My Name is Will, A Novel of Sex, Drugs, and Shakespeare

I read a review of this book about a year ago and it peaked my interest then but I didn't go out of my way to pick the book up. I just figured, "eh, if/when I see it, I'll pick it up." I wish I would have gotten it last year. This book is smart, funny, witty and not for everyone. There is sex, there is drug use and there is Shakespeare. The main character is William "Willie" Shakespeare Greenberg, a Jewish kid in the masters program as UC Santa Cruz, who has decided that his masters thesis is going to be about how the original William Shakespeare was a closeted Catholic and how that influenced his writing and how there may have been hidden codes in this plays and sonnets to other hidden Catholics in Elizabethan England. Willie has been cut off by his dad and needs some fast cash so he agrees to be a drug runner, ending up at a Renaissance Faire. Interspersed in Willie's story, is the parallel story of an 18yr old William Shakespeare before his shot-gun marriage to Anne Hathaway, his own experiences with hallucinatory substances and run-ins with the law. I would read this again and tell everybody else to read it, but only the people who I thought would be able to handle it, like I said, it's a SMART book, not for the ding-dongs out there.