First Draft: A Dialogue of Writing is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with fiction, nonfiction, essay writers, and poets, highlighting the voices of writers as they discuss their work, their craft, and the literary arts. Hosted by Mitzi Rapkin, First Draft celebrates creative writing and the individuals who are dedicated to bringing their carefully chosen words to print as well as the impact writers have on the world we live in.
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In this episode, Mitzi talks to Jodi Picoult about her new novel, By Any Other Name.
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From the episode:
Mitzi Rapkin: By Any Other Name is questioning the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays and it is your belief that a Jewish Italian poet named Emilia Bassano wrote many of his most famous plays. In your novel, one of the major themes and a line that comes up in different ways more than once, is when Emilia is meeting Shakespeare, he says how he wants everybody to know his name, and she doesn’t want anybody to know her name. Thematically through the book, I think it’s asking the reader, is art more important than recognition? And the poetry might last, even if you don’t know the poet’s name.
Jodi Picoult: That really is the seminal question of the book. Here we are, 400 years later, in my personal opinion, I think everybody in Elizabethan England knew that the name William Shakespeare was a name for hire; not just Emelia, but other people were writing using that name who weren’t allowed to use their own name, and he was making money off it. And I think everyone was kind of in on the joke in the theater world. And as you hear Ben Johnson say in the book, you know, I think somehow, we’ve lost the punchline at this point. You know people now, 400 years later, have canonized Shakespeare, and have made him a religion even more so than a playwright, and we literally have lost that punchline. So interestingly, I actually experienced that myself when I started adapting Between the Lines for it being a Broadway bound musical, I was working with a producer who had paired me with this guy named Timothy Allen McDonald. He was a librettist, and he was going to write the libretto and Tim was like, No, I never get to work with living authors, please help. And so, we wound up working so seamlessly together that at this point now, we are partners, and we’ve written three shows together. And I love working with him. It’s really fun to write with a collaborator, which actually every playwright in Elizabethan England knew, apparently, except for Shakespeare. But at the time, I was told by my producer, your name will not be on the libretto, you will not be listed as a writer, because they were afraid it would be seen as a vanity project and because of that, they wouldn’t be able to get a theater and bring it to Broadway. And so, when the show debuted off Broadway in 2021 at Second Stage Theater, my name was listed as the original author for the book, but not for the show. And I absolutely wrote that show with Tim McDonald. And after the show closed, Tim actually wound up going to his lawyers and saying, I want this changed legally. I want her name on it going forward. And now that the show is in licensing and theater groups are doing it all over the country, my name is on it as one of the co-writers of the libretto. So, I was willing to give up my name just so I could see that show make it. And I have to say that I so value my co-writer for saying, This isn’t right, and she deserves the credit too. It just didn’t feel right. And if Tim had never said, Oh, her name should be on that libretto, would I have been okay with it? Yes, because that was the deal that I made with the devil in order to get that show up. But it certainly would have felt like a splinter, like something I was regretting. So, I guess maybe I’ve learned, you know, kind of what Emilia do, which is, you can’t really ever separate the art from the artist.
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Jodi Picoult is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of 29 novels, including By Any Other Name, Mad Honey, Wish You Were Here, and My Sister’s Keeper, and, with daughter Samantha van Leer, two young adult novels, Between the Lines and Off the Page. Picoult’s books have been translated into thirty-four languages in thirty-five countries. Picoult also wrote five issues of DC Comic’s Wonder Woman. Picoult is the co-librettist for the stage musical adaptation of her two Young Adult novels. Picoult lives in New Hampshire with her husband. They have three children.