If you’re like Travis Kelce and were “definitely supposed to” read “The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark” by William Shakespeare but never did, fear not, for your local STEM major who took one Shakespeare class is here. Taylor Swift’s new album “The Life of a Showgirl” opens with “The Fate of Ophelia,” a song that just reached its fourth week at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100. Swift has faced controversy online for seemingly writing a new ending to a famously devastating story, so I’m here to set the record straight for my close personal friend Taylor Swift.
Who’s Ophelia anyway, and what is her fate?
Ophelia is one of Shakespeare’s most iconic tragic characters. She is, as Swift says, “the eldest daughter of a nobleman,” meaning Polonius, the councilor to the King of Denmark. While Ophelia only appears in five of the play’s 20 scenes, she’s a powerful personification of guilt, manipulation and depression.
Throughout the course of the story, Ophelia is manipulated by all the men in her life. This includes her father Polonius, her brother Laertes and Hamlet himself. The constant mental anguish of being used as a pawn eventually drives Ophelia mad. She meets her fateful end, drowning beneath a willow tree.
You may be wondering why on earth Taylor Swift would hear this story and think, “Yeah, I’ll write a love song about this!” Fair question, but the song really isn’t about Ophelia’s death; it’s about Swift’s survival. As much as I hate to boil an intelligent woman down to her romantic history, “The Fate of Ophelia” is undeniably a love song. Swift, who we all know has had her fair share of heartbreak, uses Ophelia’s story as a reflection of the loneliness and manipulation she faced before finding her now-fiancé, Travis Kelce.
Early in the song, Swift sings, “And if you’d never come for me / I might’ve drowned in the melancholy.” This is a clear nod to Ophelia’s cataclysmic end. Ophelia not only drowns physically but is also consumed emotionally by her “melancholy”. Whether her death was an accident or intentional, we never do find out. Either way, Ophelia climbs a precarious willow tree as her mind unravels and falls into the water below.
Swift suggests that without finding love, she may have faced a similar emotional fate. Ophelia had no one honest or trustworthy in her life; Swift implies that finding someone raw and honest saved her from the same despair. Maybe if Ophelia had someone to tether her to reality, she would’ve met a different end.
In the infectious chorus, Swift sings, “Late one night / You dug me out of my grave and saved my heart from the fate of Ophelia.” This is a clever call to the gravedigger’s scene in “Hamlet.” One of the only darkly comical scenes in the tragedy features two gravediggers joking about death.
Swift transforms the grim imagery by suggesting that being “dug out of her grave” represents being pulled back into love after heartbreak. Ophelia lived and died as a plaything for men, an unfortunate fate of so many women, both real and fictional, throughout history. In contrast, Swift is revived by a man who viewed her as a human, not a toy.
Verse two deepens this reflection: “The eldest daughter of a nobleman / Ophelia lived in fantasy.” Here, Swift is both describing Ophelia and herself. Like Ophelia, Swift is an eldest daughter; like Ophelia, she has lived much of her life in fantasy. In her albums “Folklore” and “Evermore,” she delves into fanciful daydreams, telling stories that are not her own.
In her song “I Hate it Here,” she sings of feeling the need to escape into a world of her own making: “I hate it here so I will go to/secret gardens in my mind/People need a key to get to/The only one is mine.” Through these parallels, Swift isn’t rewriting “Hamlet,” she’s reframing it. She tells her own story through the lens of Ophelia’s.
Later in verse two, Swift sings, “But love was a cold bed full of scorpions/The venom stole her sanity.” Throughout her short time in “Hamlet,” Ophelia is never loved truly or deeply. She is used as a pawn in the game between Polonius, Laertes and Hamlet. Hamlet confuses and manipulates her with incomplete declarations of love. He is a typical modern-day playboy in an Elizabethan setting. He promises he loves Ophelia one day and then claims to hate her the next.
He appears to enjoy twisting her in knots and making the boundaries of their relationship unclear. Meanwhile, Ophelia’s father and brother simultaneously forbid Ophelia from seeing Hamlet, only to later use her as bait in a ploy to expose him. These men are the “scorpions,” poisoning her life and mind as she lays in a “cold bed.” Eventually, their venom has its way with her, and she loses her sanity. Ophelia’s story can ring true for so many women, and it clearly resonates with Swift. She recognizes the pattern of how love turns toxic, and how manipulation can disguise itself as care.
Then comes the bridge: “Tis locked inside my memory/And only you possess the key.” This echoes one of Ophelia’s lines in “Hamlet:” “Tis in my memory locked, / And you yourself shall keep the key of it.” In the play, Ophelia says this out of obedience to her brother, promising she will stay away from Hamlet. Swift takes the line and spins it into a vow of intimacy, a choice she makes out of love instead of submission. She is locking away her tender moments with her partner where only the two of them can reach them.
Finally, Swift closes the bridge with, “No longer drowning and deceived / All because you came for me.” This is Swift’s final farewell to torment and heartbreak. Where Ophelia drowned, Swift survives.
In the end, “The Fate of Ophelia” isn’t a retelling, it’s a resurrection. Through her lyrics, Swift turns Ophelia’s tragedy into a tale of her own survival. She turns Ophelia into a symbol of endurance and tells the story of a woman learning to trust love without losing herself in the process.
Listen to “The Fate of Ophelia” here.
Read “The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark” online here.
Listen to Travis Kelce say he was “definitely supposed to read Hamlet” here.