4 Rock Songs Inspired By Shakespeare

The flowery language of William Shakespeare and the rawness of modern music don't seem like the most logical pairing, but the former's works led to quite a few notable rock songs. The great singer-songwriters that shaped rock 'n' roll music wrote songs about just about everything. And while they often took cues from their own lives, current events, or the world around them as things unfolded, they also were willing to look back quite a ways to sources more cultured, literary, and timeless, namely the works of William Shakespeare. Operating out of London in the late 15th and early 16th centuries, Shakespeare is regarded as the greatest or most definitive of writers in the English language, such was the quality and impact of his plays — tragedies, comedies, and histories — and sonnets.

Those plays and poems were all written more than 400 years ago, but their influence reverberated through the centuries. Not only are there many words you had no idea Shakespeare invented and numerous films and TV shows derived from plots and characters introduced in those stage works, but there are numerous rock songs that pull from the the author's canon. Here are four songs by major rock acts like Radiohead, Lou Reed, and more that are Shakespearean in their scope and lyrics.

Radiohead officially contributed "Talk Show Host" to the alternative rock collection that served as the soundtrack for the stylized and modernized 1996 film "William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet." The film, but not the accompanying album, used an original work the band recorded after seeing the movie, which they included on their next LP, 1997's heavily praised "OK Computer." That song: "Exit Music (For a Film)," referencing its real-world purpose and also identifying itself as an elegy for Shakespeare's tragically deceased title characters — young lovers from bitter rival families.

Multiple pieces of Shakespeare media inspired Radiohead leader Thom Yorke's lyrics, not just the film for which the band was commissioned to write a song but also the 1968 movie directed by Franco Zeffirelli. "I saw the Zeffirelli version when I was 13 and I cried my eyes out, because I couldn't understand why, the morning after they shagged, they didn't just run away," Yorke told Select in 1997. "It's a song written for two people who should run away before all the bad stuff starts. A personal song."

Legendarily irascible former Velvet Underground leader Lou Read is a '70s musician you wouldn't want to meet in real life, but by the late 1980s he'd emerged as a founding father of alternative rock. In 1989, he released the modern concept album "New York." Leading off and setting the tone for the LP, an exploration and examination of the biggest metropolis in the U.S., was the single "Romeo Had Juliette." In seeking to show off a deeply personal side of life in New York City in the 20th century, Reed transported the characters of Romeo and Juliet from a fictional Verona, Italy, of hundreds of years prior written about in a titular play by William Shakespeare first presented in London in the 1590s.

Not only taking plot and characters from Shakespeare, Reed wrote his lyrics in a bouncy, rhythmic, flowing style, reminiscent of the meter employed by the playwright. As "Romeo and Juliet" begins with a prologue that lays out the background, stakes, and tragedy to come, Reed begins "Romeo Had Juliette" with a verse explaining how a leather-vested Romeo Rodriguez is about to "clean the mess that he has dropped / Into the life of lithesome Juliet Bell." Modern additions and updates abound, including drugs, guns, and police skirmishes. A big difference is that "Romeo Had Juliette" doesn't end as definitively as the death-laden "Romeo and Juliet."

There's a dark reason why actors refuse to say the word "Macbeth" during productions of the Shakespeare play of the same name about sorcery and power plays for the Scottish crown, first staged in the early 1600s. Yet Elvis Costello seemed to have no issue with any of that. Near the end of his 1989 album "Spike," he included a song titled "Miss Macbeth." It's in part an exploration and repudiation of the idea that the play's ostensible villain, the scheming and ultimately punished Lady Macbeth, is the most reprehensible character in Shakespeare, if not all of Western literature. Conflating and compositing Miss Macbeth with other misunderstood and vilified women, Costello sings of a character with coal-black eyes and hair made of spiderwebs feared by children. She is cursed to listen to love songs her whole life and recall great loves of her past that never actually existed.

Costello concedes a point to Shakespeare and the haters, however. "Sometimes people are just what they appear to be / With no redemption at all," he posits, noting that while some people get a bad rap, there just might be some real Lady Macbeths out there.

The title of ex-Police frontman Sting's 1987 solo effort, "... Nothing Like the Sun," is punctuated the way it is to draw attention to the fact that it's a quotation. "Nothing like the sun" is in fact a lyric from the album cut "Sister Moon," which Sting pulled from one of William Shakespeare's poems. In addition to more than 30 plays, Shakespeare wrote over 150 pieces of poetry, specifically in the 14-line format of the sonnet. A great many of them use clever and effusive language to express romantic and passionate thoughts. The otherwise untitled "Sonnet 130" is just that kind of work, as Shakespeare uses most of the lines to favorably compare his lover's attributes to natural phenomena. "My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun" is the first line, for example.

When crafting "Sister Moon," Sting copy-pasted the first line of "Sonnet 130" into the beginning of the tune's final stanza. "Sister Moon" is a meditation on the romantic and powerful mood cast by the moon, so it required a few contrasting, Shakespearean remarks about the moon's opposite. Hence that's why Sting says the eyes of his beloved (the moon) are "nothing like the sun."