Flipping the bard
Jodi Picoult fans will devour her latest feisty, feminist doorstopper that pulses with passion across the centuries.
‘A woman who makes herself invisible, by definition, gives up her voice.” Elizabethan poet Emilia Bassano’s prescient words underscore the theme of By Any Other Name; that of women finding their voices and battling misogyny and prejudice. In a dual narrative set across two time periods, Jodi Picoult has delivered a smart, enthralling doorstopper of a novel that will be wolfed down by her fans.
In New York in 2023, rookie playwright Melina Green creates a new work inspired by the life of Emilia, her ancestor, said to be the first female poet published in England and a covert playwright.
Four hundred years earlier, in 1582, 13-year-old Emilia, daughter of an Italian musician in the court of Queen Elizabeth I, and a converso Jew – one converted to Christianity – is forced to become the mistress of Lord Hunsdon, the Lord Chamberlain. Forty-three years her senior, Hunsdon is responsible for all theatre performed in London.
Wary of a theatre world that privileges white men writing stories about men, Melina is unwilling to risk failure by submitting her play to the Village Fringe Festival. Her best friend Andre, also a newbie playwright and black, has likewise struggled to gain traction. He secretly submits Melina’s play under the pseudonym “Mel” Green.
As Mel, Melina’s work is at last taken seriously. At her request, Andre fronts the play as Mel, losing his own identity in the process. A backlash results when Melina’s former nemesis, now lover, theatre critic Jasper Tolle, goes public with the story, inadvertently precipitating a backlash that cancels Melina and her dreams. At least for now.
Meanwhile, for 10 years, Emilia lives under the protection of Lord Hunsdon, a bird in a gilded cage. Lonely and isolated, she begins to write plays in secret, encouraged by her new friend, the playwright Kit Marlowe. Lord Hunsdon’s protection abruptly ends when Emilia falls pregnant – but not to him. She has risked everything to conduct a clandestine but doomed love affair with the young earl of Southampton. Pregnant, and without prospects, Emilia is forced by her family into a loveless marriage with Alphonse Lanier, a violent drunkard and a wastrel, who squanders the money settled on her by Hunsdon.
Emilia continues to write undercover. Desperate for money to support herself and her son Henry, she sells her plays for a pittance to William Shakespeare, an actor with writerly ambitions.
Picoult has written Emilia as a proto-feminist, trailblazer and resourceful survivor, reimagining the highlights of her life from the ages of 12 to 76. As is often the case with dual narratives, one point-of-view character becomes more compelling and overshadows the other. Emilia’s tale reflects the more dynamic storyline, the stakes higher. She fights for survival in an era when a woman was ruled by her husband and forbidden to write under her own name.
Picoult leaves a trail of breadcrumbs of quotes from Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets interwoven into Emilia’s writing and dialogue. The novel pulses with passion, drama, intrigue, domestic violence and social injustices. Picoult weaponises her fiction to establish Emilia as a viable candidate for the authorship of many of Shakespeare’s plays.
In her source-rich author’s note, Picoult is unequivocal about not buying into the idea of Shakespeare authoring his own plays. Her stance will doubtless raise some hackles among Shakespeare aficionados and probably add fuel to the authorship debate, but her admirers are likely to enjoy this feisty, feminist angle on the subject. Reviewed by Sue Reidy.
By Any Other Name, by Jodi Picoult (Allen & Unwin, $37.99) is out now.
Slings and arrows
Fintan O’Toole struggles to offer new insights into Shakespeare’s tragedies.
Recently a visiting professor in Irish studies at Princeton, Fintan O’Toole is well known as a political journalist, literary editor, columnist, drama critic and as the author of more than 20 books. Four of these are studies of Shakespeare; but although their publication dates are spread across the greater part of O’Toole’s long career, they are better seen as the outline of a single work, concentrating as they do upon the same group of major tragedies – Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth. The first of them, No More Heroes: A Radical Guide to Shakespeare, appeared in 1990. It was republished – with the addition of some material from Macbeth and Hamlet: A Radical Guide (1995) – in 2002 as Shakespeare is Hard, But So Is Life: A Radical Guide to Shakespearean Tragedy.
The present text, while wisely dropping any claim to radicalism from its title, remains largely unchanged, apart from the addition of a 16-page introduction. Its cover is adorned with enthusiastic endorsements promising that, “You’ll look at Shakespeare with new eyes after reading this book”; but it is a stretch to claim novelty for a text that repeats the arguments of one published more than 30 years ago.
With its mocking references to Elon Musk and Boris Johnson, O’Toole’s introduction is clearly intended to make Shakespeare is Hard seem up to the minute; and among its laudatory blurbs is one from the Irish Times (the newspaper for which he has worked since 1988) praising it as “a brilliant and extremely readable distillation of … current thinking about Shakespeare’s tragedies”. Yet O’Toole’s own afterword boasts that he “hardly reads any” of the thousand-odd annual publications on Shakespeare; and, far from engaging with “current” thinking, no work of criticism later than 1983 is included among the book’s acknowledgements. Explicit engagement with other critics is limited to a methodical attack on the central ideas of the Edwardian AC Bradley.
“You’ll do badly if you don’t read Bradley,” I remember being warned by our sixth-form English teacher in 1959. But, although Bradley’s Shakespearean Tragedy is still regarded as a classic, it’s difficult to see it exercising much influence on the way the plays are read today. O’Toole, however, denounces it as the principal source of ideas that still “combine to make the study of Shakespeare so tedious”. By cutting the central character off from the play’s action and concentrating on the Aristotelian notion of his “tragic flaw”, Bradley tamed the plays, employing a “secular version of original sin” to extract the “neat moral fables” that would be celebrated in subsequent criticism.
Inevitably, such fables were linked to an “increasingly psychological notion of character”, centring on the soliloquies in which a Hamlet or an Othello was made to brood on his own shortcomings.
Instead, O’Toole argues, these “tragic heroes” are important only in so far as their struggles epitomise a social crisis afflicting the entire world to which they belong. The tragedies explore the traumatic confusions resulting from the “fundamental reordering” involved in the transition from a feudal to a capitalist society, from the rule of inherited status to that of ruthlessly acquired power, exposing their central characters to the tormenting pull of irreconcilable values.
These characters become compelling, he maintains, not through the diagnosis of any defining psychological flaw, but “because they are literally indefinable, eluding and defying definition in a deliberate and systematic way”.
But even in 1990, the “radical” nature of such claims was much exaggerated, for the world that No More Heroes described was one already made familiar by the “new historicism” turn taken by Shakespearean criticism in the 1980s. As a result, O’Toole’s reflections on the individual tragedies often seem to mirror the very critical trends that he professes to ignore.
His chapter on Hamlet, for example, is entitled “Dying as an Art”, discussing this as “a play about death”, as though this were some sort of revelation, rather than an approach developed by a long succession of critics, culminating in the 15 essays that make up a 2023 collection entitled The Shakespearean Death Arts: Hamlet Among the Tombs. Similar complaints might be made about other chapters. “King Lear: Zero Hour” explores the play’s preoccupation with “nothing” in ways that will be unsurprising to those acquainted with recent work on the tragedy. His treatment of Macbeth’s treacherous “doubles” – its collapsing opposites of fair and foul, prophecy and chance, along with its disruptions of cause and effect – can seem equally predictable.
All of that said, O’Toole remains, as one might expect, a lively and sometimes stimulating writer: In “Othello Inside Out” he writes persuasively about the ways in which the conniving Iago and his gullible victim, in addition to their structural rivalry as dramatic protagonists, are frighteningly exposed as “brothers under the skin”, equally driven by self-disgust – unwitting doubles whose “minds begin to fuse together [so that] as Iago’s words give shape to Othello’s thoughts, so Othello starts to sound more and more like Iago”.
So, despite the somewhat toxic positivity of its title, Shakespeare Is Hard, But So Is Life can sometimes be a rewarding book, and one that I would probably be happy to recommend to young readers coming to the tragedies for the first time. But for students genuinely looking for new ideas about the tragedies, it is likely to prove a disappointment. Reviewed by Michael Neill
Shakespeare Is Hard, But So Is Life, by Fintan O’Toole, (Head of Zeus, $35 hb) is out now.