Jodi Picoult has written 29 books over her three-decade career and has finally landed on the one she feels destined to write. “I don’t know if I believe in reincarnation,” says the author, 58. “But I feel like this is the story that I was meant to tell.”
Her new novel By Any Other Name, out Aug. 20, tells the dual-timeline stories of Emilia Bassano, a real-life woman who some historians have suggested could have been behind Shakespeare’s work, and Melina Green, a fictional modern-day playwright who finds success by using her Black male roommate’s name.
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Diving into the age-old controversy surrounding Shakespeare’s authorship isn’t that far afield for Picoult, whose previous novels have taken on hot-button topics like abortion, racism, school shootings and much more.
Penguin Random House
And even though such notable figures as Helen Keller, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain and even some Supreme Court justices all ascribe to the theory that Shakespeare didn’t work alone, she’s already drawing heat from some academics who call her a “conspiracy theorist.”
“There’s an extra level when you posit that it could have been a woman,” Picoult adds. “I didn’t write this book because I am a raging lunatic. I wrote this book because this is the information that I found. And it certainly convinced me.”
By Any Other Name draws on extensive research into Bassano and how the theater world worked during Shakespeare’s time, holding up clues that point to the role the Bard really played — and the more the novel lays the groundwork, the more convincing it is that the lauded playwright didn’t act alone.
“When you think about the fact that everyone [in the theater] was collaborating back then, nothing was copyrighted … it wasn’t by any means a fancy business to be in,” Picoult points out, noting that at the time, Shakespeare was also working as an actor and a producer.
“How do you explain the fact that when the guy died, he did not own a single book? There was not any unfinished manuscript or papers lying around, nothing in his will,” she continues. “And when he died, not a single other playwright of the time said, ‘Oh, what a loss!’ … I kept thinking it would actually be stranger if Shakespeare had written all of these plays.”
Tim Llewellyn
While she admits the topic gets her fired-up, that’s also not new for the author, who has to “be kept up at night” in order for an idea to become a novel.
In the case of By Any Other Name, it’s not just the authorship question, but the gender of the true author that got her wheels spinning. During Shakespeare’s time, women were forbidden from publishing, so it wasn’t unheard-of for them to write under male pseudonyms or “borrow” a male writer’s name.
“For me to write the best book that I can … I need to write about something that is upsetting me,” she explains. Her own experiences writing for the stage inspired her to turn it into a dual-timeline story that also follows a modern-day woman trying to break into the male-dominated field and the issues she encounters along the way. “I wanted to talk about how little has changed in 400 years,” she says.
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But just like her characters, Picoult doesn’t let the haters get her down. “I’m not here to convince you. I’m here to lay out everything I learned and let you make your own decisions,” she explains. “If we can open up one mind, then a book is worth it.”
By Any Other Name comes out Aug. 20 from Ballantine Books and is now available to preorder, wherever books are sold.
