw your chamberpot slop out the window? Nope. You would have been fined quite heavily).

In particular, how did you balance the biographical details of Emilia Bassano’s life with the creative freedom that usually comes with writing a novel?

We know very concrete facts about Emilia’s life, almost all of them from the journals of a quack astrologer/doctor named Simon Foreman, which are still in the Ashmolean Library in Oxford.

However, from her own words, recorded by Foreman, we know the details of her childhood, her thorough classical and legal education at the hand of Countess Susan Bertie, her family’s musical prowess, her placement as the mistress to the Lord Chamberlain of England when she was 13 and he was 56, her pregnancy ten years into their relationship, and her marriage to her cousin Alfonso Lanier – which wasn’t a happy one. We also know that she survived the death of virtually everyone she loved, and raised her own grandchildren after her son and daughter-in-law’s death. We know from historical records that she was scrappy – even starting a school as a means of income – and that when her brothers-in-law stole money due her for a patent, she represented herself in court (and won). So I had all these benchmarks, and I just had to get from one to the other.

From medical ethics to the carceral system, your books have long grappled with controversial topics. Questioning the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays is a thorny issue in literary circles. Others have made the case for Emilia Bassano, but what do you hope readers get out of reading By Any Other Name? And how did you brace yourself for the inevitable backlash?

Oh, it’s already been contested, and the book isn’t even published yet! First of all, my book is fiction, so if you don’t want to believe that Emilia wrote any of Shakespeare’s work, don’t! But read it first, and then see if you still believe the multiple connections between the work itself and Emilia’s life are simply multiple coincidences.

The truth is that we know a lot about Shakespeare – that he was a businessman and an actor, that he evaded taxes twice, that he jacked up the price of grain he hoarded during a famine, that he had restraining orders taken out against him by multiple colleagues, that he never left the country, that he was self-taught but died without owning a single book or leaving behind any writing of his own, that when he died – in spite of his phenomenal fame – not a single other playwright or poet wrote of what a great loss it was.

What don’t we know for sure about Shakespeare? That he wrote a single play that happens to have his name on it.

By Any Other Name comprises two timelines: Emilia Bassano in Elizabethan England and a present-day aspiring playwright called Melina Green. How did you go about crafting Melina’s storyline, and what did you want it to evoke in tandem with Bassano’s?

I should probably not admit this, but this is the first book I wrote in two halves – Emilia’s first, then Melina’s – and then mashed them together. I had so much trouble keeping all the details of Emilia’s life and world in my head, I just couldn’t zip back and forth between the two time periods. So I wrote them separately…and then intercut them, and crossed my fingers to hope for the best. To my delight, they matched up so beautifully.

What I really wanted to do with Melina was underscore Emilia’s life and remind everyone it’s not history if it is still happening. A lot has been made of recent attention to BIPOC, LGBTQ and female creatives in modern theatre. Now, for example, during one season at a theatre, a single play written by a woman/Black/non-binary writer is performed, when a few years ago there would have been none. That is not equity. Equity is making the proverbial table bigger, not allotting one seat to someone who isn’t white and straight and male. I could have easily published Emilia’s story on its own, but I think that complementing it with the story of Melina’s journey through this world of contemporary theatre is a powerful way to underscore the point I’m making.

Emilia Bassano’s story, as England’s first documented professional female poet, is a strongly proto-feminist one. What was it like depicting a unique character who broke boundaries in her time, whilst staying mindful of the historical context and gender politics of 16th-century England?

I feel like this is the book I was meant to write. I have spent so many years talking about gender discrimination in publishing - and being cut down by men for doing so – but Emilia’s story is the ur-version of what we female writers are still experiencing today.

I think what impressed me the most about Emilia is that she found a way around the bias, around the strictures, around the system. She paid a hefty price for it – credit where credit is due – but I do truly believe she wrote a lot of the phrases that we all can recite from memory today, which have long been attributed instead to Shakespeare. It made me wonder what I would have done in her situation. If the only way to get my words read was to use someone else’s name, would I do that? Does the art matter more than the artist? I think the answer is probably yes…but also that it’s not a choice any woman should have to make, just to have her voice heard.

By Any Other Name is out 10th October.