The Meaning Behind 'Ophelia' on Taylor Swift's The Life of a Showgirl

Taylor Swift’s 12th studio album The Life of a Showgirl dropped Oct. 3, and William Shakespeare buffs will relish in the title of the first track “The Fate of Ophelia” and accompanying music video, inspired by the tragic play Hamlet (circa 1599-1601). In the song, Swift sings of her heart being saved “from the fate of Ophelia,” an apparent reference to her fiancé, Travis Kelce. “And if you’d never come for me,” goes the song. “I might’ve drowned in the melancholy.” The titular Ophelia is known in Shakespeare’s Hamlet for tragically drowning after enduring rejection by Hamlet and his murder of her father. The line in Swift’s song and The Life of a Showgirl‘s cover art appears to be inspired by a Victorian-era painting that depicts the scene in Hamlet when Ophelia goes crazy and falls into a stream and drowns after learning Hamlet killed her father. Back then, it was trendy to paint scenes from William Shakespeare plays, and Ophelia was a popular subject. John Everett Millais depicts “Ophelia” floating in a stream, her head and chest above water and the rest of her body submerged. According to the Tate collection in the UK, artist Elizabeth Siddal posed for Millais over a four month period in a bath full of water kept warm by lamps underneath. Millais covered her body with flowers that signify love, pain, innocence, and faithfulness. The painting also inspired Hamlet adaptations by Laurence Olivier (1948) and Kenneth Branagh (1996), as well as a 1995 music video for “Where The Wild Roses Grow” by Kylie Minogue and Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds. The art news website ArtNet even pointed out that the scene in season 3 of White Lotus in which Walton Goggins and Aimee Lou Woods are floating dead in the water appears to invoke the Millais painting. Arguably the most famous depiction of Ophelia in pop culture in recent years is the 2019 film Ophelia, which reimagined Hamlet from Ophelia’s point of view, with Daisy Ridley starring as Ophelia. Swift acknowledged the Hamlet reference when she was previewing the album during an interview on her Kelce’s podcast, joking, “He may not have read Hamlet, but I explained it to him, so he knows what happened.”