Andrew Muir

“The 1997 album Time Out of Mind was released after, though written prior to, a brush with mortality for the singer himself when he contracted histoplasmosis whose symptoms range from being flu like to being life threatening. Dylan was seriously ill and, upon returning to public view from his recuperation, wryly remarked that: “I really thought I’d be seeing Elvis soon.”
― Andrew Muir, Bob Dylan & William Shakespeare: The True Performing of It

“Kill me dead” is a tautology that worries some critics, but Dylan, before writing his own version, sang it early (and later) in his career as part of ‘Cocaine Blues’. It appears straight, as those three words, in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus and in variants elsewhere, most notably, given Dylan’s frequent recourse to that seminal play, in Hamlet.1 We will be looking at the language of Dylan’s Tempest in detail in the final chapter, but it is fitting here to quote one of Anne Margaret Daniel’s notes on ‘Early Roman Kings’: “That ‘Gonna shake ’em all down’ sounds contemporary, or at least twentieth century; automatically, we associate shakedown with the Grateful Dead, yet, it too is Shakespeare’s. Merriam-Webster lists its first use in 1859, but Shakespeare riffed on it in Coriolanus.”
― Andrew Muir, Bob Dylan & William Shakespeare: The True Performing of It