Opening
In a split narrative across 2013–2023 New York and 1580s England, Melina Green and Emilia Bassano Lanier fight for authorship, agency, and a voice in male-controlled worlds. A public shaming by Jasper Tolle silences Melina for a decade, even as Emilia learns to survive—and write—in Elizabethan court. Their stories mirror and fuel each other, asking who gets to make art and whose name ends up on it.
What Happens
Chapter 1: Melina (May 2013)
Melina recalls a college lesson about the Lebombo bone—an ancient baboon fibula marked in 29-day cycles—and her professor’s conclusion: “History is written by those in power.” The idea frames her senior year at Bard College, where she meets weekly with Professor Bufort, a once-famous playwright who admires her promise but calls her pages “emotionally sterile.” He grips her shoulders, tells her to “bleed into your work,” and pushes her to write something that leaves her exposed.
She does. Melina crafts Reputation, a one-act that allegorizes a trauma from age fourteen: a mother’s death, an older boy who “sees” her, a coerced sexual encounter, and the reputational wreckage that follows. With archetypal figures—the Girl, the Boy, the Father—she aims for the universal. For the final reading, she adds a secret epilogue Bufort hasn’t vetted: a professor grooms a student using Bufort’s exact words. The surprise judge is the feared New York Times critic, Jasper Tolle. The room freezes when the epilogue lands.
Tolle calls the play “small” and “overly sentimental,” declaring that coming-of-age stories about girls aren’t universal. When Melina defends herself, he advises her to “steer clear” of personal work if she can’t “handle criticism” and labels her “difficult.” He awards the prize to a male student’s Marvel-heroes-in-therapy play. Bufort retaliates with a C+ on her thesis, gutting her prospects. In a rage, Melina tears up her pages—then finds a packet from her father about an ancestor: Emilia Bassano Lanier, England’s first published female poet. Amid the ruins, a thread to the past glows.
Chapter 2: Emilia (1581)
Twelve-year-old Emilia Bassano—an orphaned ward of the Countess of Kent—studies languages and literature while her converso Jewish family keeps faith in secret. When the Countess marries and departs for Holland, Emilia’s security evaporates. Left to the Countess’s brother, Baron Willoughby, she sails with him to Denmark. A storm nearly breaks the ship, and during the chaos, Emilia gets her first period and believes she is dying—until Queen Sophie of Denmark comforts her and names it “la puissance,” power.
At Kronborg Castle, Emilia watches a play about a prince named Amleth who feigns madness to avenge his father’s murder. She meets Tycho Brahe, who points out courtiers Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Emilia critiques the play’s thin female roles and plot-utility maidens; Brahe praises her eye, comparing change on earth to the supernova that proved the heavens can shift. Back in London, her cousin Jeronimo secures the Bassanos’ position at court—by selling Emilia as the mistress of Henry Carey, Lord Hunsdon, the Lord Chamberlain and the Queen’s cousin. A courtesan, Isabella, tutors Emilia to wield her body as a “weapon” in a world that gives women nothing.
Chapter 3: Melina (July 2023)
A decade later, Melina shares a Washington Heights apartment with Andre. She scrapes by on odd jobs and writes cautiously, her prose “beautiful and too careful,” still haunted by Tolle’s humiliation. Secretly, she has spent seven years building a play, By Any Other Name, about Emilia Bassano. Melina’s research into court life, Kronborg, and courtiers like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern leads to a bold thesis: William Shakespeare serves as a front for Emilia, who cannot publish for the stage under her own name.
At Andre’s mother’s birthday, a debate with Andre’s father, an English teacher, galvanizes Melina. She goes home and finishes the script. Andre reads it and breathes, “This is the one.” He begs her to submit to festivals. Melina balks. She believes the theater’s gatekeepers elevate stories they recognize—which means men, and narratives about men—while sidelining voices like hers and Emilia’s.
Chapter 4: Emilia (1582)
At thirteen, Emilia moves into Somerset House as Hunsdon’s mistress. At a masque, she befriends melancholy Henry Wriothesley, the Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, another soul with little control over his future. When Emilia meets Hunsdon—a kind, silver-haired man forty-three years older—he offers pineapple in his orangery instead of a bed. He appreciates her conversation and keeps her close; she remains lonely in a gilt cage.
Watching a falconer train a hawk, Emilia sees her reflection in the hooded bird—powerful yet controlled—and writes a poem. Hoping to secure her place, she asks Hunsdon to take her out; at a joust, she commits a public faux pas before the Queen. Fearing exile, she seduces Hunsdon that night and steps fully into the role expected of her. Their intimacy deepens into intellectual partnership: Hunsdon lets her read and comment on plays submitted for censorship. At the Rose, she asks why women can’t act or write; he laughs it off. Later, she finds a dull script, The Reign of a Great King, by a man named William Shakespeare, and tosses it aside, certain she could do better—a spark that ignites Authorship, Identity, and the Fight for Recognition.
Chapter 5: Melina (August 2023)
After quitting another nanny job, Melina receives an email: By Any Other Name is a Village Fringe finalist—addressed to “Mr. Mel Green.” Andre, drunk and desperate to help, submitted under a male name to bypass the festival’s misogynistic artistic director, Felix Dubonnet. Furious but game, Melina plans to reveal herself at the meet-and-greet, forcing Dubonnet either to keep the play or expose his bias.
The plan collapses at once: Dubonnet assumes the Black, male Andre is “Mel Green” and treats Melina as his plus-one. Then he announces a special New York Times column covering the festival—by Jasper Tolle. The shock steels Melina rather than scares her off. She asks Andre to continue the masquerade as “Mel Green” so Tolle will judge the play without prejudice. If he praises it, she will reveal the truth and confront a decade of sexist gatekeeping on the public record.
Character Development
Across five chapters, each character moves from passivity to strategy, learning to navigate the rules of rooms they do not control.
- Melina Green: From a promising but guarded student to a writer who courts risk. Tolle’s public dismissal stunts her for years, but Emilia’s story rekindles her purpose. By 2023 she engineers a high-stakes ruse, choosing action—and potential exposure—over silence.
- Emilia Bassano Lanier: From orphaned ward to court insider. She learns the coded language of pleasure and power, makes herself indispensable to Hunsdon, and glimpses authorship as a path to freedom.
- Andre: From supportive friend to catalyst and co-conspirator. His reckless submission as “Mel Green” forces momentum and then sustains the plan when the stakes rise.
- Jasper Tolle: Introduced as the arbiter of taste who defines “universal” through a narrow lens. His reappearance signals an impending reckoning.
- Henry Carey, Lord Hunsdon: More complex than Emilia’s buyer; he is tender, lonely, and intellectually curious, even as he benefits from structures that cage her.
Themes & Symbols
Melina and Emilia occupy different centuries, but the same machine attempts to silence them. Gatekeepers in both timelines define universality as male experience, making women’s stories “small.” The novel foregrounds Gender Inequality and the Silencing of Women's Voices by tracking the cost of speaking and the ingenuity required to be heard. Melina’s fear after Tolle’s verdict mirrors Emilia’s constraint at court; each learns to hack the system—through an epilogue that names abuse, a pseudonym, a staged seduction, a private editorial desk—until the art can stand on its own.
Who makes the work and who gets the credit becomes the engine of conflict. Melina’s theory that Emilia authored the canon behind a male mask aligns with her own gambit to publish as “Mel.” The novel turns authorship into a battlefield where identity is both shield and shackle, sharpening Authorship, Identity, and the Fight for Recognition. Beneath it runs The Erasure and Reclamation of History: from the Lebombo bone’s reinterpretation to Emilia’s lost pages, the text proposes that history is curated, and reclamation demands audacity.
Symbols:
- The Falcon: Emilia’s reflection—strong, precise, and hooded by a keeper. Power that must perform to be valued.
- The Name “Mel”: A mutable mask that opens doors. It exposes how perception—not talent—often determines access.
- The Theater: A paradoxical space of constraint and truth. It bars Emilia from the stage even as it becomes her laboratory; it is Melina’s proving ground and battlefield.
Key Quotes
“History is written by those in power.”
- The anthropology lesson sets the book’s thesis and stakes. Every plot turn—from Tolle’s review to Hunsdon’s patronage—illustrates how power writes the record and why reclaiming suppressed narratives matters.
“Bleed into your work.”
- Bufort’s directive becomes both artistic challenge and red flag. Melina’s epilogue literalizes the cost of vulnerability for women in institutions that punish them for it.
“Small.” “Overly sentimental.” “Difficult.”
- Tolle’s labels pathologize feminine experience and police tone. His language reveals the gatekeeping logic that defines “universal” as male and marginalizes everything else.
“La puissance.”
- Queen Sophie reframes menstruation as power, not shame. Her naming gives Emilia a counter-script to patriarchal theology and primes her to see her body and voice as sources of strength.
“This is the one.”
- Andre’s conviction anchors Melina’s wavering confidence. His belief becomes the bridge from private genius to public risk.
Why This Matters and Section Significance
These chapters lock in the novel’s double helix: Melina’s present-day bid for artistic legitimacy entwines with Emilia’s origin story inside the Elizabethan court. The Lebombo bone primes us to read every scene as a contest over who records truth; Emilia’s Denmark trip, Tycho’s supernova, and the names Rosencrantz and Guildenstern seed a new authorship mythos; Melina’s festival gambit weaponizes the very bias that once shamed her. Together, the sections set the stakes—career, reputation, authorship—and pose the central question: when a woman’s voice is muted by power, what strategies can make it unmistakably, enduringly heard?