The Bard and the Bunny: Love and Heartbreak

One obvious intersection between Shakespeare’s works and Bad Bunny’s music is their exploration of love and heartbreak. Love, in both its joy and its anguish, is a universal theme neither artist shies away from. Shakespeare, of course, penned some of the most enduring love stories and poems of all time. The tragic Romeo and Juliet set a template for passionate romances doomed by fate, while comedies such as Twelfth Night and Taming of the Shrew explore the many humorous pathways of falling in love. Beyond his stories, Shakespeare’s sonnets lay bare the Bard’s own musings about love’s beauty and pain, as in “Sonnet 130,” where he uses cliches to satirize popular love poetry, or in ”Sonnet 16,” where he defines true love as an “ever-fixed mark.” Importantly, Shakespeare didn’t portray love as purely blissful; he usually dug into deep topics such as jealousy (Othello), rejection, sacrifice, and madness. In Much Ado About Nothing, Beatrice and Benedick show how love can be tempered with sharp wit and reluctance. Approaching the topic from these many angles, Shakespeare treated love and the emotions surrounding it as incredibly complex and profoundly human.

Though Reggaeton as a genre may be best known for the dance music, a significant portion of the music is devoted to the trials and tribulations of love. The face of the genre, Bad Bunny represents  this content ratio well, as he has a surprisingly large collection of songs about love, heartbreak, and everything surrounding it. In fact, some of his biggest hits are breakup songs or meditations on lost love. His bluntly titles track “Amorfoda” (Puerto Rican slang that roughly means “love, f*cked”) is a modern equivalent of a heartbreaking soliloquy. Over a simple piano, Bad Bunny processes  raw pain and bitterness towards his ex, cursing the romance that left him hurt. These unfiltered emotions of anger, sorrow, and longing resonate with his listeners much like some of Shakespere’s more despairing monologues on love moved past and present audiences, such as when Juliet agonizes over Romeo’s banishment or Duke Orsino in Twelfth Night melodramatically sings about his unrequited love for Olivia. Bad Bunny often juxtaposes upbeat and catchy music with melancholy lyrics, highlighting the bittersweet duality of heartbreak. In his collaboration with J Balvin “La Canción,” he talks about the memory of a lost lover triggered in him by hearing “the song” they used to dance to together. It essentially is a 21st century, reggaeton-style take on love’s haunting reminiscences. One can easily imagine Shakespearean characters being stirred in a similar manner by a romantic tune that revives old feelings in them. 

Interestingly, both artists also explore the theme of empowerment and self-worth in relationships. Shakespeare gave us strong-willed characters like Beatrice, who wouldn’t settle for anything less than a deep, mutual love, but he also gave us tragic figures like Cordelia in King Lear who suffers banishment and death for staying true to her principles of love and honesty. Similarly, Bad Bunny often flips the script of the reggaeton landscape, strongly rooted in machismo culture, to uplift the perspective of the ones that are usually powerless in love. In “Soy Peor,” he turns deep heartbreak into a way to brag, claiming defiantly that the pain of separation made him wilder. Even more interestingly, Bad Bunny has songs like “Solo de Mi” where the narrative voice, in this case a woman, asserts independence from a partner that is abusive: “Yo no soy tuyo ni de nadie, yo soy solo de mí” (“I’m not yours or anyone’s, I belong only to myself).” This line is a powerful modern manifesto of self-possession and resilience that would be applauded by Shakespeare’s characters. One can draw a direct line from Shakespeare’s Portia, who insists on staying true to herself and outwitting the ones underestimating her in The Merchant of Venice, to the speaker in “Solo de Mi” claiming her autonomy. Across the centuries, the message between the two artists stays the same: that, in love and in life, knowing your worth is extremely important.