WILL: 1. a legal document, and 2. diminutive of William, as in William Shakespeare, the motor-mouth narrator of this bawdy, rumbustious novel by Christopher Rush. On his deathbed the Bard of Avon is apportioning his worldly goods and regaling his lawyer with the mise-en-scenes and dramatis personae of a life public and private, high and low. Here is the confessional final bow for a faithless husband, a lousy father, a sexual adventurer, a country boy reborn as a city swell, a man of property and encroaching sorrows-- and a compulsive quoter of his own best lines. Rush succeeds in this audacious attempt to usurp the very voice of Shakespeare, not the playwright or the poet but the man himself in the daily midst of his libidinous striving into the heart of renaissance London. Who was he at home? Pull a chair up to the bedside and eavesdrop on... WILL.
