A Novel of Sex, medicine, and Shakespeare.

Gage Rich

20 July 2008

How best to scribble a recent novel about Shakespeare that even Shakespeare would like? Make him a youthful, horny and smart women person with a cause to suffer and enemies to battle. Give him plenty of clever jokes to announce, a sophisticated family life and a good group of pals. Ultimately, compare and contrast him with a graduate student in 1980s California who, also named Shakespeare, is likewise concentrated on randy escapades, sidetracked by familial facts and lost in a sector of words. He's a college teacher in his hometown of Stratford who likes drinking ale with his pals to Latin, and wooing girls to virtually everything else. His pa is the city drunk, and visitors to the family's home are greeted by a 10-foot rubbish pile outside the front doorway. His mother's family, the Ardens, were once respected, but since the Queen converted all of Britain to Protestantism, the Ardens, as Catholics, have started to be afraid of persecution. When William, never one to imagine too much about faith, learns more about his very own family's past and their current struggle to maintain their religion, he must decide where his devotion lies.

Does he risk life and limb for the Roman Church, or does he accept the new faith? His soul-searching is advanced, however, by his libido, which keeps getting him into difficulty. He's got an obscure idea the original Shakespeare was Catholic, but he's small to go on. His research is advanced not only by his libido but by his preference for getting high over doing any real work.

His pop is cutting him off financially, and so he agrees to supply some medicine to a Renaissance Faire to make some fast money.

But the trip ends up often a disaster thanks to the affections of not 2 but 3 ladies, the DEA and an enormous wizardry mushroom. The one thing it appears that may save them both is theater, if they decide to channel their intellect and energy in that positive direction. Both times were ones of quick social and political change, and both youthful men embody lots of the spirit, and conflict, of their times. This is the person long before he had been The Bard but was still, according to Winfield, a wise-cracking, rebellious teen who, deep down, longed to do the decent thing. He plays with words and captures the sense of the times and places he's setting the action in, yet the themes remain undying.