The riddle of Shakespeare’s genius must remain unsolved, for now at least, after Boris Johnson’s publisher said on Wednesday morning that the new prime minister’s “simple and readable” book exploring the “true British icon” had been indefinitely delayed after his victory in the Conservative leadership vote.
Johnson’s biography, Shakespeare: The Riddle of Genius, had originally been scheduled for October 2016, but this was postponed. In April this year, publisher Hodder & Stoughton said the book had been scheduled for April 2020, but admitted it was not yet finished.
On Wednesday, the day after Johnson’s win over Jeremy Hunt to become party leader and hence prime minister, the publisher said that it has no plans to publish Boris’s tome “for the foreseeable future”.
Johnson, who is also the author of a bestselling biography of Churchill, and a novel, Seventy-two Virgins, dubbed “sexist, racist [and] fundamentally undiplomatic” by Mark Lawson, had hinted at this himself during Conservative party hustings, saying that “there’s no doubt at all that, er, being a full-time politician means I won’t be able, for instance, to rapidly complete a book on Shakespeare that I have in preparation”.
Hodder had promised that the book would see Johnson “explain Shakespeare’s genius in a simple and readable way; in a way that gets to grips with what is really going on, what the characters are up to, what the point of it all is; and in a way that sets the man simply and intelligibly in the context of his time”.
