Woman’s touch behind Shakespeare’s plays

Author says clues in text show female poet was the real writer of several works attributed to the Bard

SHAKESPEAREAN plays were written by a woman and the clues are there in Romeo and Juliet and Othello, according to US author Jodi Picoult.

Picoult, whose books have 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 several works.

As examples, she cites the fact that the character of Juliet is 13 years old –the age that Bassano was forced to become someone’s mistress. In Othello, a reference to “goats and monkeys” fits with a fresco in the Italian town of Bassano del Grappa, Bassano’s family home, while Desdemona’s servant is named Emilia.

Picoult also detects the hand of Bassano 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.

“I think that, back then, people in theatre knew that William Shakespeare was a catch-all name for a lot of different types of authors. I think they expected it to be a joke that everyone would get. And we’ve all lost the punchline over 400 years,” she told an audience at the Hay Festival as she launched the novel, By Any Other Name.

English people are resistant to the theory, she added. “Shakespeare has gone beyond being a playwright – sometimes I think he’s a religion… There is this blind faith in Shakespeare.”

The novel features dual timelines. One is concerned with Bassano, as she secretly works on the plays and sonnets. Another is set in the modern day, where a descendant of Bassano battles sexism in the theatre world on Broadway.

Picoult, author of My Sister’s Keeper, studied Shakespeare at university but did not think about authorship until she read an article by the journalist Elizabeth Winkler which 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 surviving daughters and he did not teach either how to read or write. I was like, oh, no, no, no. The man who wrote those characters would have taught his girls how to read. And it just sent me down a rabbit hole.”

Other details of Shakespeare’s life made her suspicious, she said. “We know he never travelled, because there were really good records of people who left the country of that status, and yet he managed to write about places like Italy, Egypt and Denmark with details that weren’t available in guidebooks at the time. When he died, he was not buried in Westminster Abbey, although a lot of playwrights you don’t even know were buried in Westminster Abbey.

“Here’s the one thing we don’t know about Shakespeare: that he actually put quill to paper.”

In 1611, Bassano became the first female poet published in England, aged 42. Picoult said: “Writers do not magically appear when they’re in their 40s. Writers have been writing. It’s my belief she was writing – I just don’t believe she was doing it under her name.”