"Howl, Howl, Howl, Howl, Howl!"

[Boris] Johnson, 58, has long been struggling to write a biography of William Shakespeare, missing several deadlines after securing a lucrative publishing advance in 2015.

He may have been concentrating on the manuscript during his recent self-imposed leisure time, after announcing his imminent departure in July and quitting in September.

For much of the time since July, he has been on UK and foreign holidays -- reportedly cutting short a trip to the Caribbean on Friday to try to reclaim the crown in the Conservative party's latest leadership contest.

Following the resignation of Prime Minister Liz Truss, Johnson's supporters have urged him to resume a tenure that was abruptly curtailed by a cabinet uprising.

They appear motivated in part by a burning desire to halt Rishi Sunak, the former finance minister who was initially promoted by their Caesarean hero Johnson, but they accuse of then back-stabbing, Brutus-like.

Shakespeare's tragic heroes, such as King Lear and Macbeth, see the error of their ways too late, providing a redemptive coda to their doomed stories.

Johnson is not a tragic figure, Shakespearean or otherwise.  Lear isn't "redeemed" in Act V; he merely realizes, after the murder of Cordelia, that everything that has gone wrong since he divided the responsibility for his kingdom between his two daughters and exiled the third (Cordelia), is all his fault.  He isn't returned to the throne a better man; he dies of, effectively, a broken heart; of grief over his responsibility for his failures (which also led to the death of Cordelia).  It's a more painful and terrible an ending to a Shakespeare play than anything else in the canon.  Macbeth is haunted by guilt, but in the end no one laments his death; he's the villain, he deserves it.

Maybe Willy Loman, the 20th century revival of the "tragic hero," is redeemed in death.  But not even Hamlet is redeemed at the end of the play.  At most he's doomed from the moment his father's ghost appears, rather like poor Oedipus who was doomed before the action of "Oedipus Rex" started. Tragic heroes are never redeemed and restored.  They just accept responsibility for causing the events of the tragedy at the very end of the story.  Without that, it isn't a tragedy, just a series of unfortunate events.  Like history, for the most part.

I mean, if you're gonna make lame and inappropriate analogies, at least get the substance of the analogue right.  At best Johnson is Falstaffian, but without the charm.  Shakespeare never knew a Parliament with a powerful PM and a figurehead monarch. If he were alive and writing today he'd be quite brutal about Johnson; but he wouldn't invent a phony redemption story for him.

This will only be a tragedy if the nation accepts its responsibility for its part in these events.  Johnson will certainly never do that much.  He doesn't have the (tragic) character for it.