SotD - Shakespeare

Since it's Shakespeare's birthday, Susan Omand picks an appropriate song of the day...



"If music be the food of love, play on"



Shakespeare's work has long been a source of musical inspiration across all genres. For example, you have the classical beauty of Romeo and Juliet in ballets from Tchaikovsky and Prokofiev. There's operas based on his plays, like Verdi's Macbeth or Wagner's Das Liebesverbot, which is based on Measure for Measure. You've got a mention of King Lear in the Beatles' I Am the Walrus, Iron Maiden riff on a Marc Antony speech from Julius Caesar in The Evil That Men Do, even Tupac and Billy Bragg get in on the act (pun intended) with allusions to Macbeth.



But I ignored all of these, and the many other great Shakespearean based songs that I had to choose from, and in the end I decided against going for something about Shakespeare at all. Instead, I plumped for a song by his sister. Well, kind of. Stay with me on this one...