What’s in a name?

AWARD-WINNING author Jodi Picoult’s By Any Other Names hits the shelves on August 20.

Told in intertwining narratives, the story follows two women writers in different eras. Emilia Bassano, whose perspective takes place in 1581, is an aspiring playwright who finds a way to bring her dramatic masterpieces to England’s theatres, despite most young women of her day not being allowed a voice of their own. However, sharing her stories with the world still came at a great cost, as she had to pay a man for the use of his name, writing her own out of history.

Present time’s Melina Green has just written a body of work inspired by her Elizabethan ancestor Emilia Bassano. However, it is still unlikely for women in Melina’s time to be in theatre, leaving her to question if she is willing to follow Emilia’s steps for a chance to see her work performed.

Known for writing the 2004 hit My Sister’s Keeper, American novelist Jodi Lynn Picoult has published more than 20 novels and short stories, usually focusing on moral dilemmas and procedural drama.

In an interview, the author discussed that her book’s character Emilia Bassano is in fact a real-life historical figure, who is suspected to have written some of the plays attributed to Shakespeare.

“I had been reading The Atlantic, and there was an article by a woman named Elizabeth Winkler, and in it she was talking about the authorship question — which has been raised for years about whether or not Shakespeare actually authored plays,” she said.

“She (Elizabeth) was looking at whether there might be any women who were among those who could be potential authors, and one of the things that she said was that Shakespeare had two daughters who survived, and neither of them knew how to read or write.

“I thought, wait… hang on a second. You know what I love the most about Shakespearean plays? The feminist characters. You’ve got Rosalind and Beatrice and Catherine and Portia, and I don’t buy the fact that a guy who could write such egalitarian women in the 1500s would not teach his own daughters how to read.

“That kind of got me going down a rabbit hole, and the more I learned about Emilia, the more her life naturally seemed to plug up gaps and questions that we have about Shakespeare’s authorship,” she added.