On Shakespeare, Jodi Picoult ’87 Just Doesn’t Buy It

On the latest PAW Book Club podcast, author and playwright Jodi Picoult ’87 answered members’ questions about By Any Other Name, her novel introducing us to Emilia Bassano, a woman who lived in Tudor England and plausibly could have written some of the most famous works attributed to William Shakespeare. The following excerpt has been edited and condensed. Listen to the podcast and find the full transcript here.

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Michael Behrman ’87 asks, “What brought Jodi to think about this? Could a man have written the Shakespeare female characters as well as a woman?”

I took all my Shakespeare classes with Professor Michael Cadden at Princeton, loved them. I loved the beauty of the writing in the plays, but I also loved the characterization of the females. You had these incredibly complex, three-dimensional characters like Portia, and Kate, and Rosalind, and Beatrice.

I think Michael Cadden said to us once for maybe four seconds of a seminar that there was a question about Shakespeare’s authorship. Honestly, I was like, “Oh, yeah, OK, whatever,” but I was a good little English major and I laughed it all off. I didn’t think about it for years until I read an article in The Atlantic by Elizabeth Winkler [’11]. In it, she mentioned something that just stopped me in my tracks: Shakespeare had two daughters that survived infancy, and he taught neither of them to read or write.

I was like, “Yeah, no, I just don’t buy it.” I don’t believe that the same person who created those incredibly complex female characters in the plays would not have taught his own daughters to read or write. It made me fall into this rabbit hole about authorship and about what we actually know, the actual facts that we have about Shakespeare, who he was, and what, if anything, he wrote.

I had never heard of Emilia Bassano. I had heard lots of authorship stories before. I’d heard about the Earl of Oxford being the forerunner of the anti-Stratfordian movement, but I had never heard a woman’s name mentioned. When I started to learn more about Emilia Bassano, I couldn’t believe how seamlessly her life plugged in all of the question marks and gaps that exist in Shakespeare’s that allow us to wonder if he actually wrote these works.

Sue Rhoades *92 saw your author’s note about expecting hate mail and antagonism to be off the charts for this book, and asks, “Has it been? Is there any particular area of criticism that has surprised you?”

Interestingly, I was getting pushback for this book before it was even published, which blew me away. I did an event at the Hay Festival in England, and I had some guy, some older academic white male, who published a piece about how I am a crackpot conspiracy theorist. All I could think was, “You haven’t even read the book. How could you know?” That kind of continued after the book was published. Every criticism that I have received has been from someone in academia who has studied Shakespeare. Most are men; there was one woman.

Look, I get it. When you have crafted an entire career and persona around studying Shakespeare, it’s scary to think that maybe what you’ve learned all those years, what you’ve upheld all those years, may not be accurate or true. I think questioning Shakespeare’s authorship doesn’t take away from the plays in any way. I think it brings more people to them. The reality is I have heard from far more people who’ve said to me, “I never really got into Shakespeare. I didn’t understand it, but man, now after this, I’m reading it again, and it suddenly makes sense,” which I think is really interesting.

Ann Mongoven ’84 and Shani Moore ’02 asked about your writing routine, whether and how you battle writer’s block, and how you researched this book.

I don’t believe in writer’s block. I’ve been very vocal about that. I think writer’s block is the luxury of time. I actually think back to my days at Princeton. You had writer’s block, you couldn’t write that essay that was due, until miraculously, it always cleared up the night before it was due, right? Suddenly, you were able to produce a draft.

I started writing professionally when I had a newborn, and then very quickly, two more kids. I was the primary caregiver and I was a novelist, and I would write anytime they were napping, or at nursery school, or not hitting each other over the head with a sippy cup. I got to the point where, honestly, I wrote in 15 minute bursts, because that was all I had.

How did I do the research for this book? Interestingly, like I said, there are such limited amounts of primary source documents that they’re pretty easy to get your hands on, and to read, and to see for yourself.