- Cover of of My Name is Will by Jess Winfield
As co-founder of the Reduced Shakespeare Company, Jess Winfield managed to distill the complete plays of Shakespeare down to a single, two-hour production. Now, in his first novel, “My Name Is Will: A Novel of Sex, Drugs, and Shakespeare,” Winfield has once again taken an unconventional approach to the greatest writer in the English language.
The novel tells the tale of two Shakespeares. One is the eighteen-years-old William Shakespeare in Stratford-upon-Avon who is earning a living by teaching Latin to schoolboys. His life is turned
upside down when he learns his mother is a secret Catholic at a time when Elizabeth I is persecuting adherents of the “Old Faith” as traitors.
The other is struggling UC Santa Cruz grad student, Willie Shakespeare Greenberg, who is trying to write his thesis about the Bard. In the midst of his half-hearted studies, Willie is cut off by his father because of his laziness. Desperate for money, Willie agrees to deliver a single giant, psychedelic mushroom to a mysterious collector. But he unwitting becomes a target of the Drug Enforcement Agency at a time when Ronald Reagan has declared a war on drugs.
Despite being separated in time and space, a series of unmistakable parallels develop in the lives of Willie and William. Their encounters with the law, ex-girlfriends and their experimentation with mind-altering substances shape the two Shakespeares and even the course of history.
In a book review for the Los Angeles Times, Donna Seaman writes, “Winfield knows how to snare and enrapture an audience. Indeed, he’s almost too charming, and too eager to tell us what to think. But many readers will savor Winfield’s teacherly moments and appreciate Shakespeare as a man responding with uncommon brilliance to tyranny and resistance, horror and beauty, fear and hope. Winfield’s high-spirited tribute is a celebration of the power of language and story, through which we learn who we are and who we might be as we strut and fret our hour upon the stage.” (Read the complete LA Times review)
My Name Is Will: A Novel of Sex, Drugs, and Shakespeare by Jess Winfield, List price $23.99, 304 pages, Published by Twelve/Hachette Book Group USA, ISBN-10: 044650885, ISBN-13: 978-0446508858
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[...] Third Series. Jess Winfield, the co-founder of the Reduced Shakespeare Company, has published his debut novel. And Naxos Audiobooks released a CD recording of the Donmar Warehouse’s award winning production [...]