Pop Sonnets

Folger Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare Unlimited

Folger Shakespeare Library

Arts

4.8 • 879 Ratings

🗓️ 10 February 2016

⏱️ 24 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

There’s something that never ceases to astound when it comes to Shakespeare – the way this 400-year-old playwright continues to pop up in popular culture. Our guest on this podcast episode is Erik Didriksen, who takes hit songs from artists like Taylor Swift and Coldplay and rewrites them as Elizabethan-style sonnets. The Tumblr where Didriksen has posted these sonnets has become so popular that he's published a book, "Pop Sonnets: Shakespearean Spins on Your Favorite Songs." He was interviewed by Barbara Bogaev. From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast series. © February 10, 2016. Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This episode, called "Press Among the Popular Throngs," was produced by Richard Paul. Garland Scott is the associate producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster and Esther Ferington. We had help from Bob Auld and Deb Stathopulos at the Radio Foundation in New York and Phil Richards and Matt Holzman at KCRW public radio in Santa Monica, California. The actors who you hear reading the sonnets are Elyse Mirto and Bo Foxworth of The Antaeus Theater Company in Los Angeles.

Transcript

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0:00.0	From the Folger Shakespeare Library, this is Shakespeare Unlimited. I'm Michael Whitmore, the
0:05.0	Folgers director. This podcast is called Press Among the Popular Thongs. It's always surprising how
0:12.9	Shakespeare, this 400-year-old playwright, continues to crop up in popular culture. This podcast
0:19.0	brings you the latest example. Since 2013, a 27-year-old
0:24.0	New York software developer named Eric Didrickson has been taking the lyrics to songs by pop stars,
0:30.6	Taylor Swift, 50 Cent, Adele, Sir Mixalot, and converting them into Elizabethan-style sonnets. The results are hilarious, and like the
0:40.0	songs that inspired them, they've become immensely popular, so much so that Eric now has a book of
0:45.7	them out. Pop sonnets, Shakespearean spins on your favorite songs, which we invited him in to talk
0:52.1	about. Eric is interviewed by Barbara Bogave.
0:55.4	How does this happen? One day you just wake up and you say to yourself, there just aren't
0:59.6	enough pop songs out there that have been rewritten in the form of Shakespearean sonnets?
1:03.2	I was wandering around the wilderness of the internet one day a couple of years ago and came
1:09.0	across a Tumblr post. Someone had screenshoted a
1:12.7	Twitter account that purportedly takes pop lyrics and turns them into Shakespearean verse,
1:18.1	but they weren't doing a terribly good job of it. And someone had posted this on Tumblr and
1:22.2	said, not niambic pentameter, do not accept. And someone responded to it, a gentleman named Johnny
1:27.1	from the UK uk responded with
1:29.4	a perfectly set shakespearean sonnet version of macklemore's thrift shop that was it impressive
1:37.0	it was one of the funniest things i've ever seen in my life and i immediately wanted to see more
1:43.7	so i dug through john Johnny's Tumblr and found
1:46.6	that that was sadly the only one. And at the time, I was mildly obsessed with Carly Ray Jepson's
1:52.2	Call Me Maybe and wanted to see a Call Me Maybe sonnet so bad that when I couldn't find one, I decided
	...

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