In Beethoven’s one opera Fidelio, the loyal wife Leonore, disguising herself as a man, takes on the name Fidelio, as a probable reference to Imogen’s cross-dressing as Fidele.
A portrait of Franz Schubert, who composed a lied for the song "Hark, hark! the lark."The 'Song' from Act II, Scene 3 (Hark, hark! the lark) was set to music by Franz Schubert in 1826.
Perhaps the most famous verses in the play come from the funeral song of Act IV, Scene 2, which begins:
- Fear no more the heat o' the sun,
- Nor the furious winter's rages;
- Thou thy worldly task hast done,
- Home art gone, and ta'en thy wages:
- Golden lads and girls all must,
- As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.
The first two lines are quoted by Virginia Woolf in Mrs. Dalloway by the two main characters Clarissa and Septimus Smith. The lines, which turn Mrs. Dalloway's thoughts to the trauma of the First World War, are at once an elegiac dirge and a profoundly dignified declaration of endurance. The song provides a major organisational motif for the novel. The final couplet also appears in the Anton Myrer novel, The Last Convertible.
The last two lines appear to have inspired T. S. Eliot in "Lines to a Yorkshire Terrier" (in Five-Finger Exercises). He writes:
- Pollicle dogs and cats all must
- Jellicle cats and dogs all must
- Like undertakers, come to dust.
The song was set to music by Roger Quilter as "Fear No More the Heat o' the Sun," No. 1 of Five Shakespeare Songs, Op. 23 (1921). It was also set by Gerald Finzi as part of his song cycle on texts by Shakespeare Let Us Garlands Bring (1942). The text is sung by Cleo Laine to music by John Dankworth on her 1964 album Shakespeare and All That Jazz.
At the end of Stephen Sondheim's The Frogs, William Shakespeare is competing against George Bernard Shaw for the title of best playwright, deciding which of them is to be brought back from the dead in order to improve the world. Shakespeare sings the funeral song of Act IV, Scene 2, when asked about his view of death (the song is titled "Fear No More").
"Fear no more the heat of the sun" is the line that Winnie and her husband are trying to remember in Samuel Beckett's Happy Days as they sit exposed to the elements.
In the Epilogue of the novel Appointment with Death by Agatha Christie, the first four lines of the verse are quoted by the character Ginevra Boynton as she reflects on the life of her deceased mother Mrs Boynton.
In The Scent of Water (1963) by Elizabeth Goudge, the central character, Mary Lindsay, feels struck by lightning when she realises she has fallen in love with Paul Randall, an author and Royal Air Force pilot, blinded in the last days of World War II, and married. "Fear no more the lightning-flash", Mary suddenly thinks, along with the rest of that stanza, ending "All lovers young, all lovers must /Consign to thee, and come to dust", knowing she must hide her love, and recognising that, already fifty, she is growing old (Chapter IX, Part 1, p 164).
