First comes Groundhog Day, then comes Easter, then comes Shakespeare’s birthday. All that remains is for us to lock up a sacrifice in the Wicker Man on April 30 and Sulis will have been appeased.

We don’t know when, exactly, the Bard was born, but his baptismal date is April 26, 1564. Since it’s human nature to try to keep things neat, his natal day is generally held to be April 23, the very date of his death in 1616.

I hope you’ll join me this morning, as we celebrate the Bard, with a full morning of music inspired by his plays. We’ll hear selections from composers who were Shakespeare’s contemporaries, right on down to Paul Moravec’s “Tempest Fantasy,” which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2004.

Other treats will include a recording of Ralph Vaughan Williams conducting his own “Serenade to Music,” after a text from “The Merchant of Venice,” a reconstructed duet from a projected opera on the subject of “Romeo and Juliet” by Peter Ilych Tchaikovsky, and incidental music for a production of “Antony and Cleopatra” by French composer Florent Schmitt, in an opulent recording conducted by JoAnn Falletta.

Just some of the ingredients that will go into a secret recipe made public from 6 to 11 a.m. EDT, on WPRB 103.3 FM and wprb.com. We engage in a little Shake and bake, on Classic Ross Amico.

If music be the food of love, bake on.