By Any Other Name

Emilia is 12 and lives with her guardian, Susan Bertie, the Countess of Kent, and her brother, Peregrine Bertie, the Baron Willoughby. She is the daughter of a family of Italian musicians who found favor at Elizabeth’s court, and as an orphan, she is in the care of this noble family. In the garden, she plays at building a fairy house and uses some stolen chess pieces to imagine King Oberon and his Queen Titania fighting over an orphan child, represented by a pawn. (This is a reference to Shakespeare’s play, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which Emilia will write later in the novel.)

Emilia imagines the pawn and the royal couple as a way of coping with the argument she overheard earlier between the Countess and the Baron. The Countess is to be married and move away and wants the Baron to take Emilia. He argues that he cannot take her. Instead of this argument, Emilia imagines that the fairies both love the child so much that they each want to keep him. The Countess finds Emilia in the garden and brings her indoors to have some French lessons, where they translate Marie de France’s Bisclavret. She tells Emilia that she must leave her, but she will write. Emilia is devastated but pretends to be happy for the Countess.

In London, Emilia visits her cousin Jeronimo and his wife, Alma, who live with their children in the Italian neighborhood. They close the curtains and secretly celebrate the Sabbath. They are Jewish but must hide their religion for fear of persecution.

At the royal court with her guardians, Emilia is dressed lavishly and feels uncomfortable. The Baron and the Countess gossip about court matters, including who is favored by Elizabeth I and who is in disgrace. Though she could be in trouble for doing so, Emilia slips away from the court to get fresh air. She is trapped by an older, lecherous lord who tries to grope her. She escapes from him and runs into another older man whose name she does not know. He is kind to her, and she ducks back into the court, where she tells the Countess she was visiting her cousins.

Time passes and the Baron’s wife, who dislikes Emilia, becomes pregnant. The Baron takes Emilia with her on a diplomatic mission to Denmark. The ship encounters a terrible storm, and Emilia begins bleeding into her underwear. Not knowing what menstruation is, she believes she has been internally injured and will die. When they are introduced to King Frederick and Queen Sophie’s court, Emilia faints. She awakens and is tended to by the queen and her ladies. The queen gently explains to her about menstrual cycles and tells her that it is not a nuisance, but a gift of power.

At the Danish court, actors perform a play about the ancient hero Amleth. (This legend is the loose basis for the play Hamlet.) Emilia is unimpressed with the play, especially since the woman are not given speaking roles nor their actions explained. During the play, Emilia and a courtier trade jokes. He reveals himself to be Sir Tycho Brahe, an astronomer and favorite of the king. He is missing his nose and wears a gold replacement for it. He asks her to accompany him to dinner and introduces her to his friends, Rosenkrans and Guldensteren. (These names are slightly modified from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, the names of two characters in Hamlet.) During dinner, he tells her of his discovery of a supernova, which proves that the heavens can change, meaning that the stars, and a person’s fate, are not fixed. Emilia is delighted by this discovery.

After their return to London, the Baron explains to Emilia that she can no longer stay with him and that she has been well educated and will bring happiness to a man. She assumes he will arrange a marriage for her, but he instead takes her to his mistress’s home. Isabella, his mistress, is intended to tutor her in the arts of sex and seduction. Devastated, Emilia flees Isabella’s home and runs to her cousins, where she tells them she is to be sold. She is horrified to realize that they already knew, and Jeronimo helped to broker the deal. He tells her that she will be treated well and in return, Hunsdon will allow them a place at court and to bring over more relatives from Italy.

Returning to Isabella’s house, the older woman comforts Emilia. She explains that being a mistress offers more freedom than being a wife, who is owned by her husband. She counsels Emilia to think of the role as acting a part in a masque, and that she must learn to use her body as a weapon to survive. They begin their lessons.

A decade after college, Melina and Andre are roommates in New York. Discouraged by the lack of opportunities for Black playwrights, Andre works at a casting agency. Melina pays the bills with a string of nannying and other temp jobs and writes many mediocre plays. One day, when borrowing her computer, Andre discovers her unfinished script for By Any Other Name, a play about Emilia Bassano. He urges her to finish it and send it out.

Between her temp jobs, Melina goes to the Archive and Manuscripts room at the New York Public Library and researches Emilia as well as the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays. Though her college professor had dismissed the question of authorship, she learns that there is evidence to suggest that Shakespeare did not write his plays. Shakespeare might not have attended school, whereas Emilia was well-educated. She was the mistress of the Lord Chamberlain, who controlled the London theater industry, and was from a musical and creative family. She also learns that Emilia’s guardian, the Baron, was the ambassador to Denmark, whereas Shakespeare would not have known much about the country, its legends, or customs—even though Hamlet is set there. Melina begins to imagine a way that Emilia could have written these plays and writes her own play about Emilia’s life.

Andre is a gay man but is afraid to come out to his parents, so he has Melina pretend to be his girlfriend. At dinner with his parents, his mother, Letitia, talks about a meeting where male coworkers claimed she took up too much time speaking. This leads to a conversation about how women are often considered too loud or pushy when they are merely participating. Andre tells his father, an English teacher, about Melina’s play and they discuss the question of Shakespeare’s authorship. Melina points out that some of Shakespeare’s contemporaries also questioned whether he had written the plays. That night after dinner, she finishes her play.

Andre reads the play the next morning and urges her to submit it somewhere. He also says that what happened to Emilia is still happening—female playwrights struggle to find representation. Melina agrees and angrily says that she has been rejected from men’s writing groups because men deem her work uninteresting. Andre tells her she should submit to a fringe festival he knows about, and she agrees. Over champagne, the two write her application and get increasingly drunk. However, as she is about to submit Melina realizes that the man running the festival, Felix Dubonnet, is an artistic director notorious for producing only work by men. In frustrated tears, she decides not to do it. Meanwhile, Andre drunkenly deletes part of her name, leaving it the unisex “Mel” and submits it on her behalf. The two fall into a drunken sleep.

An excerpt from By Any Other Name recounts Hunsdon and Emilia talking about women being forbidden onstage.