Dylan Williams Quotes

Among the writers he was reading when he wrote these stories in the 1950s—and he was reading all the time, all kinds of books, dozens and dozens of them—were David Riesman, Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, John Cheever, James Baldwin, Randall Jarrell, Sigmund Freud, Paul Goodman, William Styron, C. Wright Mills, Martin Buber, George Orwell, Suzanne Langer, F. R. Leavis, David Daiches, Edmund Wilson, Alfred Kazin, Ralph Ellison, Erich Fromm, Joseph Conrad, Dylan Thomas, Sean O’Casey, e. e. cummings—who collectively represented a republic of discourse in which he aspired to

Dylan stopped at an intersection and gave Chris a long look. 'Not you. You are original. Unique.' 'That good or bad?' 'Oh definitely good. Very, very good. I'd never go back to an off-the-rack lover again.' 'Naw, you prob'ly ordered your lays from the Williams-Sonoma catalog.' 'Well, I'm done shopping now.'

Bob Dylan was different. Where most folk singers were either clean-cut or homey looking, Dylan had wild long hair. He resembled a poor white dropout of questionable morals. His songs were hard-driving, powerful, intense. It was hard to be neutral about them. “The Times They Are a-Changing” was perhaps the first song to exploit the generation gap. Dylan’s life was as controversial as his ideology.

seems I have been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. It’s a lifelong appointment and there are no dues, just glory and hobnobbery. I look at the list of current members and feel woozy. In the department of literature, there’s Ann Beattie, Michael Cunningham, Jeffrey Eugenides, Jonathan Franzen, Amy Hempel, Jamaica Kincaid, David Mamet, Lorrie Moore, Joyce Carol Oates, Sharon Olds, Ann Patchett, Jayne Anne Phillips, Francine Prose, Marilynne Robinson, George Saunders, Wallace Shawn, Anne Tyler, Edmund White, Joy Williams, and Tobias Wolff. Really? I think. These people are gods to me. It’s like I’ve been allowed onto Mount Olympus. Then there are the departments of art (Bruce Nauman, Cindy Sherman, Jenny Holzer, Susan Rothenberg), music, and architecture. Honorary members—people whose work falls outside these categories—include Bob Dylan, Meryl Streep, Frederick Wiseman, and Martin Scorsese.

Here are some people who have written books, telling what they did and why they did those things: John Dean. Henry Kissinger. Adolf Hitler. Caryl Chessman. Jeb Magruder. Napoleon. Talleyrand. Disraeli. Robert Zimmerman, also known as Bob Dylan. Locke. Charlton Heston. Errol Flynn. The Ayatollah Khomeini. Gandhi. Charles Olson. Charles Colson. A Victorian Gentleman. Dr. X. Most people also believe that God has written a Book, or Books, telling what He did and why—at least to a degree—He did those things, and since most of these people also believe that humans were made in the image of God, then He also may be regarded as a person… or, more properly, as a Person. Here are some people who have not written books, telling what they did… and what they saw: The man who buried Hitler. The man who performed the autopsy on John Wilkes Booth. The man who embalmed Elvis Presley. The man who embalmed—badly, most undertakers say—Pope John XXIII. The twoscore undertakers who cleaned up Jonestown, carrying body bags, spearing paper cups with those spikes custodians carry in city parks, waving away the flies. The man who cremated William Holden. The man who encased the body of Alexander the Great in gold so it would not rot. The men who mummified the Pharaohs. Death is a mystery, and burial is a secret.

Here are some people who have written books, telling what they did and why they did those things: John Dean. Henry Kissinger. Adolph Hitler. Caryl Chessman. Jeb Magruder. Napoleon. Talleyrand. Disraeli. Robert Zimmerman, also known as Bob Dylan. Locke. Charlton Heston. Errol Flynn. The Ayatollah Khomeini. Gandhi. Charles Olson. Charles Colson. A Victorian Gentleman. Dr. X. Most people also believe that God has written a Book, or Books, telling what He did and why—at least to a degree—He did those things, and since most of these people also believe that humans were made in the image of God, then He also may be regarded as a person . . . or, more properly, as a Person. Here are some people who have not written books, telling what they did . . . and what they saw: The man who buried Hitler. The man who performed the autopsy on John Wilkes Booth. The man who embalmed Elvis Presley. The man who embalmed—badly, most undertakers say—Pope John XXIII. The twoscore undertakers who cleaned up Jonestown, carrying body bags, spearing paper cups with those spikes custodians carry in city parks, waving away the flies. The man who cremated William Holden. The man who encased the body of Alexander the Great in gold so it would not rot. The men who mummified the Pharaohs. Death is a mystery, and burial is a secret.

Jobs later explained, “We discussed whether it was correct before we ran it. It’s grammatical, if you think about what we’re trying to say. It’s not think the same, it’s think different. Think a little different, think a lot different, think different. ‘Think differently’ wouldn’t hit the meaning for me.” In order to evoke the spirit of Dead Poets Society, Clow and Jobs wanted to get Robin Williams to read the narration. His agent said that Williams didn’t do ads, so Jobs tried to call him directly. He got through to Williams’s wife, who would not let him talk to the actor because she knew how persuasive he could be. They also considered Maya Angelou and Tom Hanks. At a fund-raising dinner featuring Bill Clinton that fall, Jobs pulled the president aside and asked him to telephone Hanks to talk him into it, but the president pocket-vetoed the request. They ended up with Richard Dreyfuss, who was a dedicated Apple fan. In addition to the television commercials, they created one of the most memorable print campaigns in history. Each ad featured a black-and-white portrait of an iconic historical figure with just the Apple logo and the words “Think Different” in the corner. Making it particularly engaging was that the faces were not captioned. Some of them—Einstein, Gandhi, Lennon, Dylan, Picasso, Edison, Chaplin, King—were easy to identify. But others caused people to pause, puzzle, and maybe ask a friend to put a name to the face: Martha Graham, Ansel Adams, Richard Feynman, Maria Callas, Frank Lloyd Wright, James Watson, Amelia Earhart. Most were Jobs’s personal heroes. They tended to be creative people who had taken risks, defied failure, and bet their career on doing things in a different way.

The Gates of Eden,” as he called it that night, took us furthest out into the realm of the imagination, to a point beyond logic and reason. Like “It’s Alright, Ma,” the song mentions a book title in its first line, but the song is more reminiscent of the poems of William Blake (and, perhaps, of Blake’s disciple Ginsberg) than it is of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, vaunting the truth that lies in surreal imagery. After an almost impenetrable first verse, the song approaches themes that were becoming familiar to Dylan’s listeners. In Genesis, Eden is the paradise where Adam and Eve had direct communication with God. According to “Gates of Eden,” it is where truth resides, without bewitching illusions. And the song is basically a list, verse after verse, of the corrosive illusions that Dylan would sing about constantly from the mid-1960s on: illusions about obedience to authority; about false religions and idols (the “utopian hermit monks” riding on the golden calf); about possessions and desire; about sexual repression and conformity (embodied by “the gray flannel dwarf”); about high-toned intellectualism. None of these count for much or even exist inside the gates of Eden. The kicker comes in the final verse, where the singer talks of his lover telling him of her dreams without any attempt at interpretation—and that at times, the singer thinks that the only truth is that there is no truth outside the gates of Eden. It’s a familiar conundrum: If there is no truth, isn’t saying as much really an illusion, too, unless we are all in Eden? (“All Cretans are liars,” says the Cretan.) What makes that one truth so special? But the point, as the lover knows, is that outside of paradise, interpretation is futile. Don’t try to figure out what the song, or what any work of art, “really” means; the meaning is in the imagery itself; attempting to define it is to succumb to the illusion that truth can be reached through human logic. So Dylan’s song told us, as he took the measure in his lyrics of what had begun as the “New Vision,” two and a half miles up Broadway from Lincoln Center at Columbia, in the mid-1940s. Apart from Dylan, Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso may have been the only people in Philharmonic Hall who got it. I

It was marijuana that drew the line between us and them, that bright generational line between the cool and the uncool. My timidity about pot, as I first encountered it in Hawaii, vanished when, a few months later, during my first year of high school, it hit Woodland Hills. We scored our first joints from a friend of Pete's. The quality of the dope was terrible -- Mexican rag weed, people called it -- but the quality of the high was so wondrous, so nerve-end-opening, so cerebral compared to wine's effects, that I don't think we ever cracked another Purex jug. The laughs were harder and finer. And music that had been merely good, the rock and roll soundtrack of our lives, turned into rapture and prophecy. Jimi Hendrix, Dylan, the Doors, Cream, late Beatles, Janis Joplin, the Stones, Paul Butterfield -- the music they were making, with its impact and beauty amplified a hundredfold by dope, became a sacramental rite, simply inexplicable to noninitiates. And the ceremonial aspects of smoking pot -- scoring from the million-strong network of small-time dealers, cleaning "lids," rolling joints, sneaking off to places (hilltops, beaches, empty fields) where it seemed safe to smoke, in tight little outlaw groups of three or four, and then giggling and grooving together -- all of this took on a strong tribal color. There was the "counterculture" out in the greater world, with all its affinities and inspirations, but there were also, more immediately, the realignments in our personal lives. Kids, including girls, who were "straight" became strangers. What the hell was a debutante, anyway? As for adults -- it became increasingly difficult not to buy that awful Yippie line about not trusting anyone over thirty. How could parents, teachers, coaches, possibly understand the ineluctable weirdness of every moment, fully perceived? None of them had been out on Highway 61.

Both Shakespeare and Dylan were lambasted for ensuring that their artistic efforts generated money. The more perceptive peers of both Bards would have been intimidated by the quality of the work even as they decried it as worthless, as well as envious of the success. Such jealousy and resentment breeds the same language of denunciation that is mirrored across the centuries. All classes were annoyed at the actors’ successes in Elizabethan time, and they were attacked as being not worthy of the money they earned.

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.

As Dylan noted in a 2011 interview: “One song is always using a line from another song to brace it. But then goes off on another tangent. Minstrels did it all the time. Weird takes on Shakespeare plays, stuff like that. It’s just done automatically.”9

Other commonplaces go back even further. The proverb we use nowadays, ‘all that glitters is not gold’ is usually traced to Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice Act II Scene iv: All that glisters is not gold; Often have you heard that told. The term “glisters” became glitters in time; it is, in effect, the same word. People had indeed ‘often heard that told’, prior to Shakespeare, Chaucer had it as: “Hit is not al gold, that glareth”. So, it was known in English poetry before Shakespeare even got to it. It is such an obvious truth that it is no surprise to discover that earlier civilisations used the same phrase. The Roman poets Shakespeare appears to have immersed himself in, and from whom Dylan, who also studied them at school, liberally quotes, include, amongst their lines, nōn omne quod nĭtet aurum est (‘Not all that glitters is gold’).

Other commonplaces go back even further. The proverb we use nowadays, ‘all that glitters is not gold’ is usually traced to Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice Act II Scene iv: All that glisters is not gold; Often have you heard that told. The term “glisters” became glitters in time; it is, in effect, the same word. People had indeed ‘often heard that told’, prior to Shakespeare, Chaucer had it as: “Hit is not al gold, that glareth”. So, it was known in English poetry before Shakespeare even got to it. It is such an obvious truth that it is no surprise to discover that earlier civilisations used the same phrase. The Roman poets Shakespeare appears to have immersed himself in, and from whom Dylan, who also studied them at school, liberally quotes, include, amongst their lines, nōn omne quod nĭtet aurum est (‘Not all that glitters is gold’). It was a Latin proverb and well-known enough as to appear in Corpus Juris Civilis (the Book of Civil Law) some two and a half thousand years ago. Dylan puts a version of this ancient saying into the mouth of a grandparent dispensing a list of clichéd advice. Dylan thus acknowledges, as Shakespeare did, that here was an old truth, while simultaneously giving an intriguing twist to the concept: Grandma said, “Boy, go and follow your heart And you’ll be fine at the end of the line All that’s gold isn’t meant to shine Don’t you and your one true love ever part” As with other things we have heard and read and thought many times in our life, many of us never come across a version of this phrase without either hearing it in Dylan’s voice or thinking of its use in Shakespeare’s play and the extra resonance those bring to it. Such is the power of Bards.

Instead, we accept them all as part of the short phrase itself. That same short verse, which is, incidentally, alluded to on the Dylan albums Time Out of Mind and “Love and Theft”, ends with another instance of the same phenomenon. The last four words are rarely quoted, because they are, literally, ‘taken as read’: never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee. The same thing, I suggest, is already happening with Dylan’s “but it’s getting there.” In both cases, given our mortality, we all know how it ends. Another thing about bards, associated with their raising of everyday speech to high art, is that they are generally claimed to have sprung naturally from the soil, or from the common mass of humanity. They are, in other words, not only our spokespeople but also one of us.

A gift for polyphonic universality is another characteristic of Bards. They speak out in the voices of people from all walks of life and they say things in such a way that we think they are voicing our own thoughts. As David Bowie put it in his ‘Song for Bob Dylan’: “And you sat behind a million pair of eyes/And told them how they saw.

Garlock, you might have thought, had taken the Christian opposition to Rock as far as anyone could: “Bringing racism into his attack, Garlock noted that rock had its roots in the music of Africa, South America, and India, places he said where voodoo, sex orgies, human sacrifices, and devil worship abounded. Garlock linked some rock performers with Satan.”17 Yet, even further excesses of abuse on the theme of Rock-as-Satanic have followed as the years have passed. Possibly the craziest is Jacob Aranza’s claims that “75 percent of the rock and roll today (top 10 stuff!) deals with sex, evil, drugs, and the occult.” And that this is all part of a decades’ long, four step plan, “Satan’s Agenda”, to “pronounce rock stars as messiahs”.18 Jeff Godwin took this even further: “The Lord has also revealed to some Christians that incarnate demons from the netherworld actually are members of some of the most popular bands.”19 Converts are famous for their zeal, and as early as 1957 one celebrated rock’n’roller turned on the music that had propelled him to fame when he found religion. Richard Wayne Penniman, better known as Little Richard, stopped playing rock’n’roll and began to preach against it: “I was in the eighth grade at San Diego Adventist Elementary School, his conversion touched my life. Little Richard arrived at our school with an entourage of about three black limousines and a staff of personal assistants in black suits. He spoke in chapel, then preached Sabbath morning in a local church (probably San Diego 31st Street), then spoke and sang in the afternoon for a standing-room-only Associated MV (AY) meeting at the old San Diego Broadway church.

Although feted as literary geniuses, they are all acclaimed as having sprung naturally from the communal, oral art of ‘the people’. So strong is the wish for this to be the case that a risible series of claims attach themselves to Bard mythology. Poetic seers who are sons of the soil has always been an attractive image. Thus, we get Milton referring to Shakespeare as a rustic genius: “warbling his native woodnotes wild”, Burns being known as ‘the heaven-taught ploughman’. Dylan himself peddled the myth of the kid who ran away and grew up in a carnival in the middle of twentieth century America and picked up everything he knew in a similar, near mystical, manner.

But I don’t believe that I understand what is going through his mind. The particular magic that Dylan has over, say, twenty million people, is the paradox and the inaccessibility of him. In his music, people are struck by something and yet they don’t really seem to know what it is. That’s always been the case with the most acute and exalted poetry. There are lines of Shakespeare like this, in which you don’t have to know who plays what to be struck by the magic of words. Then the insight of the listener is followed by intense perplexity. We hear something that we finally realize is saying something we think ourselves…

Professor Marjorie Garber pointed out the close affinity that exists between Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin’”.11 The play, she states, is: “concerned with youth, sexuality, media, and generational conflict … the love story of two young people and the failure of parents to understand their idealistic and rebellious children. Romeo’s outburst to Friar Laurence “Thou canst not speak of that thou dost not feel” was, effectively, the cry of a generation.

Dylan’s antagonism towards critical opinion has never been complete. Naturally, he has thought of his work as being regarded as ‘up there with the greats’. Talking to Robert Shelton, Dylan remarked that: “Until Bringing It All Back Home song-writing was a sideline. I was still a performer. Then I knew I had to write songs… Get some of those literary people, some of those poetry people to sit down with my records … that would be good.” This was soon after declaring “I never dug Pound or Eliot. I dig Shakespeare”, in Spring 1966.35

This chapter has also stressed that Shakespeare and Dylan’s work is grounded in popular entertainment and in pleasing audience. That ‘work’ is both business and artistic. Genius can exist, they prove, alongside commercial acumen and the highest artistry is not incompatible with widespread popularity and live shows.

All pretences to the contrary are here likewise fully answered; and the unlawfulnes of acting, of beholding academicall enterludes, briefly discussed; besides sundry other particulars concerning dancing, dicing, health-drinking, &c. of which the table will informe you.

At certain times I read a lot of poetry. My favorite poets are Shelley and Keats. Rimbaud is so identifiable, Lord Byron, I don’t know. Lately if I read poems, it’s like I can always hear the guitar. Even with Shakespeare’s sonnets I can hear a melody because its all broken up into timed phrases so I hear it. I always keep thinking, what kind of song would this be?”15

I’m using the old melodies because they’re there. I like the melodies. Besides, if they can hear the old melodies in my new songs, they’ll accept the songs more. It ain’t the melodies that’re important, man, it’s the words. I don’t give a damn ‘bout melodies.”21

Dylan remarked to biographer Robert Shelton, in 1978: “the myth of the starving artist is just that – a myth”.30 Genius can also be at the beck and call of the need for cold, hard cash. One thinks of Dostoyevsky producing the most extraordinary series of novels in order to settle debts, and of Charles Dickens’ mass-marketed outpouring of the most beautiful quality prose, at a time when it was valued by quantity, and paid by the wordage. As Samuel Johnson prosaically put it: “No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.” Both Shakespeare and Dylan prove to be canny operators in the world of commerce. William Burroughs remembered meeting a young Dylan who described himself as having “a knack for writing lyrics” and that he “expected to make a lot of money”.

It is already apparent that one is increasingly reading the works of ‘experts’ on Bob Dylan who have never witnessed him in any concert venue, nor, for another important example, heard a single Robert Johnson, Woody Guthrie or Chuck Berry song. It is a worrying trend that repeats the mistaken approach of literary critics who for so long ignored the ‘business of the stage’ when writing on Shakespeare.

The comparison has become so commonplace that it can even be expanded and reversed. “Leonard Cohen is John Donne to Bob Dylan’s Shakespeare” declared a headline in The Guardian. Donne is considered later, making this quote from the biography The Ballad of Bob Dylan all the more intriguing: “For two years Zimmerman sat in the front row of Rolfzen’s class, third seat from the door, transfixed by the teacher’s lively Donne and Shakespeare.

Part of the problem stems from the Nobel Literature Academy’s announcement of Dylan’s success. Sara Danius said, emphasis mine: “If you look back, far back, 2,500 years or so . . . you discover Homer and Sappho, and they wrote poetic texts that were meant to be listened to, they were meant to be performed, often together with instruments, and it’s the same way with Bob Dylan. But we still read Homer and Sappho . . . and we enjoy it, and same thing with Bob Dylan. He can be read, and should be read.

Kazuo Ishiguro was pushing for such an expansion in his 1917 Nobel Lecture. After speaking so movingly about the effect singers have on his writing and discussing a film, amidst his literary musings and remembrances, he ended with a plea that serves well as a conclusion to this Nobel Prize section with its comments on future generations, genre and form: “… we must widen our common literary world to include many more voices from beyond our comfort zones of the elite first world cultures. We must search more energetically to discover the gems from what remain today unknown literary cultures, whether the writers live in far away countries or within our own communities. Second: we must take great care not to set too narrowly or conservatively our definitions of what constitutes good literature. The next generation will come with all sorts of new, sometimes bewildering ways to tell important and wonderful stories. We must keep our minds open to them, especially regarding genre and form, so that we can nurture and celebrate the best of them.

Kazuo Ishiguro was pushing for such an expansion in his 1917 Nobel Lecture. After speaking so movingly about the effect singers have on his writing and discussing a film, amidst his literary musings and remembrances, he ended with a plea that serves well as a conclusion to this Nobel Prize section with its comments on future generations, genre and form: “… we must widen our common literary world to include many more voices from beyond our comfort zones of the elite first world cultures. We must search more energetically to discover the gems from what remain today unknown literary cultures, whether the writers live in far away countries or within our own communities. Second: we must take great care not to set too narrowly or conservatively our definitions of what constitutes good literature. The next generation will come with all sorts of new, sometimes bewildering ways to tell important and wonderful stories. We must keep our minds open to them, especially regarding genre and form, so that we can nurture and celebrate the best of them. In a time of dangerously increasing division, we must listen. Good writing and good reading will break down barriers. We may even find a new idea, a great humane vision, around which to rally.

In Shakespeare’s London, most plays were only performed a handful of times before being discarded and replaced with ‘the latest thing’. This provides a stark contrast to the Royal Shakespeare Company’s schedule in current times. Shakespeare’s theatre, just like the rock music of Dylan’s decades, was inherently influenced by changes in fashion and style. Relentless demands for novelty and hits drove both industries and this had an impact on our two artists in fundamental ways. Just as Dylan went after the latest, but deeply unpleasant, studio sound in the mid-Eighties and jumped, or rather sank, into the pop video market, so Shakespeare had to move into whatever area the current fashion dictated. If plays featuring prostitutes and witches were in demand, then that is what was written. Popular entertainers need to remain fashionable.

The primacy of performance dominates their thoughts. To return to Dylan’s Nobel Lecture, we find him musing on the practicalities of ‘putting on a show’: “I began to think about William Shakespeare, the great literary figure. I would reckon he thought of himself as a dramatist. The thought that he was writing literature couldn’t have entered his head. His words were written for the stage. Meant to be spoken not read. When he was writing Hamlet, I’m sure he was thinking about a lot of different things: “Who’re the right actors for these roles?” “How should this be staged?” “Do I really want to set this in Denmark8?” His creative vision and ambitions were no doubt at the forefront of his mind, but there were also more mundane matters to consider and deal with. “Is the financing in place?” “Are there enough good seats for my patrons?” “Where am I going to get a human skull?” I would bet that the farthest thing from Shakespeare’s mind was the question “Is this literature? But, like Shakespeare, I too am often occupied with the pursuit of my creative endeavors and dealing with all aspects of life’s mundane matters. “Who are the best musicians for these songs?” “Am I recording in the right studio?” “Is this song in the right key?” Some things never change, even in 400 years. Not once have I ever had the time to ask myself, “Are my songs literature?

As John Lennon said of Dylan: “I loved him because he wrote some beautiful stuff. I used to love his so-called protest things. But I like the sound of him. I didn’t have to listen to his words. He used to come with his acetate and say, “Listen to this, John. Did you hear the words?” And I said, “That doesn’t matter, just the sound is what counts. The overall thing.” You didn’t have to hear what Bob Dylan’s saying, you just have to hear the way he says it, like the medium is the message.

I wrote the songs to perform the songs. I needed to sing in that language, which was a language I hadn’t heard before.” Furthermore, he points out that: “The ideal performances of the songs would then come on stages throughout the world. Very few could be found on any of my records. Reaching the audience is what it’s all about.”2

… Shakespeare was a working dramatist in a very competitive world; he was writing highly topical plays to catch a particular market, and if he did not pull in an audience, the theatrical company in which he had a substantial financial share did not eat that week. What he and his fellows were selling was not a printed book but a heard and seen experience. As a result, he was far more concerned with the design of a very complex system of communication, as a tool to make the audience respond as he wished, than with a merely verbal text.”3

There’s always new things to discover when you’re playing live. No two shows are the same. It might be the same song, but you find different things to do within that song which you didn’t think about the night before. It depends on how your brain is hooked up to your hand and how your mind is hooked up to your mouth.”19

Verse speakers and opera singers could learn a great deal if they listen to all forms of popular music from Billie Holiday to Edith Piaf, where the passion, the feeling, the intonation, the tempo all arise from the word. In Broadway jargon, this is called ‘reading’ a song. I once asked Richard Rodgers, composer of Oklahoma! and countless other musicals, whether he had a stash of melodies in a top drawer, waiting to be used. ‘Of course not!’ he said. ‘I need the words.’ Like every composer of songs, it is the words that are proposed by a lyric that awaken the tune”.

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.

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.

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.

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].

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

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

…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

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.

It was just Dylan, with a murmuring electric guitar, and the louder Hunter played the song, the larger were the spaces in the music, allowing him to crawl inside.

Dylan arrived on the scene with a beat-up acoustic guitar and a voice that David Bowie later compared to “sand and glue” in his “Song For Bob Dylan” from Hunky Dory (1971).

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.

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’.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

Eighteen days of war: terrible images.More than I've become a primaire anti-American. Everything that comes from the USA provokes horror, disgust, hate. I have trouble listening to Stevie Wonder, Bob Dylan. I couldn't read William Carlos Williams (and I'm sure that all of them are against the war). A country that was to impose to the world their impressive stupidity and cruelty, its vulgarity (to which they call democracy), their taste for theft (to which they call freedom).

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

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

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.

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