In Rush’s song Limelight is the following line:
All the world’s indeed a stage,
And we are merely players.
Which, of course, comes from Shakespeare’s As You Like It:
All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players.
(II, vii, 139-143)
What other songs have Shakespeare quotes (or almost-quotes) and allusions?
Brush Up Your Shakespeare by Cole Porter, of course. There are other songs in Kiss Me Kate that include Shakespeare quotes: “I Come to Wive it Wealthily in Padua” and “I am Ashamed that Women are So Simple.”
What a Piece Of Work Is Man from “Hair”
Donovan and the lesser-known Brian Protheroe both set “Under the Greenwood Tree” (from As You Like It) to music.
Joni Mitchell offers this in “Talk to Me”:
…Even though it’s covered in keloids from the slings and arrows of outrageous romance.
I stole that from Willy the Shake,
You know, “Neither a borrower nor a lender be.”
Romeo, Romeo, talk to me!
I always loved the title of the Blondie compilation Once More into the Bleach.
From the Eagles “Get Over it”
“…the more I think about it, old Billy was right
Let’s kill all the lawyers, kill 'em tonight”
Taken from Shakespeare’s Henry VI
I bet we could find a lot of Shakespeare quotes in Sting’s material. Tell me he never met a bard he didn’t like to quote.
Green Bean
It seems you have forgotten another allusion to the “All the world’s a stage quote” - Elvis Presley’s “Are You Lonesome Tonight”.
The end of the Beatles’ song “I Am The Walrus” has quotes from an actual BBC broadcast of King Lear. The quotes are from Act 4 Scene 6 and include “… bury my body, and deliver the letters which thou findst abot me to Edmund Earl of Gloucester, seek him out upon the British party … Oh, untimely death.”
Those quotes give that song an atmosphere of creepiness and no doubt it added to the “Paul Is Dead” fervor that swept the world in the Fall of 1969.