A straightforward
biography of the most famous playwright in the English language was never going
to come from Jess Winfield, one of the co-founders of the Reduced Shakespeare
Company. My Name Is Will: A Novel Of Sex, Drugs, And Shakespeare reclaims the bawdy Bard
and the scholars who love him by pairing a slightly implausible story of the
young playwright with a contemporary college-campus escapade, for an explicit
tale that will never be assigned in high-school English classes.
William Shakespeare, 18,
tutors local boys in Latin, enduring their japes and the way his schoolmaster
prods him to keep them in line instead of humoring their questions about
dead-language double entendres. Then a mysterious messenger pulls him into a
secret network of English Catholics, in hiding since the Queen denounced them.
William isn't religious, but the fraternity offers a sense of purpose he can't
find in his everyday life. However, his dalliances with the local girls he
meets through his play-acting friends become an unwelcome distraction, trapping
him in jail and worse. Meanwhile, in 1986, UC-Santa Cruz grad student Willie
Shakespeare Greenberg dawdles over his books between tokes of hash, then agrees
to help a neighbor carry marijuana and one magnificent mushroom to a pal at the
local Renaissance Faire. When the narcs grab his source, Willie decides to
deliver the drugs anyway, hoping to get enough money to pay for another
semester of procrastination on his master's thesis (on Shakespeare's religion)
and possibly impress his beautiful TA.
Unlike with many novels
which split the plot between narrators, neither protagonist of My Name Is
Will
seems strong enough to carry a book of his own. William is a wuss who initially
seems intentionally deaf to the life of the town around him and the intricacies
of his father's downfall, and Willie's pursuit of women and drugs would quickly
become repetitive if it weren't interrupted by the exploits of his 16th-century
counterpart. The connections between them sometimes seem forced—when one
William sleeps with a dream woman in a field, for example, the other must do so
as well—but Shakespeare buffs will revel in the many, many references
Winfield inserts into these escapades. From the ripped-from-soliloquy quips
that William's friends use as evidence of his extemporaneous genius to Willie's
charming ability to repeat the right quote at the wrong time, even while
tripping, My Name Is Will overcomes its self-conscious premise by giving
its source just enough stage time as its Williams careen toward their goals.