Bob Dylan & William Shakespeare Quotes

“In every decade, up to and including until Dylan’s last album, thus far, of self-penned material, 2012’s The Tempest, Shakespeare appears in Dylan’s songs. The Bard of Avon appears in parody, in allusion, in burlesque, as a touchstone, in quotes and intertextuality that ranges from a light touch to being central to a song’s meaning. The same is true of Dylan’s prose and film scripts and, with increasing frequency as the years have passed, Shakespeare has been used by Dylan, in interview, to offer revelatory insight into his own working practice.”
― Andrew Muir, Bob Dylan & William Shakespeare: The True Performing of It

“Vogel also quotes, almost straight, from As You Like It when he comments that “The whole world’s a stage.” Co-director Larry Charles talks about this on the DVD commentary track: “… ‘the whole world is a stage’ – quoting Shakespeare referring to the stage. It’s all play, playing with the reality; the Rastafarian janitor – was it real, was it not, was it a dream?”
― Andrew Muir, Bob Dylan & William Shakespeare: The True Performing of It

“Dylan looked to Hamlet for inspiration when editing Renaldo and Clara. One of three quotes Dylan wrote on the wall of the studio where he edited this film, came from the opening scene: “For this relief, much thanks, for ’tis bitter cold and I am sick at heart”.44 Dylan’s underrated film, Masked and Anonymous contains yet another trove of Shakespeare references in a film whose plot is reminscent of many of Shakespeare’s works: a ruler dying, a brutal succession, betrayal, political, familial and dynastic intrigue. With a mixed genre style and generic character parts such as mistress, soldier, drunk; as well as metaphorical names such as Bobby Cupid, Tom Friend and Pagan Lace and a plot of civil and familial turmoil, it is no surprise that Larry Charles described the film as “Shakespeare meets Cassavetes”.45 We also have a character named Prospero, and in the film script, at least, a Hotspur and a Blunt, plus that familiar pair from King Lear, Edgar and Edmund. Edmund here is also a son who is not a ‘full’ son and perhaps for similar reasons, power-crazed and driven to dominate. Edmund assumes control in Dylan’s film, in contrast to the play. Although, what he has control over seems to be built on extremely shaky ground.”
― Andrew Muir, Bob Dylan & William Shakespeare: The True Performing of It

“walking it’ to ‘came off it while riding it’. Whatever is the case, Dylan was undoubtedly recovering from the 1966 world tour that nearly killed him and probably would have, had he carried on with it, as originally scheduled. Instead, he was lying low in Woodstock and reading voraciously. Ginsberg says he took the following for Dylan to read: “a box full of books of all kinds. All the modern poets I knew. Some ancient poets like Sir Thomas Wyatt, Campion. Dickinson, Rimbaud, Lorca, Apollinaire, Blake, Whitman and so forth.” Although Ginsberg does not list Shakespeare among the ‘ancient poets’, I am inclined to think he was included in the ‘and so forth’, or at least that Dylan used some of his reading time re-acquainting himself with Shakespeare because we do know that Ginsberg was talking to Dylan about Shakespeare on the phone soon after this visit.35”
― Andrew Muir, Bob Dylan & William Shakespeare: The True Performing of It

“This trope is central to many a play by Shakespeare and to a number of central songs by Dylan. One immediately thinks of “you’ll find out when you reach the top you’re on the bottom” from ‘Idiot Wind’ which was to 1975 what ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ was to 1965. In turn that brings to mind: “She knows there’s no success like failure/And that failure’s no success at all”. ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ is more purely Learian, though, and irresistibly so in the quatrain: “Ah you never turned around to see the frowns On the jugglers and the clowns when they all did tricks for you You never understood that it ain’t no good You shouldn’t let other people get your kicks for you”
― Andrew Muir, Bob Dylan & William Shakespeare: The True Performing of It

“This trope is central to many a play by Shakespeare and to a number of central songs by Dylan. One immediately thinks of “you’ll find out when you reach the top you’re on the bottom” from ‘Idiot Wind’ which was to 1975 what ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ was to 1965.”
― Andrew Muir, Bob Dylan & William Shakespeare: The True Performing of It

“Everything from the simple “no” to the terrors of ‘the void’ of Sartrean “nothingness” is evoked. These themes and feelings, and key words, echo throughout a particular set of Dylan songs from the sprawling collection collectively known as The Basement Tapes. ‘Nothing Was Delivered’, ‘You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere’, ‘I’m Not There’, ‘Too Much of Nothing’ and other titles, reflect that nothingness/emptiness is a major, recurring theme in these songs. Similar concerns to King Lear are embedded in many songs: “life is brief”, or ‘Goin To Acapulco’s’, “It’s a wicked life but what the hell/Everybody’s got to eat/And I’m just the same as anyone else/When it comes to scratchin’ for my meat”’ And even in that modern nursery rhyme,32 ‘Quinn The Eskimo (The Mighty Quinn)’ where the titular character, Godot-like, is also not there.33”
― Andrew Muir, Bob Dylan & William Shakespeare: The True Performing of It

“It is striking that our feelings about the song are so divergent despite noting the same points. Having written extensively on the primacy of performance, I am more than open to the claim that how a song sounds and makes you feel should be key. Yet, for me, Dylan’s achievement is in deliberately cloaking the bitter intent of the words in ‘sugar-coated rhymes’. After all, sometimes, as he warns us, “Satan comes as a man of peace”, or one can “look like the innocent flower,/But be the serpent under’t”, as Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth puts it in Macbeth Act V scene i.28”
― Andrew Muir, Bob Dylan & William Shakespeare: The True Performing of It

“also tracked down and quotes, in the opening minute or so, the ‘looking/cooking’ couplet with which Dylan kicks off his song. As Warmuth writes: “The radio documentary “Shakespeare in American Life” includes an episode by Richard Paul on the African-American experience with Shakespeare called “Shakespeare In Black and White.” It asks the question “Who ‘owns’ Shakespeare?” and Paul begins his piece by contrasting a straight reading of Othello with actors doing the very same lines from Othello: a Burlesque that Dylan uses in “Love and Theft.”24 This is a rewarding listen and is of relevance to both Dylan and Shakespeare scholars as well as to anyone interested in the social history of the United States.”
― Andrew Muir, Bob Dylan & William Shakespeare: The True Performing of It

“The radio documentary “Shakespeare in American Life” includes an episode by Richard Paul on the African-American experience with Shakespeare called “Shakespeare In Black and White.” It asks the question “Who ‘owns’ Shakespeare?” and Paul begins his piece by contrasting a straight reading of Othello with actors doing the very same lines from Othello: a Burlesque that Dylan uses in “Love and Theft.”24 This is a rewarding listen and is of relevance to both Dylan and Shakespeare scholars as well as to anyone interested in the social history of the United States.”
― Andrew Muir, Bob Dylan & William Shakespeare: The True Performing of It

“The first thing to note is how apt an image ‘lifelessness’ is in terms of Dylan’s songs of the period. Lifelessness being a sin perfectly chimes with Dylan’s writing at the time. The hip, visionary Dylan was constantly contrasting the vibrant young with the stagnant and decaying old, and the vital against the lifeless. “He not being busy born, is busy dying.” sang Bob in ‘It’s Alright Ma, (I’m Only Bleeding’)’ in perhaps the most famous of these assertions. It is not, however, a fair depiction of Ophelia as she appears in the play. The Ophelia in Dylan’s song is portrayed as a wrongdoer rather than the victim she is in Hamlet.”
― Andrew Muir, Bob Dylan & William Shakespeare: The True Performing of It

“As were images of Shakespeare’s times. An eye-witness to Dylan in Australia that same year, remembered that it “was amazing to watch him work on a song. He would have the poetry of it worked out in his head, and he would say to Robbie [Robertson, guitar player]: ‘…just imagine this cat who is very Elizabethan, with garters and a long shepherd’s horn and he’s coming over the hill with the sun behind him. That’s the sound I want.’”14”
― Andrew Muir, Bob Dylan & William Shakespeare: The True Performing of It

“Moreover, the dramatist himself features in ‘Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again’, from 1966’s Blonde on Blonde: Well, Shakespeare, he’s in the alley With his pointed shoes and his bells However, nothing of significant import can be read into this. Shakespeare, dressed much like one of the court jesters from his plays, appears as just yet another persona to join a whole range of cultural and historical names that populate the phantasmagoria of Dylan’s mid-sixties lyrics: Ma Rainey, Einstein, Robin Hood, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and so on. Nonetheless, along with other interview and private comments, it does show that the Bard was on his mind.”
― Andrew Muir, Bob Dylan & William Shakespeare: The True Performing of It

“In the Dylan song11, the second and fourth lines are again repeated in each verse: Bad news, bad news came to me where I sleep Turn, turn, turn again Sayin’ one of your friends is in trouble deep Turn, turn to the rain and the wind And again the only stanza to deviate from that is the final one. The Shakespeare song has been adapted and appropriated so many times over the centuries, that this parallel between the two bards, striking as it is, is not necessarily a direct one.”
― Andrew Muir, Bob Dylan & William Shakespeare: The True Performing of It

“Dylan sings a potential Hamlet reference on ‘Forgetful Heart’, The door has closed forevermore, perhaps referring to Hamlet’s line: “Let the doors be shut upon him that he may play the fool nowhere but in’s own house.” This occurs in Act III Scene I, just after the “get thee to a nunnery” outburst. Dylan source sleuth, Scott Warmuth, pointed out the Hamlet allusions in the closing song from the same album. This was a song to which I had paid insufficient attention, having thought it a mere formulaic, throwaway ‘list song’.”
― Andrew Muir, Bob Dylan & William Shakespeare: The True Performing of It

“Likewise, I would find it astonishing if Dylan sang ‘Seven Curses’ as an acknowledgement of Shakespeare’s play concerning the same theme, Measure for Measure. It almost certainly came to Dylan in the form of a song popular on the folk circuit he was part of at the time he wrote his own version. It is a very old tale, and was the plot behind songs, poems and plays long before Shakespeare, far less Dylan, was born. This is not to say that it is not enlightening to consider the two together.”
― Andrew Muir, Bob Dylan & William Shakespeare: The True Performing of It

“Almost inevitably, all natural phrases of common origin soon begin to take on the hue of a deliberate allusion, if you wish it to do so. However, that way madness lies and one gets excited by the possibility of the line, “And the poet and the painter far behind his rightful time”7 in ‘Chimes of Freedom’ referring to the poet and the painter in Timon of Athens. Still, this reverberation demonstrates how it is impossible not to make such direct connections at times, especially when something chimes so well in your mind.”
― Andrew Muir, Bob Dylan & William Shakespeare: The True Performing of It

“have written before on ‘Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright’5 and pointed out a similarity of use of the word ‘light’ with a celebrated line from Othello. It occurs in a verse which is of particular interest as it changes in the different Dylan versions we have of the song. Dylan sings the following lines in the version from The Gaslight Tapes 1962: Well, it ain’t no use in turnin’ on your lights, babe Lights I never knowed And it ain’t no use in burnin’ your lamp, babe I’m on the dark side of the road. While on the later Freewheelin’ album version, we hear, in addition to slight improvements to the first two lines, the stanza concluding with: An’ it ain’t no use in turnin’ on your light, babe I’m on the dark side of the road By changing the third line, Dylan makes this verse consistent with all the others in the song, where the third line repeats the first. In the first version, the “burning” image is redolent of ashes, of ‘burning out’ and interestingly, of ‘burning your bridges’ in addition to its primary meaning of ‘shining’ which puts the lamp in opposition to the dark. “Turning on your light” in the Freewheelin’ version suggests something much more forceful and active, and Dylan has changed the word from the plural in both the first and (now) third lines. The phrase “turning on your lights” simply suggests lighting up her home to make it a welcome place for the singer in contrast to the ‘dark side of the road’. “Turning on your light” is much more personal. It reminds you of the phrase ‘to hold a torch for someone’, and has an intimate appeal, though it is a forlorn one in this case. The light here is now both a physical thing, and also the woman’s inner being. The song’s line now shares the same two meanings of light that we hear in Othello’s chilling statement as he murders Desdemona: Put out the light, and then put out the light.6”
― Andrew Muir, Bob Dylan & William Shakespeare: The True Performing of It

“The connections to Shakespeare’s writing throughout Dylan’s art, in various fields, range therefore from the coincidence of shared culture and vocabulary through the far-fetched and the speculative all the way to reasonably reliable and firmly certain. These links are numerous, as you would expect from someone who declares that: “I’ve been trying for years to come up with songs that have the feeling of a Shakespearean drama, so I’m always starting with that.”4”
― Andrew Muir, Bob Dylan & William Shakespeare: The True Performing of It

“Kill me dead” is a tautology that worries some critics, but Dylan, before writing his own version, sang it early (and later) in his career as part of ‘Cocaine Blues’. It appears straight, as those three words, in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus and in variants elsewhere, most notably, given Dylan’s frequent recourse to that seminal play, in Hamlet.1 We will be looking at the language of Dylan’s Tempest in detail in the final chapter, but it is fitting here to quote one of Anne Margaret Daniel’s notes on ‘Early Roman Kings’: “That ‘Gonna shake ’em all down’ sounds contemporary, or at least twentieth century; automatically, we associate shakedown with the Grateful Dead, yet, it too is Shakespeare’s. Merriam-Webster lists its first use in 1859, but Shakespeare riffed on it in Coriolanus.”
― Andrew Muir, Bob Dylan & William Shakespeare: The True Performing of It

“Shakespeare references, from the passing allusion, embedded quotation, or resonant echo occur throughout Dylan’s lyrics, prose and film scripts. Prior to looking at these, it is worth reiterating that Shakespeare and Dylan have much ‘source material’ in common because they share significant cultural backdrops to their lives and works. Moreover, Dylan studied Shakespeare at school as well as many later poets, themselves inevitably influenced by Shakespeare. Consequently, when you hear an echo between the two in their words, there is always the possibility of a common source such as the King James Bible, the Book of Common Prayer, nursery rhymes, the classics, and the balladeers who preceded both. There are other writers in common, too, from the Classical age and from closer to Shakespeare’s own time.”
― Andrew Muir, Bob Dylan & William Shakespeare: The True Performing of It

“Syncretism, the merging of divergent beliefs, was perhaps a natural development for our two writers, with both being masters of paradox, as we see in their thought and wordplay,. Certainly, it was a necessary way of life for Shakespeare, depending on whom he was talking to and where he was at any given moment and for Dylan, coming from a Jewish family and later having ‘a truly born again experience’ it is a way of marrying the two faiths of his life. Listening to songs and watching plays is enjoyable and fulfilling. There is a danger when one turns to analysing the content that the rational mode of thinking necessary for this can lead you to forget the pleasure and particular insights that live performances give you.”
― Andrew Muir, Bob Dylan & William Shakespeare: The True Performing of It

“As Stephen Greenblatt put it: “Shakespeare’s plays provide ample evidence for doubleness and more: at certain moments – Hamlet is the greatest example – he seems at once Catholic, Protestant and deeply skeptical of both.”23”
― Andrew Muir, Bob Dylan & William Shakespeare: The True Performing of It

“If Shakespeare’s father’s alleged illiteracy is true, then a signed version seems impossible, but the theory went that his ‘cross marked the spot’ and sealed the claim that all the Shakespeare family members were adherent to Catholicism. All the leaps of assumption inherent in that string of ‘logic’, aside, the book was potentially an exciting find regarding his father’s convictions. Edmund Malone saw this document and was initially excited by it, though he was later to come to the conclusion shared by most modern scholars, that is, the whole thing was almost certainly a hoax.”
― Andrew Muir, Bob Dylan & William Shakespeare: The True Performing of It

“By 1965, no longer the prince of the protest movement, Dylan was the coolest star in the rock firmament. Notwithstanding this, he sang of ‘Gates of Eden’ on 1965’s Bringing it All Back Home and on the same year’s Highway 61 Revisited, the title track’s opening verse retells a famous biblical passage in modern street language: “Oh God said to Abraham, “Kill me a son” / Abe says, “Man, you must be puttin’ me on”
― Andrew Muir, Bob Dylan & William Shakespeare: The True Performing of It

“As a final example of what we can know amid the speculation, claims and counter claims, we can note Dylan’s comments in his Rolling Stone interview, in 2012, when he said: “These are the same people that tried to pin the name Judas on me. Judas, the most hated name in human history! If you think you’ve been called a bad name, try to work your way out from under that. Yeah, and for what? For playing an electric guitar? As if that is in some kind of way equitable to betraying our Lord and delivering him up to be crucified. All those evil motherfuckers can rot in hell.” Despite the distinct lack of Christian forgiveness on show, that “our” is surely crucial.”
― Andrew Muir, Bob Dylan & William Shakespeare: The True Performing of It

“KL What is your spiritual stance, then? BD: Well, I don’t think that this is it, you know – this life ain’t nothin’. There’s no way you’re gonna convince me this is all there is to it. I never, ever believed that. I believe in the Book of Revelation. The leaders of this world are eventually going to play God, if they’re not already playing God, and eventually a man will come that everybody will think is God. He’ll do things, and they’ll say, “Well, only God can do those things. It must be him.” KL: You’re a literal believer of the Bible? BD: Yeah. Sure, yeah. I am. KL: Are the Old and New Testaments equally valid? BD: To me. KL: Do you belong to any church or synagogue? BD: Not really. Uh, the Church of the Poison Mind [laughs].”
― Andrew Muir, Bob Dylan & William Shakespeare: The True Performing of It

“…death is the spur to life, the necessary counter that gives tension and energy to the action. Death provides a formal frame establishing the boundaries of the game. Without it the action would be lax, there would be too much choice, too much time, like tennis without a net. It gives the story and jokes their compulsion, edge and timing. Comedy must always be up against it, harried and pressed and working in tiny circles, the threat of loss or failure ever present. The clock is running out on festivity..”8 Clocks are always running out, and endings are forever getting closer. Dylan sings, on ‘’Cross The Green Mountain’: I look into the eyes Of my merciful friend And then I ask myself Is this the end?9”
― Andrew Muir, Bob Dylan & William Shakespeare: The True Performing of It

“The 1997 album Time Out of Mind was released after, though written prior to, a brush with mortality for the singer himself when he contracted histoplasmosis whose symptoms range from being flu like to being life threatening. Dylan was seriously ill and, upon returning to public view from his recuperation, wryly remarked that: “I really thought I’d be seeing Elvis soon.”
― Andrew Muir, Bob Dylan & William Shakespeare: The True Performing of It

“Our two writers, then, had to overcome opposition on a personal level as well as attacks upon their chosen professions. Attitudes towards sex, politics, religion, distrust of boisterous enjoyment and financial envy all contributed to the opposing forces. Uncanny parallels are apparent in the harassment and censorship both Shakespeare and Dylan faced and in the ways they confronted and overcame, or circumnavigated, all of them so admirably.”
― Andrew Muir, Bob Dylan & William Shakespeare: The True Performing of It