Shakespeare and the Fate of Taylor Swift

Abstract “The Fate of Ophelia,” the opening track on Taylor Swift’s album The Life of a Showgirl , includes an unsettling Shakespearean allusion. Ophelia was the jilted lover of the melancholy prince in Shakespeare’s Hamlet , a woman whose life ends in suicide. Swift’s song says her fiancé, Travis Kelce, saved her from the fate of Ophelia, positioning her previous boyfriends as moody philosophers and the fun-loving jock Kelce as the anti-Hamlet. This song also recuperates Swift as a reader of Shakespeare after the startingly bad account of Romeo and Juliet in “Love Story,” the song that started Swift’s career.