Shakespeare and his Johnson
After the success of his book on Sir Winston Churchill, no me neither, the PM has apparently, been writing a book on William Shakespeare. Since it is about whether the bard is all he’s cracked up to be, it will doubtless be a very short book. But even so as a hard working and relentlessly accurate author (who thought the Germans captured Stalingrad) the PM is taking his time over the book; he has the advance money but seems desperately to need the final payments of several hundred thousand pounds.
Like Winston Churchill our current PM lives well beyond his means and tries to make ends meet by writing for newspapers and publishers. Like Sir Winston his fame means he earns far more than other hacks, although so far no one has suggested that Mr Johnson is worthy of the Nobel Prize for Literature. And even the Stakhanovite Sir Winston seems to have stopped churning out the volumes while he dealt with a small matter of the Second World War.
Doubtless the issue will be fudged, the denials strongly worded and the key point impossible to prove. But if your live long ambition is to be king of the world, you might think when you got there you’d concentrate and work hard at the job.
Did William Shakespeare write a play about a man of endless ambition who got to the top of the greasy pole but had no idea what to do when he got there, except complain about the terrible state of the Royal coffers and the cost of nannies?
And if so was it a comedy or a tragedy?
https://jonty.substack.com/