“No one likes a mad woman,” Taylor Swift sings on a haunting track off her 2020 album “Folklore.”
It’s not exactly true: Taylor Swift loves a mad woman. Her discography teems with fiery depictions of female characters who have traditionally been dismissed and even punished by patriarchal culture for being too much. Consider the burned witches of “I Did Something Bad,” the “insane” ex-girlfriend she humorously portrays in the “Blank Space” music video or that titular “Mad Woman” who taunts her detractors with the line, “Every time you call me crazy, I get more crazy — what about that?”
So it was perhaps only a matter of time before Swift wrote a song referring to one of the most iconic characters associated with feminized insanity: Ophelia, the tragic heroine of “Hamlet” who goes mad and is driven “to muddy death” by drowning in a brook.
Swift has finally done it on “The Fate of Ophelia,” the opening track and first single from her blockbuster 12th original album, “The Life of a Showgirl,” and she’s certainly gone all out: Not only does the song’s narrative center on the story of Shakespeare’s doomed Danish maiden, but the music video begins with Swift posing as a model for a Pre-Raphaelite portrait of Ophelia (likely based on John Everett Millais’s famous 1852 painting), and the album cover itself is a kind of modernized take on Millais’s imagery, featuring a bejeweled Swift immersed in bath water — though gazing out at the viewer, defiantly alive.
Swift is hardly alone in drawing artistic inspiration from Hamlet’s love interest. Ophelia has been an object of cultural fascination for centuries, and she is by far the most frequently painted of Shakespeare’s heroines. Though she is in “Hamlet” for just five of the play’s 20 scenes — a minor character by purely textual standards — she has an outsize aura, in part because of the ambiguity of her death (does she fall into the brook or jump in?) and the sexualized charge that animates Shakespeare’s descriptions of her madness.
Plenty of musicians have used her as a muse, too, in part because her name’s many vowels and lilting syllables seem to possess their own inherent melody. Robbie Robertson looked for her on a rollicking 1975 single by the Band, as the Lumineers did more recently on a 2016 folk stomper. The Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter used the evocative phrase “the fate of Ophelia” in the band’s 1980 tune “Althea,” a fact that has prompted me to wonder for the first and perhaps only time if Swift is a secret Deadhead. As a denizen of Bob Dylan’s “Desolation Row,” Ophelia is feeling 22 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.”
Some readers see Ophelia purely as a submissive victim. But others, including some feminists, have tried to reclaim her as a slyly rebellious figure, interpreting her madness as a rejection of patriarchal logic. Natalie Merchant took that path on her 1998 album, “Ophelia,” whose title track reimagines Ophelia as a kind of time-traveling Everywoman, contending through centuries with different manifestations of female oppression. “Ophelia was the rebel girl, a bluestocking suffragette,” she sings, “who remedied society between her cigarettes.”
In Swift’s slinky, perky and infectiously catchy new single, Ophelia isn’t a figure of subversive power so much as a worst-case scenario: “You saved my heart from the fate of Ophelia,” she tells a lover on the chorus. (In an interview featured in “The Official Release Party of a Showgirl,” an album accompaniment playing at AMC theaters, Swift notes that this is the second time she’s rewritten a Shakespearean tragedy to have a happily ever after: See also the 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 is a jubilant celebration of love — presumably a more constant devotion than what the flighty Hamlet could offer Ophelia. But there is also something dispiriting about Swift flattening one of literature’s most evocatively alluring heroines into just another princess waiting for her Prince Charming, and about reducing her madness to something that could have easily been cured by the right man.
Sure, there are limits to what kind of stories can be told within the format of a three-and-a-half-minute pop song, and Swift herself has said that she aimed for more concise lyricism on this album. But in reducing Ophelia to simply a cautionary tale, Swift also seems to neutralize her electric charge — that alluring ambiguity that has kept people painting her, arguing about her and singing her name for centuries.
Lindsay Zoladz is a pop music critic for The Times and writes the subscriber-only music newsletter The Amplifier.
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