My Name Is Will: A Novel of Sex, Drugs, and Shakespeare by Jess Winfield
My Name Is Will is a double story with the likes of Donnie Darko. The first story is that of Willie Shakespeare Greenberg, a 1980’s grad student who’s developing a hastily conceived thesis following his belief that William Shakespeare was a closeted catholic. After being cut off by his father who believes him to be lazy and irresponsible, Willie agrees to deliver a giant Mushroom to an avid collector in a renaissance fair, and consequently places himself in the middle of the Reagan War on drugs, all the while juggling his love life and his steamy affair with his sexy thesis advisor, Dashka.
The Bard joins in, in the year 1582, the year he turned 18.  He is stuck teaching Latin in Stratford-upon-Avon and on his way to becoming the playwright that he is, while his friend have gone off to further their careers, studying for either the priesthood in Rome or France or the arts and letters at Cambridge or Oxford.  It looks like it can’t get much worse until he knocks up a farmer’s daughter, is forced to marry her and is commissioned to deliver a catholic relic in the midst of Elizabethan rule.
The two Wills meet briefly on the verge of their individual breakthroughs during the collision of “two sacraments”. For Willie, it’s a giant pear sized mushroom, and for the Bard it’s a communion wafer.
 Written with bucketfuls of irreverence, wit and humour and a large knowledge of Shakespeare by its Shakespeare obsessed writer, this book is fresh and energetic. It made me laugh out loud quite a few times, and not just because I only understood half of the dialogue of The Shakespeare and his friends.