By The Landlord
“He was the man who of all modern, and perhaps ancient poets, had the largest and most comprehensive soul. But Shakespeare’s magic could not copied be; Within that circle none durst walk but he. He was naturally learned; he needed not the spectacles of books to read nature. He looked inwards, and found her there.” – John Dryden, Essay of Dramatic Poesy
“And one wild Shakespeare, following Nature’s lights,
Is worth whole planets, filled with Stagyrites.” – Thomas More
“He breathed upon dead bodies and brought them into life. Nor sequent centuries could hit Orbit and sum of Shakespeare’s wit.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Brush up your Shakespeare
Start quoting him now
Brush up your Shakespeare
And the women you will wow.” – Cole Porter
“Now we sit through Shakespeare in order to recognise the quotations.” – Orson Welles
"I would give all my fame for a pot of ale, and safety.” – Shakespeare, Henry V
“Why, this is a more exquisite song than the other …” – Shakespeare, Othello
Friends, visitors, music lovers. Hail well met. Lend me not your ears, nor years, but a few brief moments of your flickering time, your walking shadow, as we, mere players, strut upon this particular stage, this prism of ideas, this sceptred isle, this place of spinning solace and smiles, of knowledge and music shared, this other Eden, demi-paradise, this Song Bar. Hell is empty and all the devils are here! This week is a daunting prospect – to write about the greatest of writers, to briefly project the soul of the man who captured a thousands of souls, enraptured millions, and who in many ways has remained a mystery, but in the formation of a phrase, could reflect all human nature as ‘twere some raindrop refracting the whole light of the world. Soaring romance to visceral violence, heart-twisting love to lingering loss, dread and doubt to desperation, ferocity, fear and filthy fumbling, scorched jealousy to joy and jubilation, gory death to grave-dug despair, the human experience portrayed in all its irony, authority, idiocy, agony and ecstasy.
And with a roaring fire and full barrels, I fling open the Bar door wide to the work of the Bard, how his words in turn have influenced and been quoted in the form of song lyrics - not his own songs of course, but those of any songwriters since, whether knowingly, wittily or otherwise on purpose, or indeed subconsciously, unwittingly or by accident. That could be characters’ names or narrative twists, but most of all in terms of quoted phrases. Shakespeare’s influence is so incalculably enormous on the way we talk, write and think, it is inconceivable to imagine what way the the world might have turned had he not existed. It is like trying to imagine pop music without the random emergence of Chuck Berry, Little Richard, The Beatles or Kraftwerk, although on a scale impossible to imagine.
William Shakespeare was a fortunate accident, like many great creations. As Lady Macbeth says: “Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them." The son of a Snitterfield glove maker John Shakespeare, and a farmer’s daughter Mary Arden, the third of eight children, he was born probably on 23 April 1564, certainly baptised on 26 April, and died on 23 April 1616. Yet he could easily have never survived the ongoing Great Plague, especially as an infant, and later on and with a particularly severe outbreak in 1592 that his sisters and son did not survive.
Just when he was reaching great success with his history plays at the London Globe, theatres were forced to be closed for two years. It was then, in that lockdown period when public events were impossible (hmm, could that really happen again in the 2020s?) he turned his playwriting to long-form poetry, wrote Venus and Adonis, which was his first work printed and published, an erotic work that reached a mass audience. The sonnets were also a form which allowed him to expand and explore more intimate ideas. As William Wordsworth put it: "With this key, Shakespeare unlocked his heart."
Yet writing on paper wasn’t really so much the greatest thing about the Bard. We say Shakespeare, but there are there are more than 80 variations recorded for the spelling of his name. In the few original surviving signatures, he various spelt his name “Willm Shaksp,” “William Shakespe,” “Wm Shakspe,” “William Shakspere,” ”Willm Shakspere,” and “William Shakspeare”. William Shakespeare, never actually written down by him, is a more coherent version that was gradually adopted by publishers and readers. And after all, William Shakespeare is an anagram of “I am a weakish speller”.
The National Portrait Gallery’s Chandos painting, attributed to John Taylor between 1600-1610 may be the Bard’s most accurate likeness
I personally find great encouragement in that, because I was terrible at spelling as a child, writing passionately but only phonetically, enjoying the sounds of words more than accuracy of letters. But Shakespeare, as a playwright was chiefly a writer of the oral and performance tradition, and perhaps that is why, with such a keen ear, his phrases have such resonance with songwriters.
“First, rehearse your song by rote
To each word a warbling note:
Hand in hand, with fairy grace,
Will we sing, and bless this place.” - Titania, A Midsummer Night's Dream
Shakespeare’s language revolutionised English in all kinds of ways. He was genius of linguistic chemistry, mixing and matching phrases, conjoining words, changing nouns into verbs, verbs to adjectives, adding prefixes and suffixes, sourcing from Latin to French, slang and regional accent, breaking all the rules to create new elements. And so he made hundreds of new words never written or used before, most of which now seem astonishingly modern, we mostly use, abuse, amend, and take for granted. For example, more than four centuries ahead of Facebook, he created this noun into a verb:
“And what so poor a man as Hamlet is
May do, to express his love and friending to you.”
Laurence Olivier and old friend Yorick …
Maxine Peake as Hamlet
And so with a deep breath, here are just a few of his new words:
addiction to amazement, anchovy to auspicious, barefaced to baseless, bedroom to bloodstained and bloodsucker, braggart to buzzer, catlike to characterless, control to compact, coppernose to courtship, Dalmation to dauntless, dewtrop to dextrous, disgraceful to distasteful, employer to eyedrop, fathomless to fixture, footfall to foppish, gallantry to glow, green-eyed to grime, hobnail to hunchback, impartial to inauspicious, investment to invulnerable, jaded to juiced, kickie-wickie to kitchen wench, lament to laughable, lonely to lustrous, madcap to majestic, mimic to multitudinous, mountaineer to motionless, neglect to nimble-footed, obscene to Olympian, pageantry to pebbled, pendulous to pignut, priceless to puppy-dog, radiance to rascally, refractory to revolting, sanctimonious to savage, silliness to skim milk, stealthy to suffocating, unsolicited to upstairs, useful and useless, varied to vulnerable, watchdog to worn out, yelping to zany.
Go to see any Shakespeare play, and it is astonishing how many phrases are so familiar in in our everyday speech, and perhaps this is where this week’s influence on song is key. A few to begin with: So now the game is afoot, will there by fair play, with rhyme or reason? Might it be too much of a good thing? Shall we play to our heart’s content? Will it leave us in stitches, or make our hair stand on end. Shall songs come in the twinkling of an eye, in high time, at one fell swoop, by night owl, or will it take forever and a day? Come what may. And while brevity is the soul of wit, songs can be as merry as the day is long. Truth will out, but will it be a foregone conclusion? The be all and end all? No doubt ’twill be such stuff as dreams are made on. Thereby hangs a tale.
Winter of discontent made glorious summer: Antony Sher as Richard III
There are thousands more of course, Shakespeare a creator of cliches, only because they resonate and are so universally copied. There are plenty of online resources to find these, but I find one of the best is https://www.opensourceshakespeare.org/, where a word or phrase search unearths countless gems. While the working of vocabulary of the average educated person may be around 10,000 words, Shakespeare used an extraordinary 31,534 different words in his complete works, and scholars estimate that he used
Here then, decorating our premises, for your inspiration are a few more phrases that capture Shakespeare’s genius of brevity and profundity that may well crop up some songs. There are so many more, but each is a story in itself, summoning ideas, images, imagination:
“We know what we are, but know not what we may be.” – Hamlet
"Is love a tender thing? It is too rough, too rude, too boisterous, and it pricks like thorn.” – Romeo and Juliet
"There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” – Hamlet
“Action is eloquence.” – Coriolanus
“So full of artless jealousy is guilt,
It spills itself in fearing to be spilt.” –Hamlet
“The wheel is come full circle: I am here.” – King Lear
"You are not worth the dust which the rude wind blows in your face." – King Lear
"Lord, what fools these mortals be.” – A Midsummer Night's Dream
"Some rise by sin, and some by virtue fall.” – Measure for Measure
“Yet do I fear thy nature,
It is too full o' th' milk of human kindness
To catch the nearest way” – Macbeth
"This above all: to thine ownself be true.
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.” – Hamlet
"I burn, I pine, I perish.” – The Taming of the Shrew
"Time shall unfold what plighted cunning hides:
Who cover faults, at last shame them derides.” – King Lear
"They have been at a great feast of languages, and stol'n the scraps.” – Love’s Labor's Lost
“I do desire we may be better strangers.” – As You Like It
"Come, let's away to prison;
We two alone will sing like birds i' the cage.” – Hamlet
Zulu production of Macbeth at the Globe Theatre
While there are many clearly literary songwriters out there, from Elvis Costello to Billy Bragg, Morrissey to Mark Knopfler, Arctic Monkeys to Elbow and more who knowingly quote the Bard, it would also be good to garner the unwitting quoters, or the less obvious or more rarely referenced ones, such as the fast flowing phrases in hip hop, perhaps from the likes of MF Doom to Busdriver, Shakespeare rolled out from the literary to the language of the street. But, as ever, that is all down to you, dear players.
And so then, over to this head that wears a crown, the guest guru’s crown that is, though I doubt that it is uneasily worn, because this week it is carried by the marvellous magicman! Deadline for nominations is this coming Monday at 11pm UK time, for playlists published on Wednesday.
And so then, once more unto the breach dear friends, screw your courage to the sticking place, until, with bated breath, the game is up and all’s well that ends well.
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