Review: By Any Other Name

By Any Other Name by Jodi Picoult
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

It is an astonishing book in that sometimes it is profoundly interesting, and other times, it is profoundly boring. If you are a student of Shakespeare, you will especially love the premise of a woman (Emilia Lanier née Aemilia Bassano) creating his most popular plays, and you will most certainly, if you are an author, love learning about the work and subterfuge that went into a woman of those times writing...anything, let alone something that was published.

However, this is but two-thirds of what this book is about. The other one-third of this novel also takes us to modern times and deals with another woman playwright and her inability to get heard, much less produced. Through an interesting mistake that is along the lines of what went on with Aemilia Bassano, we find our modern woman Melina Green finally recognized, but not in the way it should have happened.

It was a good book that I found at times to be supremely boring, but I was able to stick with it to the end. This book, when set in modern times, deals a lot with wokeness not only in the theater but in other places of creativity.

*This ARC was supplied by the publisher Ballantine Books/Random House, the author, and NetGalley.

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SYNOPSIS:"Two women, centuries apart—one of whom is the real author of Shakespeare’s plays—are both forced to hide behind another name to make their voices heard.

In 1581, Emilia Bassano—like most young women of her day—is allowed no voice of her own. But as the Lord Chamberlain’s mistress, she has access to all theater in England, and finds a way to bring her work to the stage secretly. And yet, creating some of the world’s greatest dramatic masterpieces comes at great cost: by paying a man for the use of his name, she will write her own out of history.

In the present, playwright Melina Green has just written a new work inspired by the life of her Elizabethan ancestor Emilia Bassano. Although the challenges are different four hundred years later, the playing field is still not level for women in theater. Would Melina—like Emilia—be willing to forfeit her credit as author, just for a chance to see her work performed?

Told in intertwining narratives, this sweeping tale of ambition, courage, and desire asks what price each woman is willing to pay to see their work live on—even if it means they will be forgotten."