By Any Other Name by Jodi Picoult

genre: historical fiction

For so many, Shakespeare is on a pedestal than should not be even approached let alone touched.  His memory is sacrosanct.  To even posit the IDEA that maybe he was not one singular man who wrote all the plays we attribute to him is like actual heresy.  But, what if?  What if when we look at all the actual historical evidence, what we have all believed as truth for so long is wrong?  What if maybe Shakespeare is something - or someone - else?  In this novel of two time periods, Melina Green is a contemporary young playwright with talent but not a lot of encouragement from the theater community.  In Elizabethan England, Emilia Bassano is likewise talented but living in an even more restricted world.  In this story of finding your voice and being brave enough to speak, identities will be hidden and revealed while the pain of life goes on beyond the pages that these women write in their own spheres and their own purposes.

I was so intrigued by this novel!  The parallel experiences of these two women are images of each other while still being believable.  Emilia's life is richly imagined and sometimes so deeply painful that I almost want to cry for her.  It is HARD to let myself think about how little opportunity women have been given to make a place for themselves in history as any kind of creative force.  And it is NOT because we are not capable.  It is because we've been put in boxes and forced to confirm and literally forbidden from thriving in history's (men's) spaces.  It is infuriating.  And so reading this book sometimes made me feel a lot of that.  But I also loved this imagining of Emlila being the playwright of some of the familiar plays I know - the way the evidence is lined up makes you really wonder - what if?  Lots of little Easter Eggs in here, even if you aren't a huge Shakespeare person.  The contemporary storyline didn't thrill me as much - it felt a little more far fetched while still being written in a way that kept me wanting to read.

For as long as this book was, I read it quickly because it really interested me.