Willie Shakespeare Greenberg is not living up to his name. It's 1986, and instead of finishing his thesis on the Bard, this grad student is saying "yes" to drugs, bedding coeds, and delivering a giant psychedelic mushroom to a mysterious collector. Meanwhile (or rather, back in 1582), would-be playwright William Shakespeare is an eighteen-year-old Latin teacher whose world is turned upside down when a stranger entrusts him with a sacred relic from Rome, drawing him into an underground network of Catholic dissidents.