The Play's the Thing (Preorder)
The Play's the Thing (Preorder)
Lily Jessen
Forthcoming August 2026
I am an actress, nothing more…
For centuries, the female characters of Shakespeare’s plays have famously struggled with love, anger, death, motherhood, and marriage on the greatest stages in the world. However, for the most part, they remain the object, rather than the subject, of their stories.
Just as women in the real world are confined by the expectations of society, they have no choice but to perform. How can these characters, through their performer—and, simultaneously, their performer through them—find their own words beyond the stories that are told about them?
A novel in verse, The Play’s the Thing journeys into many layers of womanhood through the eyes of five Shakespearean women and the actress playing them.
POETRY | Paperback | 2026 | ISBN: 979-8-9967503-1-3
About the Author
LILY JESSEN is an author and actor from Cape Elizabeth, Maine. She wrote The Play’s the Thing primarily during her senior year of high school. She is also the author of the novel The Pipe Tree (2024) and the winner of The Telling Room’s Statewide Writing Contest. When she isn’t fanatically planning her next book or memorizing lines, you can find her singing musical theater karaoke, needle-felting animals, or curled up watching a murder mystery.