Shakespeare Versus the Girlboss
Jodi Picoult’s latest novel is a ham-fisted expression of cultural rage, embodying the most anodyne values of corporate human-resources departments.
Back in 1979, historian Christopher Lasch warned that a crisis of narcissism was about to consume our culture because self-referential thinking and feeling were being championed as ethical, effective, and equitable. His book The Culture of Narcissism provides an archaeology of how we got to where we are now, 45 years later. Behind the narcissistic impulse, he wrote, lies a desire to soothe emotional frustration and erase cognitive tension. These elisions are accomplished, not by grappling with reality, but by making reality conform to our wishes:
Narcissus drowns in his own reflection, never understanding that it is a reflection. The point of the story is not that Narcissus falls in love with himself but, since he fails to recognize his own reflection, he lacks any conception of the difference between himself and his surroundings.
Narcissus’s gaze is fatal, not because he loves the self he sees, but because he cannot see past himself to reality. Lasch’s prescience about our self-gazing culture has now been confirmed. Like Narcissus, we do not understand that our perception of reality is merely a failure to understand that we are only seeing ourselves.
Lasch’s predictions are now evident in even the most innocuous parts of culture. Consider the newest chick-lit offering by bestselling author Jodi Picoult. While Hamlet asserts that theatre holds a “mirror up to nature,” Picoult’s new novel, By Any Other Name, holds a mirror up to its author, though she imagines that the reflection she sees is that of Shakespeare. Her inability (or refusal) to reference anything outside of her own fantasy promises freedom from emotional tension—a freedom only made possible by a failure to grapple with the reality we cannot see. In Picoult’s case, this is particularly tragic because her entire project is to subsume the most clear-sighted of thinkers, Shakespeare, into a vision of herself.
Picoult’s novel became a bestseller as soon as it was published. It rests on the conceit—attractive to a fanciful strain of feminism unconcerned with historical fidelity—that Shakespeare’s plays were actually written by a minor 17th-century poet named Emilia Bassano (or Amelia Lanier, as she is more commonly known). Picoult works backwards from a conclusion arrived at through a contemporary grievance. “[W]hat really irked me,” she writes in a postscript, “was that Shakespeare had created some of the most clever, fierce, proto-feminist characters in all of literature—Portia, Beatrice, Rosalind, Viola, Lady Macbeth, Juliet, Katherine, Cleopatra—but he never taught his own daughters to read or write. They both signed with a mark. I. Do. Not. Believe. It.”
Picoult then admits to writing a fiction to vindicate her own outraged disappointment. There is, of course, a long tradition of re-interpreting classics in light of some contemporary preoccupation, with mixed results. They can be judged by their fruit. On this occasion, the author’s imagination is so constrained by the present that her novel reads as a ham-fisted expression of cultural rage, well-calibrated to the present book market. It expresses resentment against the human condition, and against the greatness of Shakespeare.
The idea that Shakespeare’s plays were actually written by a woman is not original to Picoult. She follows journalist and critic Elizabeth Winkler, who first proposed the entirely fantastical notion that Bassano was the “real” Shakespeare because it is improbable that a man could have imagined strong female characters. This is particularly odd because both Picoult and Winkler say they want men to see women as fully realised and strong individuals, but then refuse to believe it when men do just that.
Winkler’s and Picoult’s shared fantasy is a contemporary version of the 19th-century theory that the Earl of Oxford or Francis Bacon or someone with a better pedigree than a glove-maker’s son from a backwater town must have penned Shakespeare’s plays. These theories are simply 19th-century class elitism. Picoult and Winkler have merely made a lateral move from class snobbery to publishing-house feminism that lacks any affection for men and women as they are. When one sees only what one wants to find in the works of Shakespeare, all his characters start to look flat and insipid. And when all a writer can see is her own historically provincial idea of what is good, the humanity of others is not revealed, and our understanding of the richness and depth of the human condition becomes impoverished and anaemic.
Oliver Kamm
Picoult’s novel tells the story of two women living in two times—Emilia Bassano in Elizabethan England and Melina Green, a descendent of Bassano’s who is a modern playwright. Emilia and Melina reinterpret, and sometimes even rewrite, Shakespeare’s plays, particularly The Taming of the Shrew so that it says something more congenial to their cramped sensibility. Picoult wants Shakespeare to write about how poorly women are treated—how ignored, marginalised, and written out of relevance they are. She wants to correct the past by inventing a controlling and prickly heroine (as though these are dignified qualities) to show on the stage. Here is a passage from Picoult’s novel in which modern-day Melina talks about her fictionalised account of Emilia Bassano:
“When I created Emilia, I made her opinionated and manipulative and sexual even though I’ve been told by men that women like that make men uncomfortable, and above all else, we can’t let that happen. So stories about complicated, wholly realized men get put onstage and stories about complicated, wholly realized women don’t … which reinforces the belief that men, and their experiences, matter more. It becomes a cycle.”
Melina’s boyfriend interjects by saying that what gets produced “shouldn’t be an identity politics quota… but who can tell the best story.” Melina responds by launching into what sounds like a parody of a DEI manual:
“When the only stories told are by straight white men, it becomes the norm. People assume that the only stories that will turn a profit are stories about that particular experience—when in fact there are whole untapped audiences who would love to see their lives replicated on a stage. Do you know how gratifying it would be for more women or Black or Latinx or Indigenous or trans or disabled people to see themselves represented in theater? The answer is no, you don’t—because you’ve always seen yourself reflected there.”
There is a reason Shakespeare is a man for all ages and chick-lit like this is destined for the oblivion of mediocrity. If Picoult believes she is making a radical point, her novel is about forty years too late. Far from being controversial or daring, as she seems to imagine, her work expresses the most anodyne values of corporate human-resources departments, or perhaps of Barnes and Noble shelf-space allocation formulae. Worst of all is that, in order for Picoult’s heroine to be viewed as a game-changer, we have to forget about the fully realised female characters Shakespeare placed on the stage (to say nothing of Othello, Shylock, Aaron, and Caliban).
Picoult’s novel is caught in an intellectual double-bind. In order to maintain the narrative of a scrappy girlboss heroine, the young woman must be embattled by “The Patriarchy.” But this makes it difficult to see men as anything more than oppressors of women, or women as anything more than victims trapped in perpetual adolescence. This leads women into a dependency trap, forced to affirm The Patriarchy’s power and control in order to demonstrate their feisty resistance to it.
This requires some moral gymnastics because the uncomfortable fact is that women desire powerful men. A writer like Picoult needs to affirm a man’s power and prestige, but then must make him misunderstood instead of self-possessed and competent. The male hero of her novel, a fictional theatre critic named Jasper Tolle, cannot be the assertive man he seems to be. Instead, he must be neurodivergent—cool, aloof, and sexy, but morally acceptable as an object of female desire because he is on the spectrum.
Marilyn Simon
What distinguishes Picoult’s contemporary writing from the work of Shakespeare (besides her excessive use of the word “mayhap”) is her lack of love for humanity as it is. Her story is a reproachful admonishment of human behaviour and desire. She rewrites things as she wants to see them, and then finds herself caught in the circular reasoning of authorship theory: I think things should be a certain way, so I will look for only what I wish to find, and then believe that I have found all there is. Picoult is in love with herself, not with humanity, as Shakespeare is.
All of which is a shame because Bassano was an accomplished poet in her own right. But by making her say the things that Picoult wants to hear, Bassano’s own voice is silenced, which is awkward since that is the moral charge Picoult is levelling against men and culture. Bassano’s long poem Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum is a meditation on Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection, and on the women of the Bible. The poem does in fact defend the role of women, but it does so in an uncomfortably unmodern way. Bassano defends Eve by saying that she was merely weak and innocent, a babe compared to Adam. He is the one who should have known better. Bassano then celebrates women who shine with virtue and admonishes those who don’t. She notably critiques Cleopatra for being selfish and ungoverned, and praises instead the inward virtues of chastity, “But your chaste breast guarded with strength of mind, / Hates the embracements of unchaste desires.” Restraint of passion leads to dignity.
Picoult’s Emilia, on the other hand, has a long and passionate affair with the Lord of Southampton. Had Picoult wanted to draw attention to Bassano’s authentic voice, she might have focused on the poetry Bassano actually produced rather than putting words into her mouth that she neither wrote nor, mayhap, would have wanted to write. In writing her own version of a historic girlboss, Picoult has done exactly what she accuses The Patriarchy of doing: marginalising a woman’s voice, speaking for her, and telling her what she must say.
Picoult’s myopia, like Winkler’s before her, also blinds her to what Shakespeare’s male and female characters say. And in this regard, the two writers misrepresent the conditions of Elizabethan England. Picoult assumes that women were confined to the house and prevented from doing meaningful work. This is in spite of the fact that the real Bassano was evidently earning an income during her life and was openly a wealthy man’s mistress for decades. (The Elizabethans may have been a little less squeamish around sex than contemporary feminists are.)
Shakespeare’s own wife, Anne Hathaway, most certainly did work in the home, but she was running an industry, not confined to domestic duties. The Shakespeares became wealthy, and while her husband was in London, Anne employed labourers and ran an extensive farm, brewery, and orchard. That Shakespeare’s own daughters didn’t know how to read or write, as Picoult claims, is debatable. It seems as though the elder daughter, Susannah, was literate, and the younger, Judith, was perhaps not. But this in no way means that she was unvalued or silenced.
We have no way of knowing the family or personal dynamics at play within the Shakespeare household. It could be that Judith, like her mother, was engaged in industrious work that didn’t require reading but was no less valuable for that. It could be that the firstborn was favoured and the second ignored. It could be that Judith herself had little inclination to study (she wouldn’t be the first child to resist scholarly pursuits). Or it could be that she had poor vision, or that Shakespeare was a patriarchal brute, or that the Shakespeares were so wealthy that Judith didn’t have to worry about learning to read, or maybe even that she did know how to read but just signed her name with “J.” To infer what we don’t know of the Shakespeare family from the scant evidence we have is speculative at best, delusive at worst.
Picoult’s argument, like Winkler’s before her, is based on the assumption that Elizabethan life was oppressive and misogynistic—much like ours still is, according to the novel. In fact, life in Elizabethan England was more complex than we might think. In and around Southampton, in southern England, for instance, women comprised 48 percent of all guild members. We have records of female blacksmiths, armourers, printers, and goldsmiths. Some of these women may have inherited their businesses from their husbands but others entered the trades as fully independent individuals. People weren’t wealthy. Almost everybody worked. The myth that men suffered some anxiety around competent women is more a modern-day feminist fairytale than fact. It’s a fantasy that’s needed to prop up the combative attitude of our modern downtrodden heroines. If women of the past were, in fact, seen as “complicated, wholly realized women,” the modern woman loses some of the satisfaction of having a self-legitimising social complaint.
But the best evidence that Elizabethan society saw women as full participants in the human drama are Shakespeare’s plays themselves, which were not only written by a man but were believable representations of women and men on the stage. But Picoult again silences the very women she claims she wants to hear. It’s true that Shakespeare’s plays don’t always show wives. His comedies, like our modern-day rom-coms, typically end with the promise to wed, but do not often show married life. But there are two female characters, both of whom figure prominently in Picoult’s fictionalised account of Bassano’s writing, that are wives: Titania from A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Kate from The Taming of the Shrew. (Picoult wisely leaves the murderous Lady Macbeth offstage, unlike Winkler, who seems to admire her sociopathic ambition.)
Marilyn Simon
Titania and Kate are both strong-minded characters, and both begin by defying their husbands. Picoult applauds this aspect of Shakespeare’s writing. She has Emilia change the words of Shakespeare’s play (perhaps to make his blank verse more palatable to her modern audience). What “would her husband most want to hear?” wonders the fictional Emilia as she sits contemplating Kate’s final speech in The Taming of the Shrew: “So lower your pride—there’s nothing you can do. Place your hands below your husband’s foot. This duty my hand is ready to do, if he wants me to.” Picoult’s Emilia finds this unacceptable. “There could be nothing more ridiculous than a wife putting her hand on the ground for her husband to tread upon,” she muses, pen in hand, “so that his sole would not have to touch the ground. Except, perhaps, for reading such a line as earnest, instead of utter sarcasm.” Really? Does it escape Picoult’s notice that what she’s just done is call a fully realised female character “ridiculous” just because she doesn’t particularly want to hear what Kate says?
It isn’t only Picoult who takes the liberty of changing Shakespeare’s plays so that they conform more gently to modern feminist ethics. The Globe staged a run of The Taming of the Shrew this past summer, and found it necessary to post the following trigger warning on its website:
Content guidance: The play contains issues of misogyny, domestic and emotional abuse, including coercive control and gaslighting, violence (including murder) and strong language.
I’m not certain who gets murdered in this version of the play; Shakespeare’s original has not a single death, so I have to assume that some artistic liberties have been taken, again, in order to make the play more brutal than it is. Friends of mine who saw the play reported that it was “weird and depressing.” I wasn’t surprised to hear this. Perversely, directors seem to want to see Kate abused so that she can conform to our modern certainty about the misogyny of the past. The more sophisticated we become, the more intolerant we are of any interpretation that isn’t already what we want to believe. We’re more comfortable seeing Kate as the victim. That would seem to be our way of taming her.
But what if, instead, we take Kate’s offer as the loving and tender words of a wife to a husband whom she loves? Of course Petruchio doesn’t actually step on his wife. That would be ridiculous. He knows, as she knows, that her humility isn’t an act of defeat or of self-abnegation, but a willing and joyful surrender of herself for another. Her words are an exuberant expression of her love and service towards him, not a literal invitation to be trodden upon. And his response to his wife’s speech is to enthusiastically praise his wife, kiss her, and leave the party to go make love to her. The horror!
I took my own girls to see a production of The Taming of the Shrew five years ago, just before the pandemic began. They were eleven and nine years old at the time. It was a show staged by a local community theatre, the members of which are all amateurs. Before the show, the director appeared on the stage to give his own version of a trigger warning: “I know that some people find this play violent,” he announced, “but I have realised that unless I do violence to the text itself, I cannot make it a sad or bitter or an ugly play. It’s slapstick. It’s wordplay. It’s foreplay. I don’t know how to make it otherwise without changing Shakespeare’s words. And I don’t feel I have the right to do that.” His trigger warning, in other words, was to say that we weren’t going to see the misogyny and the abuse that we might have expected (or wanted) to see.
That production was a delight—even my nine-year-old laughed. Kate’s character went through a transformation from being ungoverned and passionate but emotionally unavailable, to being self-governed and emotionally vulnerable, without losing any of her passion. It was, as the director said, the play as Shakespeare wrote it. It also echoes the themes of the real Bassano’s own writing: those of self-sovereignty, self-control, and the dignity of loving others. These similarities don’t prove that Bassano was the real Shakespeare (the differences in the style of their verse are enough to disprove that), but rather that the Elizabethans understood humanity in ways that don’t always align with our contemporary fantasies of it. In our culture of narcissism, we are unable to see the past outside of our own reflection.
Oliver Kamm
Picoult’s Emilia compares falling in love to drowning. But Shakespeare shows that loving deeply is more like coming up for oxygen. In Shakespeare’s plays, it is self-enclosure that is the enemy. Kate’s behaviour at the start of play shows that she is wild, but this does not mean free: she is enslaved to her emotions, angry at everyone, close to no one, and determined to be in control, but that is what makes her miserable. She is violent, petty, envious, and childish. Petruchio adores her, but he wants a wife, not an adversary. Their union is about becoming partners in crime, not about him controlling her.
Kate is tame by the end, but no less spirited for that. Her speech to the other wives is a virtuoso admonishment of their petulance. By the end, Kate’s verbal energy is not focused on herself but on her relationship with her husband. She has moved out of herself and into love. Her manner of seeing is no longer confined by her own point of view; that she calls the sun the moon and an old man a blushing virgin has nothing to do with her husband’s desire to manipulate. It has to do with participating in an inside joke with him. He doesn’t want to “gaslight” her, but for her to see things differently: as one with the man she loves. Her vision is expanded because she is no longer at the centre of it. That a man wrote this shows us not that he wants to dominate women, but to partner with them, in love. The modern woman may after all have something to learn from Shakespeare.
