With Pippa Middleton yet to complete her commentary on Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, Hodder & Stoughton settled upon Boris Johnson as the only living author qualified to complete a new Shakespeare biography in time for the 400th anniversary of the playwright’s death, in 2016. These leaked extracts may reassure scholars who fear that Johnson’s Shakespeare can never approach the heights of his The Churchill Factor, also written, it is said, in the first half of a two-week skiing holiday.
1. See, what a grace was seated on this brow
Aha, I am thinking, as I stand at last in William Shakespeare’s old schoolroom. So this is how he did it!
Leaving the teeming city behind me, I, Boris Johnson, have travelled to Stratford-upon-Avon to see the place where the prodigy learned his ABC. Help! The Stygian gloom makes the BBC’s Wolf Hall look like an eyebrow-threading booth in one of London’s teeming Westfield Centres.
Reverently, I peer at a desk identical to the one where, in his trademark crumpled doublet, wilting ruff and wrinkled hose, the future world’s top author would reluctantly bend his unruly blond bonce over classical texts and dream of making it big.
I think Shakespeare’s “whining schoolboy” proves, thank goodness, that our embryonic bard was no girly swot. But an effortless mastery of the classics would help make this ambitious kid not just the biggest name in theatre, but, I have always thought, the closest Elizabethan England ever got to a top-notch political columnist. No wonder inferior phrase-makers, like the moon-faced Ben Jonson, flapped about like incontinently jealous codfish.
For the modern equivalent, we might think of Shakespeare as a polymathic Telegraph contributor who fits cameos on Have I Got News For You around visionary political leadership, a commanding place at the GQ Man of the Year awards and a prodigious and staggeringly profitable literary output. Today, his kind of greatness would earn him betrayal by his chippier friends on top of the poisoned darts aimed by puny Corbynistas sentenced to toil, like resentful dwarves, at the Guardian’s festering coalface.
Let us imagine, then, the Shakespeare bashers hurling their petty insults as our dashing classicist canters through London’s Cheapside with the large-breasted Dark Lady sinuously riding pillion. “A combination and a form indeed,” as the admittedly barmy Hamlet put it, “where every god did seem to set his seal.”
People suffered from agonising Shakespeare envy, plain and simple, and not just because said chap was stupendously brainy with a muscular frame that bewitched men and women alike. I would assert without fear of contradiction that Shakespeare was also a sublime playwright who used drama to write timeless political columns whose insights defined a nation.
Shakespeare’s routinely misunderstood Julius Caesar shows what can happen when a terrifically smug show-off gets too big for his boots. But only the dimmest of Westminster plodders would ignore Caesar’s warning about creeps on the 5:2 diet, and his hint: “Let me have men around me that are fat.”
In Henry IV parts one and two, our guy asserts what should by now be obvious: that any leader who did not spend his formative years smashing up chairs and plotting to beat people up should not be touched with a squillion-foot barge pole.
So I say: stuff everyone who doesn’t rate Shakespeare. They are idiots who do not recognise a thoroughgoing top genius when he comes along and biffs them on the conk.
2. Sigh no more, ladies
“Hurry up, I have come all the way from London,” I tell my useless Stratford guides. Finally I find it. One of those humble, half-wattled dwellings of the Elizabethans. A few people shout: “Oi, Boris.” I tell them to fuck off and die. Then I, Boris Johnson, lean down to read the sign: Anne Hathaway’s Cottage. Crikey. I am here on a mission, to try to answer the important question about any famous person. Is he like me?
In Shakespeare’s case, the question is critical, because so little has been written about him. That is why I need at least two weeks to study his essential nature. So what was he like? The case against him is that as well as being the greatest man who ever lived, Shakespeare was a bit of a chump where the fairer sex is concerned.
I am no paid-up scholar but as I duck beneath heavy Tudor beams I can easily picture la belle Hathaway, all scented, wobbly-bosomed litheness, waiting vainly for her ambitious bedmate to return from London. The great city, Shakespeare could have told you, was already on its way to becoming one of the world’s most important hubs for creative, culture and media industries.
The sonnets show that Anne’s dangerously attractive husband sometimes showed pity on the weepy females who panted at his stage door like wet otters.
And what is worse, argue his ghastly politically correct critics, than being a callous, sleazy shag-bandit?
But evidence confirms that Shakespeare was a benevolent family man with the bad luck to be both irresistible and tender-hearted. I wonder how it must have felt for him, never getting a moment’s peace from women who wanted to tear off his roomy Elizabethan boxers?
In his much misunderstood column on fairyland, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare explores the plight of generous lovers persecuted by loopy females. Don’t we all know someone like Helena, who runs about screaming: “I am your spaniel”? As ever, Shakespeare got it all absolutely 100% right.
3. All the world’s a stage
If you are looking for the truth about Shakespeare, then come with me, Boris Johnson, to a small stage in London. Let us tiptoe gratefully out of PMQs, into the teeming metropolis whose energy and diversity, thanks to its exemplary leadership, is second to none.
Every time I climb on to the BorisGlobe’s simple wooden platform – pow – I experience that familiar sizzle in the old Johnson synapses. Here stood a man who outwrote and outclassed every rival – but was denied due recognition in his lifetime. That, pal, is real tragedy.
Yes, Shakespeare must have reasoned, high above the groundlings, my work is acclaimed. Yes, draymen aside, I am universally recognised and loved. I bought a whopping house before prices went through the roof, all credit to London’s trickle-down impact on the Stratford economy.
But how many of these effusive pygmies – the godlike genius must have asked himself, with a flash of understandable resentment – realise they are in the presence of a bona-fide phenomenon, England’s own Homer. Will my contribution – the Bard continued – only be understood 400 years down the line, when Hodder finally appoints a biographer with the gifts to comprehend the vastness of my achievement?
Shakespeare will have prayed like mad that such a thing would never happen again.
