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61 pages 2 hours read

Jodi Picoult

By Any Other Name

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2024

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Chapters 7-9Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 7 Summary: “Melina, September 2023”

After the grueling workshop, Melina is exhausted but satisfied. The play has been performed, and the feedback is positive. Andre catches her arm to tell Felix that she is the actual author of the play when they are interrupted by Jasper, who asks to have a word with Andre privately. He tells Andre that he loves the show and that he wants to help transfer it into production.

Melina realizes that Jasper does not recognize her from their encounter at Bard. She also thinks that if he knows she wrote the play and not Andre, he won’t help it transfer. So, she continues to lie and tells Jasper that she is Andrea Washington, Mel’s assistant.

Andre is furious with her and reminds her that he has a day job. She promises to give him the money so that he can take some time off from the casting agency and write. Though he calls the idea an I Love Lucy-esque scheme, he agrees to help.

Jasper sets up a meeting with a producer, Tyce D’Onofrio. Melina has met with him once before for advice, and he told her that her female character was unbelievable while he was currently producing Sweeney Todd, a show about a cannibalistic barber. Andre declines to come because of his day job, so Melina meets Tyce alone. He tells her that the main reason he is interested is because Jasper recommended it.

Taking her routine afternoon at the library reading room, Melina settles in with a novel when she receives a series of texts from Jasper about logistics. As she responds, a phone begins dinging, and she realizes that Jasper is also in the reading room. They leave together and Jasper takes her to get coffee in Bryant Park. Though they initially are prickly with one another, Melina realizes that he is not as callous as she first thought. He is also genuinely interested in the play.

A section in Jasper’s point of view reveals that he feels that Melina (whom he thinks of as Andrea) is a kindred spirit. They trade trivia about the library reading room, and he shows her that the library escape hatch is by where they are standing in Bryant Park. He is impressed when she begins making a case that Emilia Bassano wrote Shakespeare’s work and begins to be convinced despite himself.

The rehearsal script from By Any Other Name includes a brief scene where Marlowe introduces Emilia to Shakespeare.

Chapter 8 Summary: “Emilia, 1592”

The Puritans continue to gain popularity in London and protest the wickedness of theater, which is a source of stress for Hunsdon. One night she proposes to Hunsdon that they invite Philip Stubbs, the leader, to dinner and show him that they are a harmless and god-fearing household. Hunsdon gently reminds her that she is his mistress, and Stubbs would likely not dine with them. Emilia is humiliated—after a decade with Hunsdon, she has grown used to her position and rarely remembers that others might consider her scandalous.

Emilia continues to work on her play Arden of Faversham and receives a note that she assumes is from Marlowe, who communicates by concealing his letters in merchant bills. However, she is shocked to see it is from Southampton, who asks her to meet him in the Paris Garden. She meets him and he tells her that he is older and wiser. He knows that she can promise him nothing, but he still loves her and wants to be with her as much as he can. They continue their love affair, and she feels guilty for deceiving the kindly Hunsdon.

One day, Southampton has her meet him in a small house, where he has hired a painter. He wants to have miniatures made of each of them as a token of their love. Though Emily knows that having such an obvious symbol of their love is dangerous, she agrees. The painter uses symbols to portray the lovers’ passion, including the six of hearts which represents doomed love. Afterward, she hides her miniature, but Southampton keeps his pinned inside his clothes, near his heart.

Marlowe tells Emilia that her play is excellent and convinces her that it can be performed if she has a cover. He helps her broker a meeting with Shakespeare, who needs plays to perform. She bargains with him, promising that her work will bring him the fame he desires, and he agrees to pay her 15 shillings.

The plague arrives in London and people flee. Marlowe stops by to give Hunsdon a copy of his new play and uses the meeting to covertly give Emilia a pamphlet advertising Arden of Faversham. At long last, she is a real playwright.

As their household prepares to leave to join the court at Hampton, Emilia becomes ill and faints. She spends days with a fever and a doctor in a plague mask examines her as she cries. When she finally awakens, Hunsdon is at her bedside. He tells her that she did not have the plague and that she will recover, but that she will not be going to Court with him. She is pregnant.

Chapter 9 Summary: “Melina, September 2024”

Andre, Melina, and Jasper head to a meeting with Raffe Langudoc, a controversial director. Though Melina wants a woman to direct the play, Jasper insists it needs to be someone who will have name recognition and bring in money. Raffe’s current project is a musical about Tucker Carlson that is touring at gun shows and making a lot of money. Despite Melina’s secret misgivings, Raffe agrees to take on the project.

Melina finds rehearsal stressful. She must pretend to let Andre be in charge and she chafes at some suggestions the actors and Raffe are making. Jasper sees her watching and jokes with her about how many bad suggestions get made and not used. After rehearsal, Andre and Melina debrief over martinis. They agree that the situation is awkward, but Melina still refuses to come forward. The conversation degenerates into a fight where she tells Andre that he doesn’t have the same struggles as she does. Andre leaves and Melina pulls out her phone to apologize when she gets a call from her father. He is in the hospital but reassures her that it is just a small procedure that Beth, his girlfriend, has brought him to.

Melina leaves a message on Andre’s door telling him that she wants to talk. She then remembers that she signed up to help cater the Lilly Awards, which celebrate female playwrights. She doesn’t do it for the extra money, though she needs it, but so that she can be close to so many inspiring female writers. At the awards, she is shocked to see Jasper, attending for work. He convinces her to duck out of the awards with him.

They share milkshakes and talk about Elizabethan writers, bantering back and forth about whether Emilia could have written the plays. During the conversation, she confronts him about not liking plays that are not for him and panning them as bad when he should have recognized that he wasn’t the audience. Jasper is taken aback but receives the criticism and begins to reflect on his past work.

In the By Any Other Name script, Emilia tells Southampton that she is married, and they cannot be together.

Chapters 7-9 Analysis

Though Emilia’s story contains the doomed love of Shakespeare’s tragedies, Melina’s has much of the zany nature of the comic plays. Andre, annoyed at being looped into pretending to be Mel, tells her, “Friends don’t let friends fuck up their lives with I Love Lucy-type schemes that are bound to fail” (160). The reference to the sitcom with its hapless heroine is apt, but the farcical pretending of “Mel Green” and “Andrea Washington” is very Shakespearean, offering echoes of plays such as Twelfth Night and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The comic elements also balance out Melina’s anger at The Invisibility of Women’s Work. She fights to have Emilia’s voice on stage and her contributions recognized, and in doing so she must silence her own voice and not take credit for her play. This is an echo of Emilia’s earlier struggle, where the only way to have her play performed was to produce it under Shakespeare’s name.

Just as Shakespearean plays often hinge on misunderstandings, this section reveals that Melina and Jasper have misunderstood one another. Where Melina believed that Jasper was a cruel and callous man, his point of view shows someone capable of great feeling. He struggles to decipher social cues and niceties and is misunderstood and stereotyped because of his neurodivergence. Jasper also senses a kindred spirit in Melina and is moved by her passion for researching Emilia. Listening to her speak, he thinks about his childhood obsession with trains when he would “chatter about track and rolling stock […] until [listener’s] eyes glazed over and they drifted away” (175). Rather than finding her obsession off-putting, he finds it intriguing: “He knew what it was like to be obsessed with a topic and to think there was no one else in the world who might be as interested” (175). Jasper, of course, also has more of a powerful voice than Melina does. As a revered critic for The New York Times, he has the power to turn public interest toward his passions. When he and Melina begin to collide here, they each learn to understand the other better and gain an understanding of their own lack of perception. Melina was quick to judge Jasper; Jasper was guilty of promoting only work that spoke to him, rather than plays where he was not the intended audience. Through the course of the novel, they learn from one another.

In this section, the miniature portraits Southampton commissions are a symbol of the doomed love affair between him and Emilia. The existence of the paintings also speaks to the novel’s themes of invisibility and legacy. Emilia is initially shocked when Southampton suggests that she be painted—though “artwork had decorated nearly every surface” of the homes she lives in, “the people who were commemorated in paintings were titled, wealthy, important. Not poor wards, courtesans, or illicit lovers” (188). The very act of committing her to painting is shocking because it is a declaration that Emilia is valuable. It is also risky, since such a “tangible token of their love” leaves “them exposed to anyone who might find her portrait tucked into Southampton’s doublet” (189). When Emilia finally agrees to sit for the portrait, she says yes to the risk but also to being made visible. Ironically, in the real world, this portrait is one of the few things left that testifies to Emilia Bassano’s existence.

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