MY NAME IS WILL by Jess Winfield

I decided to immerse myself in fiction about Shakespeare after finishing Hamnet.  In this book we have two semi-parallel storylines.  One, of course, imagines Shakespeare as an eighteen-year-old Latin tutor who has to put the brakes on his freewheeling life when he finds himself facing a shotgun wedding.  His relationship with Anne Hathaway is much less romantic here than the one envisioned in Hamnet.  The second storyline takes place in the 1980s and follows the even more freewheeling life of California grad student William (Willie) Shakespeare Greenberg.  Willie plans to write his thesis on the effect of Shakepeare’s Catholicism on his work, but Willie’s progress is stalled by his extracurricular activities, as well as his lack of success in finding sufficient evidence of his premise.  Both Williams are on a mission to deliver a package that contains contraband, and both have run-ins with the law.  In Shakespeare’s time, Catholicism was basically deemed to be heresy, and Shakespeare manages to run afoul of a Protestant nobleman.  Willie, on the other hand, gets arrested in an altercation during a protest rally against the war on drugs, not for the marijuana and hallucinogenic mushrooms that he is transporting to persons unknown at a Renaissance fair.  This bawdy romp of a novel teeters on the edge of plausibility, and its clever wordplay does not quite compensate for its silliness.