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Happy 2024, everyone!
It is with TREMENDOUS delight that I can announce the pub date for my next novel, By Any Other Name: 8/20 in the US/Canada; 10/10 for UK. (Yes, I will be on tour. No, I don’t know where yet. That will be in a future newsletter!)
To say I am excited is an understatement. This is my 29th novel, but this one may very well be the “book of my heart” – the one I kind of feel I was destined to write, so that everyone knows the name EMILIA BASSANO.
I know what you’re saying: “Who?”
Emilia Bassano. The real-life subject of half of By Any Other Name. As I’ve mentioned in earlier newsletters, the book is about gender discrimination in theater and publishing – and it starts 400 years ago in Elizabethan England, with a woman who – I believe – may well have been the author of some of Shakespeare’s plays.
I’m not the first to believe that Shakespeare might not be the true author of the plays attributed to him. There have been other Anti-Stratfordians (as they are called) – including people like SCOTUS Justice John Paul Stevens, Helen Keller, Mark Twain, Malcolm X, Sigmund Freud, and Orson Welles. Most of the time, if you even breathe a whisper of the thought that, gee, maybe it’s weird Shakespeare was the ONLY playwright of his time to not collaborate; or that he was not formally educated nor apparently self-taught, as he did not own a single book at the time of his death; or that although there are many historical documents showing him as a producer and actor, there’s not a single one that confirms him as a writer of plays; or that upon his death no other writers of the time bemoaned his loss as one of their peers; or that it’s odd that someone who was so well-known in his field would have written multiple sonnets about dying poor and forgotten…well, the Stratfordians who believe Shakespeare is inviolable will call you a crackpot for thinking these thoughts. Why? Well, there are entire academic careers built on the premise that Shakespeare was the most remarkable writer of all time. Pull the rug out from beneath that premise, and lots of careers topple. To wit, my novel hasn’t even been published, and already on social media I’ve had some men tell me I’m an idiot for subscribing to the possibility that Shakespeare may not have written all 38 plays and long poems and sonnets by himself.
Stay tuned for more notes on my research for By Any Other Name.
Have I whetted your interest? You can preorder By Any Other Name by clicking here.
Let’s make this the Year of Emilia.
XO,
Jodi
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