‘In comes Romeo, he’s moaning’

Abstract

Ever since George Harrison’s remark that Bob Dylan ‘makes Shakespeare look like Billy Joel’, comparisons between Dylan and Shakespeare have been something of a cliché. On the one hand, there is a substantial list of Shakespearean echoes in Dylan’s lyrics; on the other, to the rock critics and Dylan hagiographers of the 1960s, Shakespeare’s name was a shorthand for ‘canonic’, ‘authentic’, ‘transcendent’. Arguably, the idea of the rock auteur was born around 1965—the point when Dylan renounced his ‘folk’ status and executed a decisive stylistic swerve, not only by ‘going electric’, but by littering his work with cryptic allusions, direct Shakespeare references, and a list of theatrical characters. Later, in the Chronicles (2003), there seems to be a swerve in the opposite direction, when Dylan reclaims his ‘folk’ status, and reassumes the mantle of folksinger, folklorist, and musicologist. These tensions between ‘high’ and ‘low’ art (and the secondary axis of ‘folk’ and ‘anti-folk’) have characterized much of the academic and non-academic literature. This chapter will explore some of the intersections between Shakespeare scholarship and the work of rock auteurs from Dylan onwards. In particular, it will focus on the theme of melancholy, as personified by Jaques in As You Like It who, as an anxiety-ridden character prone to rhetorical flourishes and self-pity, is a recognizable trope in much of the post-Dylan singer-songwriter repertoire, and consider Ophelia as a similarly rich seam in pop songwriting.