“No one likes a mad woman,” Taylor Swift sings on a haunting track from her 2020 album Folklore. Yet, it’s a sentiment Swift herself often challenges. Her extensive discography is brimming with fierce portrayals of female characters traditionally dismissed and even penalized by patriarchal society for being ‘too much.’
Consider the defiant witches in “I Did Something Bad,” the humorously “insane” ex-girlfriend from her “Blank Space” music video, or the titular “Mad Woman” who provocatively tells her critics, “Every time you call me crazy, I get more crazy — what about that?”
Given this recurring theme, it felt inevitable that Swift would eventually tackle Ophelia, one of literature’s most iconic figures linked to female madness. The tragic heroine of Hamlet, Ophelia’s descent into insanity culminates in her tragic drowning in a brook.
Swift has now delivered with “The Fate of Ophelia,” the electrifying opening track and lead single from her monumental 12th original album, “The Life of a Showgirl.” She fully commits to the theme: the song’s narrative directly addresses Shakespeare’s ill-fated Danish maiden. Its music video dramatically opens with Swift embodying a Pre-Raphaelite Ophelia, reminiscent of John Everett Millais’s celebrated 1852 painting. Even the album cover offers a contemporary nod to Millais’s artwork, featuring a glittering Swift submerged in bath water, yet gazing directly at the viewer, vividly alive.
The article features an image of John Everett Millais’s 1852 painting of Ophelia, showing the tragic heroine lying on her back in a stream. This iconic depiction of Ophelia has long served as an inspiration for musicians, a tradition now embraced by Taylor Swift.
A second image highlights Swift’s “The Life of a Showgirl” album cover, which directly echoes the visual themes of Ophelia.
Swift is far from the first artist to find inspiration in Hamlet’s beloved. Ophelia has fascinated culture for centuries, emerging as Shakespeare’s most frequently painted heroine. Despite appearing in only five of the play’s twenty scenes—making her a minor character by sheer text volume—her mystique is immense. This is partly due to the ambiguity surrounding her death (did she fall, or did she choose to leap?) and the sexually charged language Shakespeare uses to describe her madness.
Plenty of musicians have drawn from her as a muse, too, in part because her name’s many vowels and lilting syllables seem to possess an inherent melody. Robbie Robertson sought her out on a lively 1975 single by The Band, much like The Lumineers did more recently on a 2016 folk anthem. The Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter famously used the evocative phrase “the fate of Ophelia” in the band’s 1980 tune “Althea,” prompting a curious thought: Is Swift secretly a Deadhead? In Bob Dylan’s “Desolation Row,” Ophelia is enduring her 22nd birthday in the worst way: “Ophelia, she’s ’neath the window / For her I feel so afraid / On her twenty-second birthday / She already is an old maid.”
While some readers perceive Ophelia purely as a submissive victim, others, particularly feminists, have strived to reclaim her as a subtly rebellious figure, viewing her madness as a rejection of patriarchal norms. Natalie Merchant pursued this interpretation on her 1998 album, “Ophelia,” whose title track reimagines Ophelia as a time-traveling Everywoman navigating centuries of female oppression. “Ophelia was the rebel girl, a bluestocking suffragette,” Merchant sings, “who remedied society between her cigarettes.”
In Swift’s slinky, energetic, and undeniably catchy new single, Ophelia is presented less as a figure of subversive power and more as a dire possibility. “You saved my heart from the fate of Ophelia,” Swift sings to a lover in the chorus. (During an interview for “The Official Release Party of a Showgirl,” an accompanying album event screened in theaters, Swift mentions this is her second time rewriting a Shakespearean tragedy for a happy ending, following the reimagined fate of Romeo and Juliet in her “Love Story.”)
“If you’d never come for me,” she sings on the new track, “I might have drowned in the melancholy / I swore my loyalty to me, myself and I / Right before you lit my sky up.”
The song serves as a joyful ode to love—presumably a more steadfast devotion than the inconsistent Hamlet could ever offer Ophelia. However, there’s a somewhat disheartening aspect to Swift reducing one of literature’s most captivating heroines to merely another princess awaiting her Prince Charming, and simplifying her profound madness as something easily curable by the right man.
Certainly, the constraints of a three-and-a-half-minute pop song limit storytelling depth, and Swift herself has noted her aim for more concise lyricism on this album. Yet, by framing Ophelia as purely a cautionary tale, Swift seems to diminish her compelling mystique—that alluring ambiguity that has prompted generations to paint her, debate her, and sing her name.