Zounds! S’blood! BoJo’s Bard biog shuffles off this mortal coil! On Monday it was announced that Boris Johnson’s widely anticipated biography of Shakespeare is on ice, indefinitely. Originally scheduled for release this October – rather late for the 400th anniversary of the playwright’s death back in April – Shakespeare: The Riddle of Genius “will not be published for the foreseeable future”, says its publisher, Hodder & Stoughton. Regrettably for those inclined to schadenfreude, they declined to confirm reports that Johnson will be forced to pay back his advance. Et tu, Boris, et cetera.
Among professional Shakespeareans – think the conspirators in Julius Caesar, only with sharper daggers – there has been a mixture of glee and remorse. On the one hand, many thought the biography wasn’t likely to be very good. On the other, everyone would have had a great deal of fun saying so. Even before the announcement, speculation was rife that not a word had actually been written, and that several prominent academics had been begged for last-minute assistance. Hodder won’t be drawn on these rumours, either.
The fact that Shakespeare should be yet another casualty of Brexit seems mournfully appropriate. Britain’s national poet he may be, but – as the scholar Michael Dobson remarked in a talk at the British Council in Paris – the playwright was un vrai Européen. Not only are most of his scripts set in mainland Europe, particularly Italy (Venice, Verona, Padua, Sicily), but many are drawn from French and Italian sources, some of which he appears to have read in the original languages. Ben Jonson’s suggestion that his colleague had but “small Latine and lesse Greeke” may have been accurate, but Shakespeare clearly knew enough French to write much of a scene in Henry V in the language, poking gentle fun at Henry’s inability to master the tongue while wooing Princess Catherine of Valois. It’s also likely that he was on nodding terms with the great Italian translator John Florio, and from around 1602 he lodged with a French immigrant family, the Mountjoys, in Bishopsgate.
In 2014 Dobson and others visited Brussels, on a mission to have Shakespeare crowned European laureate – a fitting tribute to a writer whose works unite so many worlds. That project, too, seems to be on ice.
• Andrew Dickson’s Worlds Elsewhere: Journeys Around Shakespeare’s Globe is published by Vintage.
