Drake’s “Hotline Bling” Gets The Shakespearian Treatment

Drake has made something of his own language. The Toronto rapper has created signature phrases such as “touching road,” turning the New Orleans term “woadies” into “woes,” and dubbing his hometown of Toronto “The Six.”

An artist who was truly defined by the language he created was William Shakespeare. The English playwright and poet invented at least 45 phrases that we now use in everyday English, although reading through a Shakespeare play is far from today’s modern vernacular.

Drake’s “Hotline Bling” has been translated into Shakespearian by David F Brand. The poem, entitled “When Thy Messenger Alights,” tells the tale of a man questioning a lover and reminiscing on the letters she would send him. The chorus to “Hotline Bling” is rewritten a different way for multiple stanzas of the poem. The opening stanza relates the woman calling Drake on his cell phone to a messenger unwinding a scroll.

“Thou didst nightly send me your attendant / When thy watery moon cast quenching beams. / Sealed temptation inside a parchment / And then sighed upon a midnight pillow. / I know when thy messenger unwinds thy scroll / It foretells that you bethink fantasies / Thy note discovers thy unchaste plan / Beckons forth to me: ‘Attend apace, man!’”