The Bob Dylan Book Club Book-of-the-Month for May 2025 is Andrew Muir’s Bob Dylan & William Shakespeare: The True Performing of It. As Bob Dylan’s creative output grew and as his audience began to recognize his genius, fans and academics began to search for comparisons and quickly those comparisons were pulled, as with a gravitational force, to that “great literary figure” (as Dylan called him), William Shakespeare. Dylan and Shakespeare are witty, even hilarious. They share stories and insights about the depths of the human experience. They both have a talent for short, memorable phrases that become part of our own language. They both write of individuals with high social standing and low. They play with language. They have the ability to catch and hold our attention. They use both the language of the more educated and less educated. Both wrote for performance and for a public audience.
At first, phrases like “the Shakespeare of our time” or “this is what it was like to walk the earth when Shakespeare was alive” seemed to be a way of challenging the world to see Dylan as monumental. Through time and perhaps partly because of the Nobel Prize (2016), the comparisons to Shakespeare went from provocative and daring to plausible and unchallenged, even obvious. Dylan himself referred to Shakespeare in his Nobel Banquet Speech (delivered by the US Embassador to Sweden, Azita Raji) and in his Nobel Lecture. In both, Dylan emphasizes that Dylan and Shakespeare both wrote primarily for performance. A year earliler, he also mentioned Shakespeare (and Mystery Plays) in his acceptance speech for an award presented by Musicares (2015).
When I inquired of our author, Andrew Muir, about how the theme for this book first took shape, he wrote:
”My first school experiences with Shakespeare were terrible, but in my last year we studied Macbeth, and I fell in love with the language and I’ve been in love with it ever since. [In my] mid-teens I fell in love with Shakespeare, Dylan and Dostoyevsky in the same year and have loved all three for the last 50 years.
“I wouldn’t say I am a Shakespeare scholar really, and, if so (it seems too boastful a title), only for the last ten years have I written on him; though I did study him in other periods, including 4 years at University. However, I never wrote about him until 2014-5.
[As for how Muir got into Dylan, click here: gotinto.pdf.]
“I started my first Dylan fanzine in 1990 (it ran to 1995) and my second ran c 2001-2006. I wrote articles on Dylan for other fanzines, ran a column for some years in ISIS and was very active online in the 90s. [My] first Dylan book was written in 1999-early 2000 and published 2001.”
Dylan and Shakespeare came closer together in Muir’s work:
“In 2015 I wrote a book on an outdoor annual Shakespeare Festival. I had just finished the updated book on Dylan’s live performing and so the two things fused in my mind as I was writing the Shakespeare book, I kept taking notes of Dylan echoes. I wrote a piece in ISIS on Dylan and Shakespeare and the Early Mystery plays (something he then mentioned at MusiCares – yes, I’m sure only a coincidence….) and ideas just kept growing and I realised I had a book on my hands. I started writing [The True Performing of It] before Dylan’s Nobel’s speech [2016] and before MusiCares [2015].There are so many connections and insightful parallels…The book took some years to write as I was working full time for most of it. Of course, Dylan kept doing new things—like the Nobel—that I had do incorporate. I had it finished in 2017-8 but it took some time to go through the publication process being neither fully popular nor fully academic. And, inevitably, I tinkered with it in the meantime. After the first version of the book, Dylan released Murder Most Foul and then Rough and Rowdy Ways and so a chapter was added.
“I have a particular interest in live performance v text; stage v page and I also greatly admire those who produced popular art – Burns, Dylan, Dickens, Shakespeare that is later appreciated as the highest of literary achievements.”
Bob Dyland & Willilam Shakespeare: The True Performing of It has two versions: the later version includes material on Dylan’s 2020 album Rough and Rowdy Ways. When last checked, this second version is available in the US only as a eBook, but is available as a physical book in the UK. For quick reference: the second version has a quote by Michael Gray at the top and the cover picture is larger (see image above). An overview of the second version, with additional links, is HERE.
Andrew Muir is a freelance writer and retired teacher of English Literature and Language. His publications include two books on Bob Dylan as a live performer: Razor’s Edge (2001) and One More Night (2013) plus a study of Dylan’s lyrics, Troubadour (2003) and an examination of historical and contemporary outdoor Shakespeare performances: Shakespeare in Cambridge (2015). His latest book came out in 2019 and was entitled Bob Dylan and William Shakespeare: The True Performing of It.
Muir started his first Dylan fanzines in 1990 (it ran to 1995) and his second ran from 2001-2006. Copies of the first and most of the second are available for free download:
c. 1990-1995 Homer, the slut = https://www.a-muir.co.uk/Dylan/OMN/hts.html
c. 2001-2006 Judas! = https://www.a-muir.co.uk/Dylan/OMN/judas.html
Muir is one of the Dylanologists interviewed in Bob Knows: Conversations with Dylanologists: Zoppas, Marco: 9781476693231: Amazon.com: Books
Muir’s substack presents additonal writings:
Muir’s first substack post was reprinted in a magazine for English teachers called “The Use of English” (the article on The Ballad of Donald White).
Videos featuring Andrew Muir:
The state of Shakespeare
Meeting Bob Dylan
The Bobcats
Muir’s substack:
What Does This Song Import
She Died Singing It
Our Wells Run Deep
Stuart Hampton-Reeves’ review of Bob Dyland & William Shakespeare: The True Performing of It in the Dylan Review.
And for fun:
April 29, 1966: Bob Dylan visits Hamlet’s Castle in Denmark
—Peter White, April 2025