Personally, I’m not a huge Beatles fan. I put them in that category where I can acknowledge that they deserve their legendary status in the history of music, but that doesn’t mean when a song of theirs comes on the radio I turn it up. (Except maybe some stuff off the White album.)
So I don’t have all the trivia about where and when the Beatles crossover with Shakespeare. I know there’s a video of some TV skit where they did bits from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. And isn’t there a song out there that samples from King Lear? There are probably plenty more that have scooted their way across my radar over the years.
But a headline like “Paul McCartney reveals how Shakespeare inspired Let It Be” is just begging me to click it. One of their most popular songs, inspired by Shakespeare’s most well-known play? And I haven’t heard this story before? Ok, I’m curious.
Right off the bat, the article mentions inspiration at a “subconscious level,” and I think oh, here we go. But then it takes a turn:
“And it had been pointed out to me recently that Hamlet, when he has been poisoned, he actually says, ‘Let it be’ – act five, scene two. He says ‘Let be’ the first time, then the second time he says, ‘Had I but time — as this fell sergeant, Death, Is strict in his arrest — oh, I could tell you. But let it be Horatio.’”
The Beatle concluded: “I was interested that I was exposed to those words during a time when I was studying Shakespeare so that years later the phrase appears to me in a dream with my mother saying it.”
Really? There’s really that one-to-one connection? To The Text!
The second reference is easy to find, starting in Q2. It’s just like he says, right as Hamlet is dying. It’s not in Q1. It’s in FF as well.
But what about that first reference? It’s hard to parse that quote — it sounds like he’s saying that the first time is also in Act V Scene 2, but that’s not correct. He’s basically saying, “Yeah, yeah, he says it once … but the second one is the more famous one.”
That’s because the first one doesn’t really hit the same:
I pray you all,
If you have hitherto conceal’d this sight,
Let it be tenable in your silence still;
Hamlet I.ii
Saying “Let it be” as a complete thought is definitely different from “Let it be this” or “let it be that”.
Still, though. Inspiration confirmed, I guess. Something to add to the Beatles / Shakespeare trivia category.