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

New year, new class.

The novel I decided to open this class with is the first novel by Jess Winfield, one of the founding members of The Reduced Shakespeare Company. If you have not seen the three man troop’s witty, hilarious, and politically incorrect reduction of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, do yourself a favor and youtube it.

My Name is Will: A Novel of Sex, Drugs, and Shakespeare is, like its title proclaims, about sex, drugs, and Shakespeare. The novel is a tale of two Wills – master’s student Willie Shakespeare Greenberg and future bard William Shakespeare. Willie Greenberg is BSing his way through his MA in Shakespeare Studies. Instead of studying, he spends most of his time doing drugs or girls. William Shakespeare is teaching Latin in his hometown and discovering his loyalties to the Catholic Church.

One of the neat aspects of this novel is the different chapters. Every chapter alternates between Willie and Will, with the modern day chapters being prefaced by a quote from Shakespeare’s works and the historical chapters prefaced with excerpts from Willie’s thesis, which evolves as the novel progresses.

There are a couple of reasons I wanted to start out with My Name is Will rather than a more traditional teen book. First, the novel straddles the divide between young adult (YA) literature and adult literature. The classification of a book as YA requires either a teenage main character (or main characters) or a subject/storyline that appeals to young adults in some manner. My Name is Will contains two protagonists – one who is eighteen and one who is in his mid-twenties. It does contain a teenage protagonist, William Shakespeare, but half of the story revolves around a Master’s Student. A compelling argument could be made either for or against the inclusion of My Name is Will in the YA genre. For this class, I have decided to include it.

The second reason I picked this novel to begin this class is because it introduces one of the common motifs I believe I will find throughout this course, namely the parallelism between the life and works of William Shakespeare and the lives of teenagers in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. Here, the parallels permeate the novel. The most obvious one is between the two protagonists: William Shakespeare (Will) and William Shakespeare Greenberg (Willie). While the two lead very separate and different lives, they are both undertaking the search for identity and purpose in their lives. In addition, a connection is drawn between the persecution of Catholics under Elizabeth I and the war on drugs initiated under President Ronald Reagan. The parallel is impossible to miss, as Winfield sets up the chapters to correlate the two “injustices;” as Will is racked for information in Sir Lucy’s basement, Willie imagines himself under the bright lights of drug interrogation. The connection is furthered when religion/spirituality and drugs come into direct contact, as Will is given a potion by the local witch that takes him on a religious experience right to the steps of Willie’s renaissance faire. Furthermore when the two storylines converge, Will has just taken the wafer of communion at his wedding and Willie has just consumed an enormous magic mushroom. In the chapter, the two Wills are indistinguishable as their enemies finally descend upon them. The setting and supporting characters jump back and forth between the two time periods and the sentences begin to ramble on as period and other punctuation are abandoned creating one giant LSD trip on paper. The tales do split again, but for one chapter they are united in a cacophony of drugs and religion.

Besides drugs, there are two other forces that are linked in both time periods: sex and words. Sex, it seems, is universal, and horny young men are also. Both Will and Willie have pregnancy scares; Will’s forces him into a shotgun wedding with Anne Hathaway, Willie’s is aborted before he is even aware of the pregnancy. Both men conduct sexual affairs that are grounded in their ability to manipulate words. Will’s rewriting of Ovid leads to his encounter with Rosaline, while Willie and Dashka copulate on a bus while Willie explains his thesis on Shakespeare. I will be keeping an eye out for a continuation or rejection of this theme in the rest of the literature.

Next up: The Shakespeare Stealer by Gary Blackwood.