The story of Ophelia revolves around a young woman from an upper-class background, figuring out her place in a patriarchal world under immense pressure. She is in love and ruined by it, told by her family to forget about the man whose affections she so deeply desires; told to stay away. Her emotions are weaponised against her and her lover, and her story revolves around men who attempt to control her. She finds some kind of power and relief in singing about her rage, even when they call her mad; she sings even as she drowns, broken-hearted and consumed by everyone else’s expectations.
It’s not difficult to see why Taylor Swift might find Ophelia relatable, so much so that she opens her 12th album, The Life of a Showgirl, which dropped on October 3, with a song called “The Fate of Ophelia,” a reference to the tragic character in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The song is, in many ways, a rewriting of Ophelia’s ending — and of Swift’s.
In the prologue to her 10th album, The Tortured Poets Department, Swift pleads “temporary insanity” as the explanation for the behaviour she outlines on the record: falling for a self-sabotaging Dylan Thomas-wannabe the world condemned her for, whose sins she “would have died for,” and thinking she could fix him. She describes the romance-induced “madness” as a “mutual manic phase” and “self-harm.” She casts herself as Ophelia to her lover’s tortured, self-obsessed Hamlet.
Ophelia isn’t the main character in Hamlet, but she is a crucial one — and she is particularly subject to the viewer’s perspective. She has been reinterpreted and even rewritten by a rich lineage of artists and writers, perhaps because she’s an unfinished canvas.
“Part of the reason that women artists in different media have been interested in trying to look again at Ophelia is that she's a bit crowded out of the play,” Emma Smith, professor of Shakespeare studies at the University of Oxford, tells GLAMOUR. “I mean, one feature of that play is that everybody is crowded out by Hamlet's own intensity and ego and self-centredness.”
The lack of backstory for Ophelia, of a point of view or inner monologue, has left her vulnerable to projection over time. Everything from her image to her clothing to her words to the play as a whole has been subject to artistic reimagining, whether on the stage or in film depictions like Hamlet (2000, starring Ethan Hawke and Julia Stiles) and Ophelia (2018, starring Daisy Ridley), or in other media, like the video game Elsinore.
Taylor is now part of that history of representation. What she takes from the character is illuminating for understanding both The Life of a Showgirl and its predecessor, The Tortured Poets Department, and the stories Taylor has been drawn to for nearly two decades. More than anything, Taylor’s invocation of Ophelia makes sense because what is her public image if not an unfinished canvas, one that her fans continue to colour in with their own projections?
Who is Ophelia? Why might she matter to Taylor Swift?
In Hamlet, Ophelia is the daughter of Polonius, the chief advisor to King Claudius (Hamlet’s uncle), and the sister of Laertes. The play indicates early on that Ophelia and Hamlet previously had some sort of romance, though there aren’t many details. (“The question about the level of their relationship… is really ripe for other artists to imagine or reimagine,” Emma notes.) Meanwhile, Hamlet’s father, the previous King of Denmark, is dead, and his ghost comes back to tell Hamlet that Claudius murdered him and that Hamlet should seek revenge on Claudius for killing his brother and marrying his brother’s wife, Gertrude (Hamlet’s mother), in quick succession.
This task, to be fair, does not leave much time for romantic endeavours. Hamlet’s anger and grief cloud his love for Ophelia, sidelining her needs and emotions. When Ophelia argues in Act III, Scene I, that he’s led her on, that he made her believe he loved her, Hamlet is brutal and self-effacing in these iconic words: “I did love you once,” he says, before contradicting himself. “You should not have believed me… I loved you not… Get thee to a nunnery/Why wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners?” His thirst for vengeance crops Ophelia out of the picture.
Many fans think the “Actually Romantic” lyrics are a direct response to Brat's “Sympathy is a knife.”
So Ophelia is often relegated to the background as the plot unfolds, and her desires are either disregarded or manipulated for other characters’ goals. To add injury to insult, Hamlet later accidentally kills her father, which, combined with romantic heartbreak, spins her out into madness. In her devastation, Ophelia climbs a willow tree and falls into a brook, where she sings songs as she drowns — either by tragic accident or suicide.
This is Ophelia’s story as Shakespeare wrote it. But in scholar Elaine Showalter’s seminal essay on the topic, "Representing Ophelia: Women, Madness, and the Responsibilities of Feminist Criticism," Elaine argues that the true story of Ophelia actually lies in the many interpretations of her.
“To liberate Ophelia from the text, or to make her its tragic centre, is to reappropriate her for our own ends; to dissolve her into a female symbolism of absence is to endorse our own marginality; to make her Hamlet's anima is to reduce her to a metaphor of male experience,” Elaine wrote. “I would like to propose instead that Ophelia does have a story of her own that feminist criticism can tell; it is neither her life story, nor her love story, but rather the history of her representation.”
To that end, Ophelia is whatever a given culture — or stage production — sees her to be. In earlier versions of Hamlet, she is frail and obedient, “a pretty and pathetic child” as the Royal Shakespeare Company wrote, something to be pitied. She was originally played by boys; later by preteen and teenage girls, or even older women. Given a more “dignified” grief, or a harsher, impassioned kind. A virgin or a slut. A victim or a survivor. A damsel in distress or an empowered woman choosing her own fate. She is, in a sense, an unknowable showgirl; she can become whoever you want her to be.
A writer whose authorship has been questioned and debated, an author who did not always own or profit from their own work, a creator whose low-brow work for a mainstream audience has become the subject of study at prestigious universities… I’ll leave the comparisons there for now, at the risk of alienating sceptical Shakespeare aficionados.
But whether or not you actually believe Taylor is a modern Shakespeare of sorts, it’s clear that she’s long been drawn to his work, even if only in the high school English-class sense. In 2008, she reworked a different Shakespeare play: Romeo and Juliet. In “Love Story,” she changed the ending entirely. Romeo and Juliet don’t die; instead, he “talks to her dad” and convinces him of the purity of his love for the narrator. The two marry and ostensibly live happily ever after. A teenager rewriting the story of two teenagers in all-consuming love.
“I mean, I think she could do better, but still, she's alive and self-directed and enjoying her life and her sexuality,” says Chris Barrett, an associate professor of English at Louisiana State University who specialises in 16th- and 17th-century English literature, about Taylor's rewrite. “I think one might want that for Ophelia, whose life and sexuality are used and leveraged by people.”
On the Tortured Poets track “But Daddy I Love Him,” Taylor revisits the idea of two people who family and society think should not be together. The heroine, a “dutiful daughter,” finds freedom in a man’s “chaos,” “revelry,” and sexuality, even though everyone around her disapproves. She even quotes a line from Hamlet when she sings, “‘Stay away from her’ / The saboteurs protested too much,” a reference to Queen Gertrude’s famous remark as she watches the play within a play, “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.”
Elaine actually uses the phrase “dutiful daughter” in her essay to describe the moment when Ophelia breaks into her innuendo-laden song, the evidence of her madness in Act IV, Scene V, of Hamlet: “The mad Ophelia’s bawdy songs and verbal license, while they give her access to ‘an entirely different range of experience’ from what she is allowed as the dutiful daughter, seem to be her one sanctioned form of self-assertion as a woman, quickly followed, as if in retribution, by her death.”
That image evokes another from Taylor's oeuvre: The moment she dives into the water after performing her surprise songs on the Eras Tour, the one deviation (at least for the audience) in the three-and-a-half-hour show.
At least until Taylor introduced The Tortured Poets Department section of the tour at the beginning of the European leg. A celebratory victory lap became something more complicated: an indictment of the very fame machine that created it.
“The Fate of Ophelia” picks up the story where Tortured Poets onstage left off: She has been shot down, obliterated, glued back together for the purposes of continuing to please fans and make money. She can do it with a broken heart, and she will.
In the new song, she describes Ophelia’s situation: “The eldest daughter of a nobleman / Ophelia lived in fantasy / but love was a cold bed full of scorpions / The venom stole her sanity.” Swift herself is Ophelia, doomed to death amid her raging grief, the heartbreak of her many losses, an “eldest daughter” as well.
But unlike Ophelia, Taylor is rescued — and not from the water in which she is drowning, not before she sings her last song, but instead from the grave she’s already in. “Late one night / You dug me out of my grave and saved my heart from the fate of Ophelia,” she sings. In the play, Hamlet and Laertes go inside Ophelia’s grave and argue about who loved her more and who is sadder about her death. In Swift’s story, however, a new character jumps in and digs her out.
Her new love means she is no longer “drowning and deceived” nor “lingering in purgatory.” What happened to her is now a memory, locked away with a key only for her lover, not even for herself.
"You had to make your own sunshine, but now the sky is opalite."
It also feels notable to recognise Taylor's age in the context of Ophelia, who is typically played by someone in her teens or early 20s but whose age is never specified by Shakespeare. Swift is in no way old at 35, but she’s also not a teenager, and she’s been subject to society’s judgements about unmarried, childless women, even though she’s now engaged to Travis Kelce and on the expected path toward marriage.
In an essay for Howl Round Theatre Commons, Philippa Kelly explores what it might mean for Ophelia to be 30, or even older, as old as Gertrude and still passionately in love with a man who does not want her and will not marry her. Moving away from the “young, beautiful ingenue” type might offer more interesting possibilities for why Ophelia acts the way she does: a trapped feeling, perhaps, from the expectations of how women should live and behave; a perpetual idea that marriage is what gives women their value.
There’s nothing like a mad woman
One thing we do know about Ophelia is that she was mad, not in the angry sense, but in the 17th-century way, which has often been used to discuss a combination of grief, heartbreak, and at times, mental illness.
Historically, madness, like hysteria, has been used to subjugate women. It’s a way to sweep away complex feelings, particularly those that are deemed unbecoming. It’s also a way to describe misunderstood mental illness, another often complex and uncomfortable reality. “According to 19th-century psychiatry, female independence was madness,” reads a 2021 Time article that examines how a woman standing up to her husband could be a reason to institutionalise her.
For Ophelia, being mad is her only form of freedom. “In early modern English drama, to be mad onstage puts you in the position of being outside the society that is perhaps constricting everybody else, but it also puts you in a position of being the revelatory truth teller,” says Chris. “It's the madmen and the fools in Shakespeare who tend to have these flashes of insight because they could speak freely because no one thinks that anything they say is actually pegged to a shared reality.”
Emma adds, “One of the ironies about Hamlet is that Ophelia really only finds her voice when she seems to have been driven mad by grief.”
Like Shakespeare, Taylor often writes of “madness,” specifically in reference to women, their passions, and how the world sees them. “Magic, madness, heaven, sin,” she sings in “Blank Space,” adding that her ex-lovers “will tell you I’m insane.” On “Mad Woman,” she provokes, “Every time you call me crazy / I get more crazy / What about that? … No one likes a mad woman / You made her like that.” And in “The Last Great American Dynasty,” Swift recounts the story of Rebekah Harkness, the previous owner of her Rhode Island home, with admiration for her shamelessness: “There goes the maddest woman this town has ever seen / She had a marvellous time ruining everything.”
Taylor's use of terms like “manic phase,” “insanity,” “mad,” “crazy” can be read as a reappropriation of those words, which are so often used derogatorily by men and women — and inaccurately as ableist stereotypes regarding mental illness — to describe how women behave. Taylor has talked of her desire to be “a good girl” and where that left her: feeling powerless even as one of the most influential people in the world.
Women are instructed to be good, to play nicely, to be respectful and meek; to do what they’re told. Don’t make anyone uncomfortable. And for a woman who is also a pop star, be who people want you to be. Perform always, and don’t let the messiness show. Madness is a plot device for Swift, too.
Shakespeare’s Ophelia, meanwhile, became a blueprint for how mental illness was addressed, treated, and depicted in pop culture, as Elaine argues in her essay. There is a direct historical link from Ophelia to the version of Taylor we see in the “Fortnight” music video, wild-haired, shrieking, and chained to a hospital bed.
“One of the things Elaine points out is that [Ellen Terry, an actress in the 19th century,] in order to prepare for the role of Ophelia, visited psychiatric hospitals to see what mad women looked like,” says Heather Hirschfeld, a distinguished professor of the humanities in the English department at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and a Shakespeare scholar who edited the most recent Cambridge edition of Hamlet.
“[Ellen] wanted to give an authentic portrayal of madness, and what she discovers is that the mad women seem more theatrical than she believed mad women really were, and that they had learned their madness. I'll sum it up this way: They had learned madness from representations of Ophelia. One of the powerful things about this essay is showing you how the theater doesn't always imitate life, but life imitates the theater, because these representations are so powerful that they take on a life of their own.”
And it wasn’t just the women “throwing themselves into Ophelia-like postures,” Elaine wrote, it was the “asylum superintendents” like Dr. Hugh Welch Diamond and clinician Jean-Martin Charcot who “imposed the costume, gesture, props, and expression of Ophelia upon them” in photos that became their own kind of art form. The most famous of them are the Charcot-produced photos of a 15-year-old girl named Augustine, clad in white with wild hair.
As Asti Hustvedt wrote for The Believer in 2011, Augustine has become a cultural figure to
project upon, much like Ophelia. “Later generations have turned her into an icon: an object of desire, a victim of misogyny, or a feminist rebel, depending on who is claiming her for themselves. Artists, writers, choreographers, filmmakers, and cultural critics have adopted her as a kind of mascot, projecting their own ideas and fantasies onto a teenager.”
Taylor's introduction of “Female Rage: The Musical” as a concept in her work continues this history of madness as a literary and dramaturgical tool. When she performed “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?” during the Eras Tour, she expressed herself as a glamorous monster, a larger-than-life albatross coming to destroy you. Her white gown flew as she levitated across the stage, the mirror box an optical illusion reflecting fans — and by extension, public perception — back to themselves. She snarled and flung back her hair: “You wouldn't last an hour in the asylum where they raised me.”
And still, it’s complicated: Where do madness and challenging expectations of women get Taylor's narrator in “The Fate of Ophelia”? The heroine lives, but she is rescued by a man, tossed back into the throes of love. She does not save herself. If you read Ophelia’s downfall as her own choice, then you might read “The Fate of Ophelia” as a new man interfering with that choice — a rescue she didn’t ask for.
Half the fun of referencing Ophelia, as artists have discovered over centuries, is that to portray her differently invites more questions: Is Swift’s version of Ophelia actually more powerful? Has she learned any lessons? Or is she still in the grips of this patriarchal society where she must marry, albeit maybe a worthier candidate? Does she have any control over her fate at all? Do any of us?
The showgirl holding the paintbrush
Many Swifties have noted the resemblance of The Life of a Showgirl’s first album cover to John Everett Millais’s 19th-century painting of Ophelia at the moment of her death, adorned in flowers. (And that was just one painting of Ophelia to be shown at the Royal Academy art show of 1852, alongside Arthur Hughes’s pre-death portrait of Ophelia, in which she looks like something from the “Out of the Woods” music video.) In the cover image, Swift is submerged in water up to the curve of her flushed cheek, lips painted, still wearing a showgirl’s bejewelled costume.
"This represents the end of my night. When I'm on tour, I have the same day every single day… and my day ends with me in a bathtub,” Taylor said on the New Heights podcast. A bathtub, not a babbling Shakespearean brook. The bathtub was also visually represented at the Showgirl Spotify activation, where it was filled with flowers, among them daisies (one of Ophelia’s flowers, and used in Taylor's discography as well). "This album isn't really about what happened to me onstage, it's about what I was going through offstage. It's the life beyond the show."
Those words parallel what artists see in Ophelia: It’s less about what’s on the page (because there isn’t much), or even on the stage, and more about what lies beneath; what can be inferred or imagined based on how other characters see her and talk about her, brought into the spotlight.
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The Millais painting also raises other parallels. He began work on Ophelia when he was 22, in 1851, at a time when photography was starting to overtake painting as the medium of the day, the Tate Gallery notes in its thorough analysis and critical recap of Ophelia. Art critic John McEwan wrote that the level of detail in the work “marks a last stand in the war of the painter as sole guardian of visual truth.” Taylor has made last stands in her own artistic wars: regarding the rights of songwriters, for example, or the importance of the album as a complete concept over singles and TikTok-friendly sound bites.
The Tate analysis also brings in critic Jan Marsh’s quote about Ophelia from a June 1998 Literary Review. Jan argues that Everett Millais’s painting is famous because of “the story of its model, the Pre-Raphaelite muse Elizabeth Siddal, who lay wearing an antique brocade gown in a tin bathtub to simulate Ophelia’s last moments. The bath water grew colder and colder and — so the tale goes — Lizzie contracted pneumonia, aptly foreshadowing her own untimely death as well as that of Shakespeare’s heroine.”
A model in a bathtub, becoming and furthering the art itself, creating the image and also subjected to interpretations of herself created by a man, and ultimately, harmed by her own work ethic. The lineage of Ophelia is rife with real-life stories of exhaustion, passionate emotion, and death. Elaine writes that “the most celebrated of the actresses who played Ophelia were those whom rumor credited with disappointments in love.” Notably, Julia Stiles has said that she also passed out after the third take of Ophelia’s death scene in the 2000 movie adaptation of Hamlet.
Millais’s art is also, like all art, open to interpretation. Emma points out that while many think of it as a masterpiece, Ophelia can also feel quite disturbing. “I see a Victorian [idea] … that there is something beautiful and slightly necrophiliac about the beautiful, pale body of a young woman. That, in some awful way, is the ideal passive, sort of inflatable sex doll kind of version of women,” Emma says. “For me, I find it deeply creepy, and that it co-opts Ophelia for this death cult of beautiful, dead girls, which I find very, very difficult.”
Chris echoes this: “It bothers me that for so long [Ophelia] was received as someone first who has this beautiful death. The popularity of those images, I think it's troubled a lot of us who would really like the fate of Ophelia to look different than it ends up being. I think we all sort of feel like she deserved better.”
That reading would be an interesting reason to revisit the work as an album cover, a chance to counter the idea of female passivity, of the glorification of young beauty and death. In the Swift cover, her eyes are alive and knowing. She is the focus of the art, but she also holds the paintbrush, and our gaze.
“What is our responsibility to Ophelia?” Heather questions. “It's to recognise in many ways that she's serving our own purposes as we argue about what constitutes womanhood, idealised womanhood, sexuality, femininity.”
And that may be the way in which Taylor is most like Ophelia after all, not as a victim of men or a lovelorn woman or even a straightforward feminist heroine, but as a cultural touchstone whose impact is in our understanding and misunderstanding of her. Just as Ophelia is a projection of the cultural and personal values of whoever is writing about her or analysing her at a given time, including Swift herself as a writer, so is Taylor. So massive, so influential, with fans and critics who are inspired — even encouraged — to project on her their own lives, experiences, and desires.
Elaine wrote that “there is no ‘true’ Ophelia… but perhaps only a Cubist Ophelia of multiple perspectives, more than the sum of all her parts.” The same feels true for Taylor, the public entity, whether you see her as a victim or a villain, a heroine or an anti-hero, a self-obsessed billionaire or a benevolent philanthropist, the foremost chronicler of girlhood or the pettiest woman to have ever lived. How we see her has always indicated more about us, for better or worse, than the showgirl on the stage.
This article was originally published on Teen Vogue.
Even non-Swifties can't escape Taylor's influence.
