Saturday is the big day. The 400th anniversary of the death of William Shakespeare. Also the anniversary of his birthday (52 years earlier), allegedly. Have you anything special planned? Back-to-back screenings of the Olivier and Branagh versions of “Henry V?” Falstaff beer pong? A “Hamlet” sleepover?

We’ll do our best to get your creative juices flowing this morning, as we set the scene with the third of four programs devoted to music inspired by the Bard’s plays. Be with me bright and early for Johan Svendsen’s “Romeo and Juliet,” Sir William Walton’s “As You Like It,” and Josef Bohuslav Foerster’s “From Shakespeare,” really musical portraits of four female characters from Shakespeare’s plays (Perdita from “The Winter’s Tale,” Viola from “Twelfth Night,” Lady Macbeth from, well, “Macbeth,” and Katherina from “The Taming of the Shrew”). And that’s just in the 6:00 hour!

Before too late, we’ll also have Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s “Much Ado About Nothing” and “Cymbeline” by his teacher, Alexander Zemlinsky. By then, you should be sufficiently caffeinated to compose sonnets with a quill.

I’ll be welcoming two guests this morning: Mariusz Smolij, music director of the Riverside Symphonia , who will tell us about his orchestra’s Friday night concert at St. Martin of Tours Church in New Hope – he’ll talk to us a little after 8 – and William Walker from The Princeton Singers will drop by a little after 9 to tell us about the choir’s Shakespeare-inspired concerts at Princeton University Art Museum on Saturday evening.

Music and sweet poetry agree this morning, from 6 to 11 EDT, on WPRB 103.3 FM and at wprb.com. We’re donning an Elizabethan collar, on Classic Ross Amico.

#Shakespeare400