If Shakespeare wrote lyrics for a heavy metal band

“By the pricking of my thumbs, 

Something wicked this way comes.” 

— Macbeth, Act 4 Scene 1

Image: Macbeth, Act 4 Scene 1. 2015 Square Talk in association with Apollo Arts Production of Macbeth, directed by Nicolas Walker.

When those words were first uttered on the Elizabethan stage, there were no amplifiers trembling in their wake, no distortion thickening the atmosphere, no drums rolling like distant artillery. There was only a bare wooden platform, a restless crowd, and a human voice trying to carry. Four centuries later, the line still carries a voltage untouched by time. 

Shakespeare wrote for wooden theatres and daylight performances, yet his tragedies confront themes that refuse to age. Their language advances with a dark propulsion. It carries dread and something heavier that’s harder to name. Storms tear across the heath in Macbeth. Sleep is murdered. Ghosts haunt the living and refuse to stay buried. The plays strain constantly toward excess, as if the language itself is trying to exceed the limits of speech. You can almost hear something tuning beneath it ever so slightly, wanting so desperately to be louder.

Heavy metal walks similar ground. Especially in earlier forms, its lyricists wrote as poets in disguise. Their songs dwell in violence and obsession, in the unquiet valleys of the mind. These are the same currents that are native to the worlds of Macbeth, King Lear, Hamlet, and Titus Andronicus, where moral order fractures and the supernatural presses close against the living. With its appetite for grandeur and gloom, heavy metal does not borrow from this world so much as recognises it. 

The connection to Shakespeare has surfaced explicitly more than once. The phrase “mind’s eye” in Hamlet reappears in the work of bands such as Dark Tranquillity, whose song “The Mind’s Eye” draws from that vision. Iron Maiden invokes Julius Caesar in “The Ides of March”, echoing the soothsayer’s warning to “beware of the ides of March”. Dream Theater ends “Pull Me Under” with a direct quotation from Hamlet in Act 1 Scene 1. Even so, these gestures rarely announce themselves. Many listeners of heavy metal who claim Shakespeare’s language is undecipherable already carry it with them unknowingly. 

Shakespeare’s soliloquies are shaped, patterned, and measured. Many of them move within iambic pentameter, and his characters articulate their emotions through vivid imagery. Macbeth’s guilt takes form in the imagination that not even “all great Neptune’s ocean” can wash the blood from his hands after murdering King Duncan.  

Heavy metal leans toward intensity rather than confession, and atmosphere rather than everyday speech. Where pop often speaks in a voice meant to sound immediate and familiar, metal builds around force and texture. Language is allowed to swell and darken, and to push past convention. Shakespeare’s tragedies are saturated with the same element. In that sense, Shakespeare’s verse does not require much adaptation as its structure is already musical. Heavy metal does not need to reinvent that language but simply amplify what was there all along. 

It is not difficult to imagine Shakespeare headbanging to metal music. 

Image: Shakespeare’s Globe, “Shakespeare Rocks!” 

The question, then, is not whether Shakespeare belongs in heavy metal, but what might happen if he wrote for it. To be, or not to be. That is the question. To be confined to the page, or to be unleashed through distortion and riffs. 

So, we shall let the experiment be simple by removing the proscenium arch and replacing it with amplifiers.

“Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage! Blow!You cataracts and hurricanoes, spoutTill you have drenched our steeples, drowned the cocks!

Crack nature’s moulds, all germens spill at once,That make ingrateful man!”

— King Lear, Act 3 Scene 2

Image: King Lear, Act 3 Scene 2. James Earl Jones, Ian McKellen & Nesbitt Blaisdell performing.

Set against distortion, it might sound like this:

Verse 

Blow, winds, and split your iron throats wide

Rage through the vault of a godless sky.

Split your cataracts, drown every tower, 

Let steepless sink in the surge of your power.

Pre-chorus

Crack the foundations, fracture the frames, 

Tear at the roots of the world that I named.

Shatter the moulds that fashioned this clay,

Spill every seed that corrupted the day. 

Chorus

Let it break, let it drown

Let the sky come crashing down.

Let it break, let it drown

Till the heavens reach the ground.

When Black Sabbath open “War Pigs” with “Generals gathered in their masses”, the line simply arrives and is left to loom. Much of metal lyric writing operates in that space, favouring blunt declaration over explanation.

The same pressure drives lines like “Blow, winds, and split your iron throats wide” and “Crack the foundations, fracture the frames.” The language moves straight to the subject and there is no soft entry into the storm. The verbs used are destructive and immediate: “split”, “rage”, “crack”, “fracture”, “shatter”. By the time the chorus arrives, everything has narrowed into repetition. “Let it break, let it drown” gathers force precisely because it refuses variation, and becomes an invocation of sorts. 

If Shakespeare were writing lyrics for a heavy metal band, the adjustment would be surprisingly minor. He would perhaps trim the clauses, tighten the blows, and let the verbs carry more weight than the syntax. The storm in King Lear is already excessive and definitely “crack[s]” the sky open. All metal would do is provide the amplification. Shakespeare’s wooden stage would become a stack of speakers while the restless crowd remains, only now it is headbanging.

If the storm rages and the valiant stand firm, elsewhere Shakespeare abandons reflection altogether and reaches for something more direct.

“Cry ‘Havoc!’ and let slip the dogs of war.”

— Julius Caesar, Act 3 Scene 1 

There is no hesitation in that line, just command followed by consequence.

Set against distortion, it might sound like this: 

Verse 

Cry havoc — loose the chain

Unleash the hunger, unmask the flame

Let them run through blood and roar

Unleash the gates. Unleash the war. 

Chorus

Cry havoc, let them roar

Let slip the dogs of war 

Cry havoc, let them roar

Let slip the dogs of war 

The line survives almost untouched because it was already written to be repeated. Metal has never been shy about borrowing outright. Iron Maiden titled one of their most enduring tracks “The Evil That Men Do”, lifting the phrase directly from Julius Caesar: “The evil that men do lives after them”. While Shakespeare wrote it as a moral observation, metal hears it as indictment.

“Cry ‘Havoc!’” belongs to that same category, arriving fully formed and built for repetition. The command was violent before a note was played and the music simply meets it at its own intensity. 

Four centuries ago, a witch sensed something approaching and named it. “Something wicked this way comes.” The line did not need distortion to carry with it menace. It already moved with rhythm and sounded like a warning. 

Perhaps the real surprise is not that Shakespeare fits into heavy metal, but that we imagine centuries as distances at all. The roof has changed. The instruments have changed. The crowd hasn’t. What was once spoken into open air now travels through the speakers and cables, but the impulse is still the same. Amplification changes the volume. Whether it changes anything else is harder to say.