"This is a novel about how women have been written out of history by the men who were writing that history... it’s the timeliest thing I’ve ever written."

Researching your novel with the NYT No1 bestselling queen of research, Jodi Picoult

Jodi Picoult is a publishing phenomenon. Since she burst onto the literary world with the global bestseller My Sister’s Keeper in 2003 she has written 29 books and sold more than 40 million. Her latest book - By Any Other Name - is out in the UK on the 10th October. It’s inspired by Emilia Bassano, the first published female poet in England, who, she posits, may be the anonymous voice behind Shakespeare’s plays. The novel, like all Jodi’s books, is shot through with meticulous research. Ahead of my event with her at Waterstones Piccadilly next week, I asked her about her process.

JM: When I think of a Jodi Picoult book, I always know I’m going to learn something. Your subjects are incredibly diverse - from school shootings to Egyptology - and in this case: who genuinely authored Shakespeare’s works. What is it that grabs you when you start a book - is it a topic that you just want to know more about?

JP: It’s usually a question that keeps me up at night.  In the case of BAON, it’s about how these days in America it feels like the rights of women are being stripped away.  I was thinking about that when I stumbled across an article by Elizabeth Winkler in The Atlantic.  In it, she was looked at the question of whether Shakespeare wrote his own work, or not.  

Now, as an English major,  I had loved Shakespeare.  I loved his language, and I loved the way he created protofeminist characters. One semester I had a Shakespeare professor who spent all of ten minutes one semester discussing the question of his authorship.  I dismissed it, like most people do. But something Winkler said struck a chord in me – that Shakespeare had two daughters that he did not teach to read, and who signed with a mark.  I was absolutely blindsided by this.  How could the playwright who had created Portia and Katherine and Rosalind and Beatrice not teach his own girls to read? It made me do a deeper dive into the authorship question – particularly into a woman Elizabeth Winkler mentioned named Emilia Bassano, the first published female poet in England – whose life intersected remarkably with many of the plays attributed to Shakespeare.  Emilia’s book wasn’t published until 1611, however, when she was in her forties. But writers do not appear out of nowhere – and I wondered, What if she was writing all along, and using someone else’s name?  What if that name was William Shakespeare? 

To me this is a novel about how women have been written out of history by the men who were writing that history, and how women’s voices have been silenced…and still are.  In a way, although half the novel takes place in Elizabethan England, I think it’s the timeliest thing I’ve ever written.  

JM: Your books are more research-heavy than almost anybody else I know. Is it your favourite part of writing? If not, what is?

JP:  Oh, I love doing the research.  It lets me be someone else for a day or a week or whatever.  I get asked all the time by people if I’ll hire them as research assistants.  Um, no.  Why would I give away the best part of the job!  I love learning so much about a topic and then finding the way to funnel it into the fiction.

JM: You’re pretty fearless in the topics you explore - from transgender issues to school shootings and systemic racism. Is there any topic that you wouldn’t touch?

JP:  Not that I’ve found yet.  I do believe that if I were going through something difficult in my own life, I wouldn’t be able to write about it at the same time.  (If you haven’t read Sophie Kinsella’s book, THIS IS WHAT IT’S LIKE, about a character with glioblastoma like Sophie has, you should.  It is a remarkable, brave novel.)

JM: I know from conversations we have had during the writing process that you uncovered new evidence while writing BAON. Do you want to share that with readers?

JP: This is my favorite thing to talk about!  Emilia Bassano, who is a real historical person and whose story is half of BAON, had a really tough life — hardship after hardship that she persevered through, always landing on her feet.  Her family was Italian, brought here by Henry VIII to be the recorder consort to the King (and later Queen Elizabeth I).  They were Jews who had to hide their faith.  When Emilia was seven, she was given to a countess as a ward, who gave her a full classical and legal education — very rare for a girl.  When the countess remarried she wound up being given to the Lord Chamberlain of England as his mistress — she was 13, he was 56.  After ten years, she got pregnant, and was married off to her wastrel of a cousin, who blew through all the money settled on her by the Lord Chamberlain, and left her penniless, with a child, and a husband she hated.  She eventually had another child who died at 8 months, and miscarried many times after that — suffering money troubles her whole life and outliving everyone she loved.  

Given so much tragedy, I wanted to give Emilia a little joy — so I decided to give her a grand romance with the Earl of Southampton.  This was borne from a real incident that happened when Emilia was in her 50s - she sued her brother in law for money owed to her after herhusband’s death, and represented herself in court (like Portia, in Merchant of Venice!).  Anyway, at the end of this long trial, out of NOWHERE the Earl of Southampton comes swanning into the court and says to the magistrate, “This isn’t my court, but if it were, I’d rule in her favor.”  This was…extraordinary to find in historical record.  Peers of the realm just didn’t DO that for commoners.  However, during the ten years she was the Lord Chamberlain’s mistress, she would have moved in the same circle as all courtiers, and the Queen.  She absolutely would have met the Earl of Southampton, who was 3.5 years younger than her, and routinely described as a hottie.  Since she was involuntarily the mistress of a 56 year old, I thought, why not give her a little fun on the side?  (Side note:  one reason I think Emilia might have written some of the work accredited to Shakespeare is because of his long-form poems - the first writing we have of “William Shakespeare,” which are dedicated quite erotically to the Earl of Southampton.

For years academics have used this factoid to suggest Shakespeare was bisexual.  If he was, good for him!  But also, if Emilia was the one penning those poems…it makes a lot of sense. Particularly because Venus & Adonis, the first poem, is about an older, sexually experienced woman like Emilia seducing a younger, sexually inexperienced boy…)  So I wrote this doomed, tragic love affair — because no matter how much Emilia and Southampton loved each other, there was no world in which he would marry a commoner like Emilia.  

OK, fast forward to me traveling to England after I finished writing the book, and going to the V&A to see the famous miniature of Emilia that is in its archives.  As remarkable as it was to see her four-hundred-year-old portrait, my eye was drawn repeatedly to the miniature beside it—a young man with long, curly red hair, his hand slipped between the fastenings of his lacy shirt to cover his heart. “Who’s that?” I asked the archivists, and I was told the portrait was of an “unknown man.” I took out my phone and pulled up a painting of the Earl of Southampton, age twenty-one. The “unknown man” miniature looked like a younger version of the Earl. The archivists were just as excited as I was. They checked the provenance of the miniature and confirmed that this “unknown man” and the Emilia miniature were painted at approximately the same time—around 1590. On the back of the vellum on which the painting was made was the print of a playing card: the six of hearts. 

The six of hearts, in cartomancy (the equivalent of tarot in Elizabethan times), represented romantic love—but the kind that couldn’t last. It’s a card of romance, of transition, of loss. It’s exactly the relationship I created for Emilia and Southampton, who could never marry a woman from a lower class. 

You cannot imagine how stunned I was. I dug into the portrait of Southampton that I had pulled up on my phone to show the archivists. It is, as it turns out, a miniature of Southampton, painted when he was twenty-one, by Nicholas Hilliard—the very same artist who created the miniature of the “unknown man” about four years earlier. On the back of this later miniature, however, is the playing card of the three of hearts—which, in cartomancy, signifies that someone else has entered the bounds of your relationship with a loved one—someone who could ruin it. That later miniature was painted in 1594—the year that I posit, in my fictional account, that Emilia is beaten so badly by her husband, she winds up crawling to Southampton’s house for help. The archivists at the Victoria and Albert Museum agree that their miniature of the “unknown man” may indeed be a portrait of the teenage Southampton. And I’m wondering if the fiction I wrote for Emilia might actually have been a truth. 

JM: Did the research process change the direction of your novel at any stage?

JP:  As I mentioned above, it was this totally unorthodox interaction between Emilia and Southampton in a courtroom (which is historically documented) late in her life that made me think she knew him as a younger woman.  

JM: You wear your research for By Any Other Name incredibly lightly in this book, but it was clearly a huge labour of love. Can you give us some highlights from the research process?

JP: So so so so many!  Some were just funny - Deborah Harkness, another terrific author, introduced me to the Agas Map, where you can see Elizabethan London overlaid on top of modern London, which was incredibly helpful to me — and she also taught me that in spite of what we see in the movies, no one threw their chamberpot contents out the windows into the streets!  Another resource I found was a massive PDF of every single day at court of Elizabeth I’s reign.  So when I tell you that Emilia’s husband was on a naval mission with Southampton, it’s true.  When I talk about jousting tournament at one of Elizabeth I’s castles — it actually DID happen that very day.  But the best bits of research were the ones where I found moments in Emilia’s life that dovetailed so beautifully with plays attributed to Shakespeare.  

Take, for example, Hamlet.  Shakespeare never left the country and did not speak any other languages.  He did not play an instrument although there are 3000 references to music in the plays.  Yet he wrote Hamlet, apparently, about the Danish court, riffing off an old Saxo myth?  OK.  Now, let’s look at Emilia’s life.  When she was twelve and a ward of the countess, the countess got married and moved to the Netherlands.  The summer before Emilia became a mistress to the Lord Chamberlain, she lived with Peregrine Bertie, the countess’s brother, who happened to be the ambassador to Denmark and happened to, yes, take a diplomatic mission there while Emilia was in his care.  Did she go with him?  No record either way, but even if she didn’t, she would have learned of the details of his trip, in which he met the king and queen of Denmark and stayed long enough to describe the location of the Queen’s closets in her chambers in the castle (they’re mentioned in Hamlet).  He also had a state dinner there, with Tycho Brahe, the astronomer whose supernova is the weird star that starts Hamlet, and Brahe’s cousins, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.  What feels like a stretch for Willie S. is literally RIGHT THERE in Emilia’s life.  Also in Hamlet:  a pun on the word “exilent” — which is the tiniest recorder a human can play — something Shakespeare wouldn’t have had much facility with, but Emilia would.  

 Don’t believe me yet?  Let’s look at Taming of the Shrew.  There is an ur-version of this play set in Greece.  There are not two sisters, but three — Kate, Phylema, and Emilia.  Their father was named Alfonso (the name of Emilia Bassano’s husband).  In the later version - which I do think Emilia crafted, when she was actively trying to hide her identity — the setting is moved to Italy.  The father is now named Baptista (the name of Emilia Bassano’s father).  A hundred musical references are added.  There are now only two sisters — brash Kate, and biddable Bianca.  At the end of the play when Kate is obedient to Petruchio, her rule-follower sister, Bianca, refuses to come when her new husband calls for her.  Kate’s obedience awakens Bianca’s resistance — Bianca, who in the ur-version, is named Emilia.  This theme of pushing against gender norms is something Emilia wrote about in 1611, when she published Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, the first book of poetry published by a woman in England, ever.  In it, she wrote a poem called “A Defense of Eve”, in which she said if men were by nature stronger and wiser than women, why didn’t Adam turn away the apple when Eve offered it?  It was her way of pointing out how ridiculous men’s expectations of women are.

Still don’t believe me.  Let’s take Othello.  In the play, Iago gives a speech: “What shall I say? Where’s satisfaction?/ It is impossible you should see this,/ Were they as prime as goats, as hot as monkeys, /As salt as wolves in pride, and fools as gross/As ignorance made drunk. But yet I say,/If imputation and strong circumstances/Which lead directly to the Door of Truth,/Will give you satisfaction, you may have’t.” (Othello, 3.3.404-11)  Lots of weird metaphors there, right?  Well, in the little Italian town of Bassano del Grappa – where Emilia’s family emigrated from -- a fresco was painted in the main square above a salt shop. At the top was a bunch of animals including a goat, a sheep, and a monkey…and a woman representing Truth.  Also in that village square? Two apothecary shops. One was called The Moor. The other was run by a man named Giovanno Otello.
Moreover, between the first publication of the play in the first quarto and its inclusion in the First Folio, about 160 new lines were added.  This, in itself, is not unusual.  However, these new lines were added after Shakespeare was dead. So we know he didn’t write them. Who did? Well, of those new lines, the vast majority were penned for the character of Desdemona’s servant, Emilia – including a long speech considered the first feminist soliloquy in literature. 

There got to be a point in the research where I said, “This just can’t be coincidence any more."

JM: Too much evidence of research in a novel can make it feel very dry, or as if the writer is showing off how hard they have worked at it. How do you make sure that the research doesn’t overpower the narrative? Is that ever a problem for you?

JP:  You always run the risk of that when there’s a lot of research.  To me, the way to combat it is to actively make sure your character’s thoughts and feelings are equally important as the facts you’re relaying.  There are so many scenes in BAON where we see a conversation Emilia has which, obviously, I crafted fictionally — but you learn so much about her frustration and her intelligence and her passion through those fictional scenes as much as you do through the historical touchpoints of her life.  One of my favorite scenes, which is entirely made up, involves a transaction Emilia has at a church where she is giving a piece of writing to Shakespeare to sell, and they bond over the deaths of their children.

JM: Do you think you’re going to upset Shakespearean scholars with your book? (Do you care?)

JP: In my usual overachieving way, I already HAVE.  They’ve crawled out of the woodwork to say I’m crazy and that I’m a conspiracy theorist — all without reading the novel, of course.  Shakespeare is more than a writer — he’s a religion for some people, and careers have been built on the study of him, so I understand the umbrage.  But then again, I’m not contesting that the name William Shakespeare isn’t on the plays — it IS.  I am saying that people paid Shakespeare for the use of that name as an allonym, to hide their true identities as writers, for various reasons.  The Stratfordians, however, will have NONE OF THAT.  

My response?  First of all, my book is fiction, so if you don’t want to believe that Emilia wrote any of Shakespeare’s work, don’t!  But read it first, and then see if you still believe the multiple connections between the work itself and Emilia’s life are simply multiple coincidences.  

The truth is that we know a lot about Shakespeare – that he was a businessman and an actor, that he evaded taxes twice, that he jacked up the price of grain he hoarded during a famine, that he had restraining orders taken out against him by multiple colleagues, that he never left the country, that he was self-taught but died without owning a single book or leaving behind any writing of his own, that when he died – in spite of his phenomenal fame – not a single other playwright or poet wrote of what a great loss it was.  What don’t we know about Shakespeare? That he wrote a single play that happens to have his name on it. I remember reading one academic’s comments about how the Shakespearean plays mirrored ideas by Aeschylus that existed then only in the original Greek. This scholar said clearly, since Shakespeare hadn’t learned classical languages, this meant that great thinkers had the same thoughts at the same time, all over the world.  The more logical explanation, of course, is that whoever wrote the plays could read ancient Greek.

JM: What advice would you give to writers who are working on a research-heavy first novel?

JP:  Don’t try to fit it all in.  If it doesn’t work in the context of your fiction, save a tidbit for cocktail parties instead.

JM: You are one of the hardest-working writers I know, so I feel confident in asking this question, even though you haven’t begun your tour yet. Do you have a topic in mind for your next book?

JP: Jojo, you know me — I already have done the research!!  It will come out in 2026, which is the 25th anniversary of 9/11, and it is about lies and reinvention.  It came from an Instagram post on an account called Post Secrets, in which people write in with their deepest darkest secrets anonymously.  Some are funny (“On Friday when I get home I take off all my clothes and walk around naked till I go to work on Monday,” and some are tragic, “My husband doesn’t know his son isn’t really his son.”)  This one said, simply, “Everyone who knew me before 9/11 thinks I’m dead.”  The moment I read that, I knew it was a book.

By Any Other Name by Jodi Picoult is published by Penguin Michael Joseph.