Critic Jasper Tolle dismisses Melina's senior play as juvenile and small at a collegiate playwriting competition.

Emilia Bassano's family brokers a deal with the powerful Lord Hunsdon to make the young teenager his mistress.

Melina researches her ancestor Emilia Bassano at the New York Public Library and writes a play about her life.

A drunk Andre secretly submits Melina's play under the gender-neutral name Mel Green without her knowledge.

Melina discovers Jasper Tolle is judging the festival and pressures Andre to keep pretending to be the playwright.

Emilia and playwright Christopher Marlowe meet at a play rehearsal and form a close creative friendship.

Jasper tells Andre he wants to help produce By Any Other Name as a full professional production.

Marlowe brokers a deal with Shakespeare to produce Emilia's play Arden of Faversham under Shakespeare's name for fifteen shillings.

Emilia becomes pregnant and Lord Hunsdon dismisses her from his household, arranging for her to marry the cruel Alphonso.

Emilia writes Romeo and Juliet inspired by her love affair with Southampton, then secretly aborts their child.

Melina reveals to Jasper that she, not Andre, is the real author of By Any Other Name.

Shakespeare urges Emilia to write a play about grief, and she composes Hamlet as tribute to their dead children.

Jasper's editor rewrites his gender-equity column to portray Melina as a villain who exploited a Black man.

Emilia dies with her loyal servant Bess at her side and is greeted in the afterlife by Christopher Marlowe.

Melina arrives at the Athena Playhouse to find Jasper as artistic director; the two reconcile and her play is staged.

Melina Green's playwriting career is derailed when critic Jasper Tolle dismisses her college play, pushing her toward anonymity rather than recognition. Years later, she discovers her ancestor Emilia Bassano—a gifted Elizabethan writer forced to publish under Shakespeare's name—and pens a play about Emilia's hidden legacy. When Andre submits Melina's work under a male pseudonym, Jasper unknowingly champions the play he once might have dismissed, and Melina must choose between exposure and success. Meanwhile, Emilia negotiates her survival by bartering her talent with Shakespeare, only to be dismissed by her protector Hunsdon and trapped in a brutal marriage to Alphonso. Melina ultimately confesses the truth but loses Jasper when his newspaper column is weaponized against her. Both women's arcs converge when Melina finally steps into the spotlight at the Athena Playhouse, giving Emilia the public recognition that centuries of silence had denied her.

The headline events driving both storylines from beginning to end.

Professor Bufort gives Melina a failing thesis grade and refuses to write her a recommendation letter.

Emilia travels to Denmark, unexpectedly gets her first period, and is gently educated by Queen Sophie about her body.

Emilia meets the young Earl of Southampton at court and teaches the eight-year-old how to play the recorder.

Emilia observes Hunsdon's captive hunting falcons and writes a poem about taming that becomes lines from The Taming of the Shrew.

Hunsdon takes Emilia to Mary Sidney Herbert's literary salon, where Sidney invents invisible ink and hints at Emilia's destiny.

The grown Southampton finds Emilia alone in a wild park and kisses her, beginning their years-long secret love affair.

Emilia sells her narrative poem Venus and Adonis to Shakespeare, earning money to survive Alphonso's chronic neglect.

Alphonso beats Emilia severely in an alley after spotting Hunsdon smiling at her during a performance of The Taming of the Shrew.

Southampton finds the badly beaten Emilia outside his estate and brings her to his hunting lodge to recover.

Alphonso abandons his royal musician post to seek a military knighthood, leaving Emilia alone in charge of the household.

Andre and Melina have a fierce argument about the ongoing deception after a tense dress rehearsal.

Melina's father suffers a heart attack and Jasper drives her to the Connecticut hospital where he is recovering.

Emilia wins her court case against Alphonso's brother when the Earl of Southampton unexpectedly appears to support her.

Southampton privately confesses to Emilia that he recognized her writing in the plays and knows she authored them.

Andre comes out to his parents and establishes himself as a celebrated playwright in his own right.

The novel's secondary events reveal the relationships and environments that shaped both women's lives beneath the surface of the main plot. For Emilia, these include her passage into womanhood during a trip to Denmark, her enchantment with Hunsdon's captive falcons that sparked her earliest poetry, and the literary salon where Mary Sidney Herbert planted the seed of her greater ambitions. Southampton's pursuit of Emilia ignites a doomed but defining love affair that fuels her greatest writing, while Alphonso's cruelty and eventual abandonment reshape her daily survival. In Melina's timeline, academic punishment after her first honest play, a crisis at her father's bedside, and Andre's near-breaking point reveal the personal costs of her long deception. The pool closes with Andre's hard-won personal and professional success, a reminder that women are not the only marginalized voices fighting for a place in theater.

The significant relationships and moments that quietly shaped each woman's journey.

Melina writes her thesis play Reputation about a girl pressured into sex, secretly including a reference to Bufort's harassment.

The Baron takes Emilia to his mistress Isabella, who agrees to teach the young girl the art of being a kept woman.

In the Danish court, Emilia watches an early Amleth play and meets astronomer Tycho Brahe, who tells her fate is not fixed.

Emilia initiates sex with Hunsdon for the first time and decides her life will be a comedy rather than a tragedy.

Marlowe disguises Emilia as a young man and takes her to a tavern where she briefly encounters William Shakespeare.

Southampton sneaks into Hunsdon's home at night, forcing Emilia to seduce Hunsdon to conceal her lover's escape.

Emilia gives birth to a son she names Henry, and Alphonso beats her when he learns the baby's name.

Emilia holds a knife to Alphonso while he bathes and threatens his life if he ever harms her or their son again.

Emilia gives birth to a daughter, Odyllia, who lives only ten months before dying.

Melina ends her relationship with Jasper and asks Andre to block his number after his apology falls flat.

Emilia publishes a book of religious poems under her own name, but the work fails commercially and earns little recognition.

Ben Jonson visits Emilia and asks her to edit the manuscripts of her own plays before they are printed as the First Folio.

Jonson shows Emilia the finished First Folio and reveals a hidden cipher he embedded to hint Shakespeare was not the true author.

Emilia overhears gossip at market about Southampton's death and travels alone to his estate to sleep beside his tomb.

As Melina steps onto the stage at the Athena Playhouse, she glimpses what appears to be the spirit of Emilia Bassano watching.

This pool traces the turning points and revelations that shifted the inner lives of both women at their most decisive moments. For Melina, it begins with the brave act of writing a play that exposed her own experience—and the retaliation that followed—before closing with her long-deferred step into the spotlight. Emilia's defining turns run from her unsettling introduction to the realities of survival under Isabella's mentorship, to the night she secretly held a knife to Alphonso's throat and reclaimed herself. Her joys and losses are starkly rendered—the birth of Henry, the brief life of Odyllia, the disguised thrill of finally meeting Shakespeare—each moment reshaping who she chooses to become. Late in life, Emilia edits her own stolen masterworks into the First Folio and learns that her great love, Southampton, is gone forever; yet she endures. The pool ends with Melina stepping into a light that finally makes both women visible, closing the centuries-long circle between ancestor and descendant.