Taylor Swift’s latest album, her 12th, The Life of a Showgirl, released on October 3rd, includes a first track and video, “The Fate of Ophelia,” which will delight those familiar with the Shakespearean tragedy *Hamlet* (written around 1599-1601).
Swift’s song alludes to her partner, , when she sings about being saved “from the fate of Ophelia.”
The lyrics include the line: “And if you’d never come for me, I might’ve drowned in the melancholy.”
Ophelia in Shakespeare’s *Hamlet* is known for her tragic drowning, which occurs after Hamlet rejects her and kills her father. Swift’s song and the album’s cover art seem to draw inspiration from a famous Victorian painting. This painting portrays Ophelia’s descent into madness and her accidental drowning in a stream after discovering Hamlet’s murder of her father.
During that era, paintings depicting scenes from Shakespeare’s plays were fashionable, and Ophelia was a frequently chosen subject. John Everett Millais’s “Ophelia” shows her floating in a stream, with her head and chest above the water and the rest of her body submerged.
According to the Tate collection, Elizabeth Siddal modeled for Millais’s painting over four months, lying in a bath of water warmed by lamps. Millais adorned her with flowers symbolizing love, pain, innocence, and fidelity.
The painting also served as inspiration for *Hamlet* film adaptations by Laurence Olivier (1948) and (1996), as well as the 1995 music video for Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds’ song “Where The Wild Roses Grow,” featuring . The art website *ArtNet* noted that the scene in season 3 of *White Lotus* where and are seen floating dead in the water is reminiscent of Millais’s painting. Arguably, the most well-known depiction of Ophelia in recent pop culture is the 2019 film *Ophelia*, starring Daisy Ridley, which reimagines *Hamlet* from her perspective.
Swift mentioned the *Hamlet* connection during an album preview on ’s, , explaining, “He may not have read *Hamlet*, but I explained it to him, so he knows what happened.”
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