In the world of Taylor Swift, tragic endings for Shakespearean heroines get turned into happily ever afters. Not because her versions of Juliet and Ophelia have taken control of their own fate—but because a man has come to save the day.
Seventeen years after Swift rewrote Romeo and Juliet with “Love Story,” she’s taken on Hamlet’s lover, Ophelia, with the first song on The Life of a Showgirl, which dropped Friday. As anticipated, the song is deliciously packed with references to Shakespeare’s text—but it’s also bound to disappoint anyone who thought we might get a bold, perhaps even empowering reimagining of the archetypal sad teenage girl.
For the uninitiated: In Hamlet, written in or around the year 1600, Ophelia goes apparently mad after she’s dealt blow after blow. Her father, Polonius, forbids her to be with Hamlet, telling her that the Danish prince is out of her league. Polonius and King Claudius then coerce Ophelia into playing the part of bait as they spy on Hamlet. Finally, the death of her father at Hamlet’s hand—he stabs Polonius through a tapestry, mistakenly believing the artwork is concealing Claudius—sends Ophelia into what modern audiences might call a psychotic episode or an emotional breakdown.
The most recognizable image of Ophelia is her tragic end: drowning in what may have been a suicide. In the 1850s, English artist John Everett Millais painted an iconic image of her “muddy death.” After centuries of interpreting her as a meek character, theater-makers and scholars have increasingly studied and reinterpreted Ophelia through the lenses of feminism and modern psychology—revealing more layers to the character, and how analysis of her often reflects whatever society is examining her.
The pre-chorus of “The Fate of Ophelia” begins with Swift, backed by groovy synth chords, singing, “If you’d never come for me / I might’ve drowned in the melancholy.” Swift pledges her devotion to the person who “Dug me out of my grave and / Saved my heart from the fate of Ophelia.” She makes several overt references to Shakespeare in the song:
“No longer drowning and deceived”
Hamlet’s dialogue refers to Ophelia using both of these words. She literally drowns (according to Queen Gertrude at least), and she replies to Hamlet’s biting claim that he never really loved her by saying, “I was the more deceived.” (Hamlet later declares that he actually did love Ophelia, but only when he’s beside her grave.)
“Keep it one hundred”
This is a fun modernization of Polonius’s oft-quoted advice: “To thine own self be true.”
“’Tis locked inside my memory / And only you possess the key”
Here, Swift roughly quotes Ophelia speaking to her brother, Laertes. In the song, these words may be referencing “the sleepless night you’ve been dreaming of” that Swift mentions two lines before. It’s a satisfying overturning of the words’ original context: In the play, what Ophelia promises to keep locked in her memory is Laertes’s advice to stay away from Hamlet).
“The eldest daughter of a nobleman”
These words tease of the album’s later song, “Eldest Daughter”—and Swift really is the eldest of two. But they’re also interesting, given that Hamlet never explicitly states which of Polonius’s children is older.
“I might’ve lingered in purgatory”
Shakespeare’s audience would have understood Hamlet’s father’s ghost as a being in purgatory. (Though Shakespeare avoids the word ‘purgatory’ itself in the play, as its use would have been dangerously close to referencing banned Catholic theology.) Swift transfers Hamlet Sr.’s predicament to her own liminal space, perhaps between hope and despair for a soulmate.
“But love was a cold bed full of scorpions / The venom stole her sanity”
Here, Swift pulls from another Shakespeare work, Macbeth (“O full of scorpions is my mind!” cries the Scottish king mid-play), then weaves in Hamlet’s motif of poison and venom (the tool for multiple murders in the play). It’s the song’s one brief mention of Ophelia’s apparent descent into madness—a somewhat surprising turn for a songstress who has, in recent years, more thoroughly explored women dismissed as crazy in numerous tracks from, “The Last Great American Dynasty” to “Madwoman” to “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?”
