There's a tie between them? Indeed!
From a piece in the Los Angeles Times...
Why haven’t Shakespeare and country music come together more often?
“Country music deals so unabashedly with big feelings — just like tragedy,” Chalsma said. “I thought the audience would connect to the song.”
Country music has long been a place where songwriters explore romantic tragedy using language as compact and colorful as the Bard of Avon’s. Clever couplets, vivid imagery and unexpected turns of phrase are the stock in trade of both.
In modern times, Shakespeare’s work is often placed among the pinnacles of high art in the Western world; just the opposite of country music, which is strongly rooted in the lives and concerns of regular folk. But the two are, historically speaking, closely connected.
“It’s always ironic to me when people start talking about Shakespeare as being so highfalutin’,” said Thomas Bradac, founder of Shakespeare Orange County and a theater professor at Chapman University in Orange. “The poetry was always considered high art, and the sonnets, but the plays themselves were the dime novels of their day. That’s why the royalty didn’t go to them, and why they got kicked out of London and moved to the South Bank, next to the whorehouses.”
Some directors have set productions of “Taming of the Shrew” in the Old West to help audiences connect better with Shakespeare’s treatise on gender stereotypes, while the Bard’s best-known themes and characters have occasionally surfaced as country song fodder.
Taylor Swift’s hit “Love Story” may be the most recent example, one in which the young singer-songwriter cast herself and her would-be love as Shakespeare’s star-crossed couple. Except she added a happy ending.
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