MY NAME IS WILL

Forget the sex and drugs. Was Shakespeare a closet Catholic? That’s the big issue in this first novel from Winfield, founder of the Reduced Shakespeare Company.

The story alternates between two protagonists in different centuries. In 1582, the 18-year-old Shakespeare is teaching Latin at his old school in Stratford while sowing his wild oats: The sex is lusty but brief and generic. A mysterious horseman asks the young teacher to deliver a box to his former teacher, the Catholic John Cottom, whose brother has been imprisoned. This will be Shakespeare’s mission, and it becomes clear his family is indeed Catholic, keeping a low profile to avoid persecution. Meanwhile in Reagan-era California, at UC-Santa Cruz, 25-year-old Willie Shakespeare Greenberg is “working” on his master’s thesis about Shakespeare and Catholicism. In fact, Willie has done no research; he is a serious hash smoker, living off his dad, a Berkeley professor, and sowing his own wild oats. Willie has a mission too: to deliver a psychedelic mushroom and some baggies to his contacts at a mock-Elizabethan hippie fair. Juxtaposing the salad days of a world-famous playwright with those of a stoned nobody invites bathos, especially when Shakespeare faces far more serious dangers, as a gruesome account of the martyred Edmund Campion reminds us. Caught humping on the estate of a vicious Protestant squire, he gets a taste of the lash and the rack; all Willie gets is a few hours in a campus cell. And so it continues. Shakespeare uses a priest’s hideaway to escape the squire’s vigilantes, while feckless Willie must eat his own mushroom (and lose the sale) to avoid capture by DEA agents. It’s all meant as good rollicking fun, of course, and Shakespeare gets a time-travel broomstick ride to equal Willie’s mushroom trip, but too often the story falls flat.

A mildly entertaining romp that’s thrown out of whack by the religious-persecution theme.