Musical Shakespeare

William Shakespeare’s legacy goes even further then we imagined. His influence has spread as far as the soundtrack of our lives, the music that has hit the charts since the fifties of the 20th century to nowadays. 

“ Sweet and noble lad, be not aggrieved!”, “brotherhood for young Christian men!” to be thanked “over and again”: don't they  sound curiously similar in meaning to “Young man, there's no need to feel down” and “It's fun to stay at the Y.M.C.A.” (Young Men’s Christian Association), from the renowned song by The Village People?! Doesn’t “Into the well, I cast a humble pray’r” remind us of Carly Rae’s “I threw a wish in the well”, the first line of “Call Me Maybe”? 

Erik Dridriksen’s Pop Sonnets. Shakespearean spins to your favorite songs. Philadelphia, Quirk Books, 2015, highlights the relationship between Shakespeare and our everyday life. These hundred poems belong to a collection, he explains, whose circulation has been limited to a group of professionals – musicians, songwriters, producers -, who made them the starting point for their compositions. Besides the Bard’s celebrated 154 sonnets first published in 1608, “his complete oeuvre was far larger… These sonnets survived by being passed down orally… In 1743, Sir Kirk de Edin began transcribing these sonnets… His work went largely unnoticed, however, until Columbia record executive Robert Lorre discovered the manuscripts in 1951 and began using the sonnets as the foundation for new singles”, Dridriksen writes in the Introduction. “The volume you hold is a selection of these lesser-known sonnets, along with the titles of the songs they helped spark”. 

Like the more famous older sonnets, this collection is divided in groups according to the theme - love, despair, time and mortality, rogues, rascals and wanton women, and ballads of heroes. The interpreters of the songs they inspired are as varied as Frank Sinatra and The Clash, Will Smith and Johnny Cash, the Beatles and Lorde… 

To read a selection of the sonnets you can visit the Dridriksen's site  or follow his Twitter account, where every Thursday he posts a sonnet inviting the followers to guess which song it was a model for… or you can buy the book, whose cover photo is posted above. 





What? “By” Erik Dridriksen makes you dubious about authorship? And, well, the publisher presents the book as “a collection of 100 classic pop songs reimagined as Shakespearean sonnets”. And you can't find any trace of Sir Kirk de Edin who first transcribed these sonnets, of Columbia record (the actual record label is Columbia records) and Robert Lorre, all mentioned in the Introduction? 

Your doubts are well founded: the sonnets have been “reimagined” by the witty “software engineer, musician, sonneteer and trivia enthusiast” Erik Didriksen who, using syntax, pronouns, lexicon and a poetic form associated to Shakespeare and his age, has created a fun and pleasant work. 

In each sonnet the first two lines and the last two contain key-words, present also in the modern song and a hint for guessing which one it is. 

“Shakespeare’s plays were intended for performance... why do we   believe his sonnets were intended solely for the page?”.