My Name is Will: A Novel of Sex, Drugs and Shakespeare

A bawdy and irreverent look at love and sex and drugs Shakespeare style this broadly humorous novel is a fascinating foray into the life of William Shakespeare and the world that he experienced in the 1580's where his happy family circle was constantly under threat from the dark religious forces of the time. It is the quest for identity and lots of good times that shape this narrative with two Will's - one real and one fictional -separated by time and place but not necessarily by life's experiences.

Eighteen-year-old William Shakespeare lives in the once an openly Catholic town of Stratford-upon-Avon. His father, John Shakespeare is a suspected Catholic with marriage ties to the powerful Arden family. For a while now John and his wife Mary have hit upon hard times with the authoritarian Protestant reformers only to happy to see the many of the Catholics hang from the ropes. Indeed once a middle-class success story, the Shakespeares have descended into the realms of shadow and disgrace and are even forced to fawn and cower while they watch as priests are butchered and disemboweled in the public square.

The young William is certainly not immune from the Anti-papist sentiment that is currently reaching throughout Elizabethan England. While teaching young students the art of English grammar at the Kings New School, he's shocked to discover that his catholic school master Thomas Cottom, a preacher in secret, had been arrested and taken to the tower of London for imprisonment and torture.

It's a sign of what is to come as William himself ends up in a torture session at the hands of the anti-papist Sir Thomas Lucy, accused of trespass, for poaching of deer, and for public lasciviousness with a maiden, the beautiful, red headed and green-eyed Rosaline. Only at the vicious hands of Lucy does William learn first hand the supremacy of the new faith where all for the sake of their own lives are wise to embrace in public fashion. Many of the Catholics who had grown wealthy are suddenly set upon by levies and taxes, fines and enclosures and other impediments great and small.

Meanwhile, almost 500 years later, UCSC graduate literature student Willie Shakespeare Greenburg is forced to become a drug runner while also trying to get permission from Clarence Welsh, his professor on the topic of his long overdue masters thesis. Even as Willie postulates whether Shakespeare was in fact a catholic, he's seduced amongst a dope-fuelled haze by the beautiful Dashka Demitra who is vetting the topic - the relationship between Shakespeare and Catholic Persecution in the 16 century - for Welsh while he's on a book tour.

While a porn magazine and a hash pipe jump starts his sexy affair with Dashka, it is a giant psychedelic mushroom that becomes Willie's nemesis, when his friend Todd, promises hundreds of dollars if Willie will do a drug run to the Renaissance Faire. The offer comes just as the right time as Willie's father, who has been investing in his education and paying for his tuition, suddenly cuts him off after he realizing that his son's been sponging off him and buying drugs. Willie really needs the money and without money fast "he'll be caged in a prison of higher learning with three squares a day and a shared cell."

In the intervening time, the real William is caught between the affections of the bonny maid, young Rosaline who is enamored of the stage, her own lap's garden, "hedged and trimmed like unto the fancy of a fairy's lawn," and his future wife Anne Hathaway whom he unwittingly gets in the family way. Slightly refined, slightly urbane, William is forced to plot a course through an comfortable social milieu, his basic traditions about Catholicism challenged, especially when he discovers his parents leanings. Unfortunately, reality lurks just beneath the surface when he and Mary attend a Catholic mass that is reviled amongst the practitioners of the new faith as wicked, idolatrous and debauched. It is here that William has a type of epiphany seeing all the hangings, dismemberments and burnings, and all of the countless smaller inglorious deaths in the name of religion.

Author Jess Winfield has a raucous time disentangling the life of Shakespeare, dividing the text and tweaking history and conjecturing whether his literary hero was in fact a Catholic. Both time periods are significant, the 1580's for its religious divisions and the 1980's for Reagan and his divisive war on drugs and the "just say no" campaign with its mandatory prison sentences for first-time drug users. The author even adds a live appearance by legendry Timothy Leary and there's much talk of freedom of expression as Willie's dope addicted adventures hurtle along culminating in a brain frying mushroom trip at the Renaissance Faire. At the same time we get to see William meeting the actor and theatre impresario James Burbage and the first seeds spouting of the Bard's amazing talent and creative genius.

Weaving his intricate themes of creative expression throughout, the author's knowledge of Shakespeare, his language and his history, is always profound and he never loses sight of the playwright's propensity for showing the absurdities of life, both modern and Elizabethan. Willie and William are indeed spirited protagonists who face life's challenges with an intrinsic mix of mistrustful hysteria and intellectual prowess. While one is urged to protect one and all: "the priest, the box, family and faith" the other is constantly blindsided by the effects a giant fungus and paranoid panic. In the end, both seem to have boundless energy even as we are witness their entertaining journey towards artistic enlightenment. Mike Leonard August 08.

Wickedly Good Will (0/0 people found this helpful)

I've never had the urge to write a review before, but I'm not even half way through this book, and I have to say something!

I was fortunate to buy this book in New York and it's brilliant! I find myself constantly laughing out loud on the tube as I read on my way to work.

The book is very, very funny & rude! Jess knows his stuff when it comes to Elizabethan England, the language, the life and for someone like me who loves shakespeare, it's like reading all of his great comedies at one go!

Each chapter is alternated between Wills of 1980 and then you're thrown back 400 years to the other Will's life, so the pace is brilliant.

When this book lands in the UK.....BUY IT, YOU WON'T REGRET IT!!!

My Name is Will: A Novel of Sex, Drugs and Shakespeare

Jess Winfield

Reader Reviews:

"Sex, drugs and Shakespeare, A sure path to Nirvana" (0/0 people found this helpful)

Wickedly Good Will (0/0 people found this helpful)

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