"Yellow Submarine"

I've been reading a book of four Shakespeare plays (Four Great Comedies by William Shakespeare, published by Washington Square Press), and in the introduction to The Tempest, part of Prospero's speech in Act Five, Scene One is quoted.  One line in particular caught my attention:  "And 'twixt the green sea and the azured vault" (V.i.43).  The same sort of description is also in "Yellow Submarine," just with the order reversed:  "Sky of blue and sea of green."

In the McCartney: A Life in Lyrics podcast about "Let It Be," Paul McCartney and Paul Muldoon comment on Shakespeare's influence:

Muldoon:  For all Paul McCartney knew, the words "let it be" had come from his subconscious or as a message from beyond the grave, but after the song was released, he realized that he may have encountered these words long before he wrote the lyrics, back when he was a schoolboy at the Liverpool Institute for Boys.  There, in the English class of Paul's favorite and most formative teacher, Alan Durband, the students read Shakespeare's Hamlet for the first time.

McCartney:  So in those days, I had to learn speeches off by heart, so I can still do a bit of "To be or not to be" or "That this too too solid flesh,"* and it'd been pointed out to me recently that, um, Hamlet, when he's poisoned, he actually says, "Let it be"... Act Five, Scene Two.  ...  He says, "Let be" the first time, and then the second time, he says, "Had I but time (as this fell sergeant, Death, / Is strict in his arrest) O, I could tell you - / But let it be, Horatio."**

McCartney seems pretty convinced that Shakespeare's "Let it be" influenced his own "Let It Be," but there's really a stronger resemblance between "And 'twixt the green sea and the azured vault" and "Sky of blue and sea of green" than there is between the two "Let it be"s.  These lines in The Tempest and "Yellow Submarine" both provide a colorful maritime description, but the contexts in which the two instances of "Let it be" appear are quite different.

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*McCartney also recites this in the movie A Hard Day's Night.  I referenced two different editions of the play (Shakespeare: Four Great Tragedies from Signet Classics and The Folger Library General Reader's Shakespeare: Hamlet), but they don't agree on the line numbers.  It's either I.ii.129 or I.ii.135.  As the Signet Classics book notes, there's also a textual issue here:  "Q2 [The Second Quarto] has sallied, here modernized to sullied, which makes sense and is therefore given; but the Folio reading, solid, which fits better with melt, is quite possibly correct."

**Again, there's a discrepancy of line numbers between my editions, either V.ii.337-339 or V.ii.357-359.  The vocative "Horatio" actually goes with the next clause, "Horatio, I am dead."