The Connection Between The Beatles’ “I Am the Walrus,” Avant-Garde Composers, and Shakespeare

The Beatles’ 1967 track, “I Am the Walrus”, has as big an amalgamation of sources of inspiration as one might expect from a song that begins, “I am he as you are he, as you are me, and we are all together. See how they run like pigs from a gun, see how they fly. I’m crying.”

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One fairly obvious source of inspiration? LSD, the curious psychedelic that helped fuel late Beatles albums like Magical Mystery Tour and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. But the band didn’t limit themselves to hits of a***.

According to Paul McCartney, an avant-garde composer and good ol’ Billy Shakespeare also played a part in creating the classic Beatles track.

Paul McCartney Pulled From the Avant-Garde

Unless you’re a high-brow culturalist, composer, or former music school student, you might not be readily familiar with the name John Cage. The avant-garde composer produced his most famous pieces in the 1950s and 60s, including “4:33”, a staple in most music history classrooms for its highly avant-garde nature. (For those who haven’t experienced this staple composition fully, we wouldn’t dare take that opportunity away from you.)

In addition to abstract compositions like “4:33”, Cage also used various equipment, like radio transmitters, to create his works. “Cage had a piece that started at one end of the radio’s range,” Paul McCartney explained in a 2025 interview with The Guardian. “He just turned the knob and went through to the end, scrolling randomly through all the stations. I brought that idea to ‘I Am the Walrus’. I said, ‘It’s got to be random.’ We ended up landing on some Shakespeare, King Lear. It was lovely having that spoken word at that moment. And that came from Cage.”

According to John Lennon, the inclusion of the Shakespearean excerpt, hardly audible toward the end of “I Am the Walrus”, had less to do with their admiration for avant-garde composers and more sheer chance.

The Beatles’ “I Am the Walrus” and Shakespeare

Paul McCartney might have been trying to embody this topsy-turvy creative approach à la John Cage when he thought to make “I Am the Walrus” a sprawling, almost disjointed musical piece that sounded like someone was surfing on a radio dial. But in a 1974 interview, John Lennon said the Shakespearean inclusion specifically was nothing more than a happy accident.

“That was live radio coming from the BBC,” Lennon explained. “Though they never knew it. When I was mixing the record, I just had a radio in the room that was tuned to some BBC channel all the time, and we did about, I don’t know, half a dozen mixes. I just used whatever was coming through at the time. I never knew it was King Lear til years later somebody told me, because I could hardly make out what he was saying. But I just sort of… It was interesting to mix the whole thing with a live radio coming through it.”

For those who may be curious, the specific excerpt from King Lear is from Act IV, Scene VI, and is a brief part of a conversation between Oswald and Edgar.

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