William Shakespeare’s many facets allow each era to respond to his writings in its own way. In the nineteenth century, Giuseppe Verdi turned Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Othello into tragic operas and transformed The Merry Wives of Windsor into Falstaff, and in the twentieth century, Duke Ellington composed jazz works inspired by Shakespeare. In 1957 Ellington recorded Such Sweet Thunder, a collection of twelve pieces alluding to Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets, and in 1963 he wrote the music for a stage production of Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens.

In August, 1956, Ellington and his orchestra were in Toronto, Canada, to perform at Ontario’s annual Stratford Shakespearean Festival. Conversations with the festival’s producers resulted in Ellington and his collaborator and arranger, Billy Strayhorn, agreeing to write a jazz suite to honor the Bard. By April, 1957, Ellington and Strayhorn had written a thirty-five minute compilation called Such Sweet Thunder. The title came from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act IV, Scene, 1, where Hippolyta says, “I never heard/So musical a discord, such sweet thunder.”

In Duke, his 2013 biography of Ellington, Terry Teachout explained that some of the pieces, such as “Star-Crossed Lovers” and “Half the Fun,” were “pre-existing compositions” that Ellington and Strayhorn dusted off and renamed for including in this suite. Teachout quoted Strayhorn saying that Ellington had long been “intrigued by Shakespeare, ’cause he said Shakespeare certainly knew more about people than anyone he’s ever known,” and Strayhorn said that Ellington believed that “the only way Shakespeare could have known as much about people as he did, was by hanging out on the corner, or in the pool room.”

Be that as it may, Teachout was skeptical of Ellington’s claims to extensive knowledge about Shakespeare. While Ellington spent time every morning reading his Bible, he seems to have read little else beyond some magazines. In contrast, Strayhorn, fluent in French, read widely in French and English literature and studied the lives and works of classical composers. “When it came to high culture,” Teachout wrote, “Ellington was a poseur, a strangely incurious man who knew next to nothing about classical music and read not systematically but at random.” Teachout speculated that Ellington was “unconsciously jealous of his bilingual protégé from Pittsburgh.”

However, according to the liner notes by Irving Townsend for the LP of Such Sweet Thunder, Ellington’s interest in Shakespeare had a long history: In 1933, when performing in England, Ellington visited Anne Hathaway’s cottage in Stratford. Townsend then quoted Ellington’s description of Such Sweet Thunder as an “attempt to parallel the vignettes of some of the Shakespearean characters in miniature.”

Townsend also noted that three of the pieces, “Such Sweet Thunder,” “Sonnet in Search of a Moor,” and “The Telecasters” drew upon Othello. Ellington’s “Sonnet for Caesar” has a stately melancholy of clarinets, brass, and piano evoking a funeral march, and for the next piece, “Sonnet to Hank Cinq,” Townsend wrote that “Ellington uses his second sonnet to pay tribute to Shakespeare’s preoccupation with history.” Regarding that musical sonnet for King Henry V, Townsend quoted Ellington as saying, “the changes in tempo have to do with the changes of pace and the map as a result of wars.”

In 1963, Michael Langham, artistic director of the Stratford Shakespearean Festival, planned to produce Timon of Athens. A work rarely performed, Langham wanted to set it around 1930, and to go along with that period, he asked Ellington to compose incidental music for the production. Arnold Edinborough, writing in the Autumn, 1963, issue of Shakespeare Quarterly, merely noted, “Timon of Athens was done in modern dress with a musical score composed by Duke Ellington,” and then critiqued details of the performance.

As with a few other Shakespeare plays, scholars suspect that for Timon of Athens Shakespeare had a co-author. In The Making of Shakespeare’s First Folio (2015), Emma Smith described how certain turns of phrase lead some scholars to believe that Thomas Middleton wrote parts of Timon of Athens. For example, Middleton, being younger and from London, may have used the more modern “I went” instead of the older, more rural, “I did go.”

Smith further observed that the editors of the First Folio, John Heminges and Henry Condell, might have been unsure of Shakespearean authorship of Timon of Athens. They added that play to the First Folio only after they could not secure the rights to publish Troilus and Cressida. Nevertheless, Heminges and Condell did add Timon to the First Folio, and, while interpreting the different phrasing is plausible, it contradicts all the scholarly praise lavished on Shakespeare’s innovative syntax and varied vocabulary.

In 2005, in his biography of Shakespeare, Peter Ackroyd surmised that when Shakespeare read Plutarch’s life of Marc Antony, he began mulling over Plutarch’s digression mentioning Timon. In Timon of Athens, as in Julius Caesar and Macbeth, Shakespeare combined his interest in history with his fascination with fairy tale. There was a real Timon of Athens, living in the fifth century before Christ, but Shakespeare may as well have begun his play with a Chorus saying, “Once upon a time, there was a very rich man . . .”

For thirty years, Ellington’s handwritten score for Timon of Athens sat filed away in the Stratford Shakespearean Festival’s archives. Then, in 1993, Langham decided to do the play again, and he wanted to re-use Ellington’s bluesy, noir themes. Langham asked conductor Stanley Silverman to restore and adapt Ellington’s score, and Silverman later issued his version as a compact disc.

Even with Silverman’s recording of Ellington’s Timon of Athens, Ellington’s musical tributes to Shakespeare seem largely forgotten. Alongside such Ellington hits as “Mood Indigo,” “Satin Doll,” and “Take the ‘A’ Train,” that fading from public memory becomes understandable. Still, Ellington described himself as “beyond category,” and experimenting with musical sketches from Shakespeare appealed to his sense of creativity. When Ellington died, Alistair Cooke, long a fan of Ellington’s music, wrote of him, “He never stuck in the current groove, or his own groove.”

As for another Duke, John Wayne, there is also a Shakespearean connection. Just as 1963 saw Duke Ellington composing music for a Jazz Age Timon of Athens, that year also saw John Wayne starring with Maureen O’Hara in a Western comedy, McLintock! While Wayne and his ensemble cast were not reciting blank verse, they were playing chess and following the plot of The Taming of the Shrew.