MY NAME IS WILL
A Novel of Sex, Drugs, and Shakespeare.
By Jess Winfield.
291 pp. Twelve. $23.99.

Related
Times Topics: William Shakespeare
Paper Cuts Blog: A Midsummer Day’s Dream

In “My Name Is Will,” William Shakespeare, imagined in his green youth (England, 1580s), alternates chapters with an American alter ego, a hash-smoking University of California, Santa Cruz, grad student named Willie Shakespeare Greenberg (California, 1980s). While young Will frolics in the hedgerows of Stratford-upon-Avon with his Rosaline, incurring the wrath and the rack of anti-Catholic Elizabethan heavies, young Willie divides his time between chasing Ophelias, dodging Reaganite narcs and fiddling with a Rubik’s Cube, musing all the while (purportedly) on the questions: “What was it that made Shakespeare great?” and “What made him Shakespeare?”

For the full review from The New York Times link here.

And to read an excerpt link here.