by A woman wrote Shakespeare’s plays and the clues are there in Romeo and Juliet and Othello, according to US author Jodi Picoult.
Picoult, who has sold 40 million copies, has turned her attention to the Bard in her latest novel. She supports the theory that Emilia Bassano, a poet and contemporary of William Shakespeare, was the real author of some works.
For example, she mentions that Juliet’s character is 13 years old – the age Bassano was forced to become someone’s mistress.
In Othello, a reference to “goats and monkeys” lies in a fresco in the Italian town of Bassano del Grappa, home of the Bassano family, and Desdemona’s servant is called Emilia.
Picoult also finds Bassano’s hand in The Merchant of Venice and The Taming of the Shrew but claims that Bassano had to hide her authorship because she was a woman.
‘proto-feminist’ characters
She believes there is ample evidence that Shakespeare did not write the plays – most damningly, she says, a man who did not educate his daughters could not have written “proto-feminist” characters.
Moreover, Picoult says that Shakespeare’s contemporaries knew that he was not the real author.
“I think people in the theater knew, at that time, that William Shakespeare was a catch-all name for many different kinds of authors. I think they were hoping it would be a joke to get everyone. And we’ve lost the punchline for over 400 years,” she told an audience at Féile an Féir as she launched the novel, By Any Other Name.
English people are resistant to the theory, she said. “Shakespeare has gone too far as a dramatist – sometimes I think it’s a religion. And if you talk to religious people and you push hard enough, eventually the answer is, ‘Because it is!’ This blind faith is in Shakespeare.
“Shakespeare has become a cottage industry in this country… and it has little to do with the playwright himself and much more to instill pride in the community at times when the community needed it. That’s how we made tea towels with Shakespeare’s face on them.”
‘anti-Stratfordian’
There are two timelines in the novel. One concerns Bassano, working secretly on the plays and sonnets. Another is set in the present day, where Bassano’s descendants battle sexism in the theater world, this time on Broadway.
The authorship debate includes theories that the books were written by Sir Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe or Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford. The name Bassano was recently added to the list.
In the acknowledgements, Picoult thanks Sir Mark Rylance, the actor and former artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe, a prominent “anti-Stratfordian”.
Picoult, the author of My Sister’s Keeper, studied Shakespeare at university but did not think about the author until she read an article by journalist Elizabeth Winkler that named Bassano as a possible author of the works.
“she [Winkler] said something in the article that stopped me dead. She said that Shakespeare had two daughters and that he did not teach them how to read or write. I was like, oh, no, no. The man who wrote those characters taught his girls how to read. And it sent me down a rabbit hole.
Picoult cited Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing, Rosalind in As You Like It, Katherina in The Taming of the Shrew and Portia in The Merchant of Venice as examples of “incredible proto-feminist characters”.
Other details about Shakespeare’s life made her suspicious, she explained. “We know he never traveled, because there were very good records of people leaving the country with that status, but he still managed to write about places like Italy, Egypt and Denmark with detail which was not available in the guidebooks at the time.
“We know he never played a musical instrument, but there are over 3,000 references – very specific ones – to music in Shakespeare’s plays. We know he was self-taught, which is awesome, but when he died he didn’t have a single book.
“When he died, he wasn’t buried in Westminster Abbey, although many playwrights you don’t even know about were buried in Westminster Abbey. And when he died, no other playwrights of the time seemed to publicly mourn or talk about his legacy.
“This is the one thing we don’t know about Shakespeare: that he put holly on paper.”
Although Picoult said she had done “tons of research” to support her theories, and her novel cites many sources, she took the leap to claim in her novel that Bassano wrote Sonnet 18 – “Shall I compare you to a summer day?” – and framed it as a mourning poem in memory of his daughter, who died in childhood.
“When you read it as a poem of child loss, you’ll never read it the same way again,” she said.
Bassano was the first female poet to be published in England, in 1611, when she was 42 years old. Picoult said: “Writers don’t look magical in their 40s. Writers are writing. I think she was writing – I don’t believe she was doing it under her name.”
