Symbols By Any Other Name Jodi Picoult

The First Folio as a Symbol of Hidden Authorship

What Is the First Folio?

In By Any Other Name, the First Folio refers to the 1623 collected edition of plays attributed to William Shakespeare, officially titled Mr. William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies. This real historical volume preserved thirty-six plays, half of which had never been printed before. Without it, works such as Macbeth, The Tempest, and Twelfth Night would likely be lost.

Within the novel, however, the First Folio operates as far more than a historical artifact. It reappears across both timelines as a layered symbol of literary immortality, deliberate deception, and the systematic erasure of female authorship. For Emilia Bassano, it is a coded project she helps shape in old age. For Melina Green, it is a revered object that propels her into the heart of the authorship debate.

The First Folio in Emilia’s Timeline: A Coded Project

The novel’s most revealing treatment of the First Folio occurs in Emilia’s chapters, when she has survived decades of pseudonymous writing and personal loss. Ben Jonson enlists her to assist with the Folio’s preparation at the print shop of Isaac Jaggard. What becomes clear immediately is that the Folio is not a straightforward commemoration of William Shakespeare. As Jonson tells Emilia, “the entirety of this folio is deception.”

The Droeshout Engraving

Jonson shows Emilia the engraving by Martin Droeshout meant to accompany the volume. Emilia, who knew the man from Stratford, finds the portrait ludicrous—a deformed forehead, uneven hair, a doublet that appears to be worn backward, and what seems to be two left arms. When she remarks on its absurdity, Jonson is delighted. He points out the double line on the neck and says it appears as though the figure is wearing a mask. The image is intentionally wrong, a visual clue for anyone who knew the real Shakespeare that the figure in the engraving is a facade.

Jonson’s Prefatory Poems

The textual clues embedded in the Folio’s front matter deepen the symbolism. Jonson’s short poem beneath the engraving instructs readers, in essence, not to look at the picture but at the book. Emilia recognizes this as a statement that the real writer is not in the image but in the texts themselves. Jonson’s longer memorial poem, To the memory of my beloved, the Author Mr. William Shakespeare: And what he hath left us, goes further. It includes the striking line comparing false praise to “some infamous Bawd, or Whore” praising a matron. The metaphor is odd within a volume supposedly honoring a male playwright, but it makes sense as a hidden reference to the women who actually wrote the works and were forced into a kind of literary prostitution—selling their words while men claimed the credit.

The Fabricated Letter

Another layer of deception involves the epistle from actors John Heminges and Henry Condell. Jonson discloses that they were never asked to write it. He is composing false compliments so excessive that a discerning reader might question whether the works of a mere mortal could truly be so flawless. These deliberate overstatements serve as breadcrumbs for future investigators willing to read between the lines. Emilia herself calls the Folio “not a set of plays…but a series of puzzles.”

The Monument Without a Tomb

Jonson’s poem declares that Shakespeare is “a monument, without a tomb” and insists he will not be lodged beside Chaucer, Spenser, or Beaumont in Westminster Abbey. The literal truth—Shakespeare is buried in Stratford, not in Poets’ Corner—doubles as metaphor. The monument exists on the page, but the identity of the author buried within the book is not what the title page claims.

The First Folio in Melina’s Timeline: A Revered Artifact

In the contemporary storyline, Jasper Tolle secures a private viewing of the First Folio for Melina. This scene establishes the volume as a secular relic—an object treated with the reverence typically reserved for religious icons. For Melina, a struggling playwright, the encounter is electric. She and Jasper discuss Emilia Bassano’s possible role as the true author of Shakespeare’s plays while standing before the physical embodiment of the authorship mystery.

This moment catalyzes Jasper’s decision to publish a column supporting Melina’s play about Emilia. The Folio here becomes an object of professional risk and personal vulnerability. When Jasper’s editor, Don, miscommunicates and runs a drastically altered article that frames Melina as exploiting Jasper, the damage ripples outward. The Folio, which had seemed to promise revelation and vindication, instead triggers professional humiliation and a rift between Melina and Jasper. The artifact that should have validated hidden female authorship temporarily silences Melina’s own voice.

Symbolic Meanings of the First Folio

Literary Immortality

The First Folio embodies the promise articulated in Sonnet 81: that a name “from hence immortal life shall have” even as the individual is forgotten. The plays survive, and with them the possibility of future recognition. For Emilia, contributing to the Folio while knowing her name would not appear on the title page represents a bittersweet bargain—her words live forever, but she does not.

Erased Female Authorship

The Folio is the physical manifestation of female erasure and pseudonymous authorship. It collects the works that women like Emilia wrote and sold, enshrining them under a man’s name. The volume’s solidity—leather, paper, print—lends permanence to a lie. Every copy of the First Folio that survives is evidence of what women created and were denied credit for.

The Coded Puzzle

Jonson’s embedded clues transform the Folio into a puzzle box. The absurd engraving, the peculiar metaphors, the fabricated actors’ letter, the poem instructing readers to look past the picture—all function as a cipher waiting to be cracked. Emilia asks whether someone will one day solve the puzzle, and Jonson’s hope is that the deception contains the seeds of its own unraveling. This symbolic function connects directly to the Shakespeare authorship question, the novel’s central intellectual controversy.

Art as Resistance

The Folio also symbolizes art as resistance and legacy. Even as it erases individual female authors, it preserves their work. Emilia understands that the alternative was not recognition but silence. The plays exist, and existence is its own form of defiance. The words survive the writer, and survival is a precondition for eventual rediscovery.

Character Connections

The First Folio links Emilia and Melina across centuries. For Emilia, it is the culmination of a lifetime of anonymous creation—a project she enters knowing she will remain invisible yet finding a strange satisfaction in Jonson’s subversive craftsmanship. Her involvement transforms her from a victim of erasure into a co-conspirator in the creation of a monument riddled with clues.

For Melina, the Folio represents the lineage she is trying to reclaim. Standing before it, she is not merely looking at an old book; she is confronting the physical proof of the system that erased her predecessor and that continues to make her own path as a female playwright difficult. The gender bias in the arts that Emilia faced has mutated but not disappeared.

Jasper, as the facilitator of Melina’s encounter with the Folio, becomes a conduit between past and present. His well-intentioned but mishandled column shows how the Folio’s symbolism of revelation can, in the wrong hands, cause further harm.

Ben Jonson emerges as perhaps the most intriguing figure connected to the Folio. He is not merely a poet honoring a colleague but an architect of an elaborate literary hoax designed to be seen through. His inclusion of the bawd-and-matron metaphor, his deliberate oddities in the Droeshout engraving, and his falsified contributions all speak to a man wrestling with guilt, loyalty, and a desire for the truth to outlast him.

How the Symbol Evolves

In Emilia’s timeline, the Folio begins as a practical project—printing collected plays—and becomes a vessel for hidden truth. Jonson’s revelation that the entire enterprise is deception reframes the volume from a tribute to a trap door. Emilia moves from skepticism to admiration as she sees how thoroughly Jonson has worked clues into every element.

In Melina’s timeline, the Folio shifts from an inspiring artifact to an emblem of the risks of challenging established narratives. The private viewing is a moment of wonder and connection, but the aftermath demonstrates that even in the twenty-first century, suggesting a woman wrote Shakespeare’s plays can have professional consequences.

Study Questions

  1. How does the Droeshout engraving function as a clue within the First Folio, and what does Jonson intend it to communicate?
  • The engraving deliberately distorts Shakespeare’s appearance with a deformed forehead, backward doublet, and two left arms. The double line on the neck suggests a mask. Jonson intends these absurdities to signal that the figure on the page is a false face, not the true author. Only those who knew the real Shakespeare would recognize the portrait as an obvious fake, making the engraving a silent signal that the identity presented to the public is a fiction.
  1. Why is Jonson’s choice of the bawd-and-whore metaphor significant in his memorial poem?
  • The metaphor draws a comparison between false praise and a prostitute complimenting a virtuous wife. In a volume honoring a celebrated male playwright, the metaphor makes little surface sense, because all the competing playwrights are men. It only becomes coherent if the true author is a woman—someone who, like a bawd, was forced into a morally compromised position by circumstance, selling her work while a man claimed virtue. The metaphor is a hidden acknowledgment of Emilia and other female playwrights.
  1. What does the First Folio symbolize for Melina in the contemporary timeline?
  • For Melina, the First Folio symbolizes both the historical erasure of women’s creative work and the possibility of reclaiming that legacy. The private viewing with Jasper represents a moment of connection to Emilia and validation of her own project. However, the fallout from Jasper’s altered column transforms the symbolism into a warning about the continued risks female artists face when challenging entrenched narratives of male genius.
  1. In what way is the First Folio “a monument without a tomb,” and how does this phrase capture the novel’s central themes?
  • The phrase describes how the plays live on without the true author receiving a proper burial in literary history. Shakespeare’s physical remains lie in Stratford, not Westminster Abbey, but the real burial is the concealment of Emilia’s identity. The monument is the book itself—the preserved works—but the tomb is missing because the author’s name is missing. This encapsulates the novel’s exploration of how art outlasts the artist while systems of erasure prevent the artist from being remembered.