By Rose, TIWP Student

“The Fate of Ophelia” should have never been a love song. In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Ophelia suffers at the hands of everyone around her. She is stripped of her dignity, her family, her sanity, her comfort, and any other rights afforded to other characters in the play are not granted to Ophelia. Even in death, she is denied the possibility of a Christian funeral–thus stripped of her honor–because she has committed suicide.

Throughout the play, she is ridiculed and violated, yet centuries later, Taylor Swift dedicated a song to the character: a love song about her husband. In the song, Swift states that, “The eldest daughter of a nobleman/Ophelia lived in a fantasy/But love was a cold bed of scorpions/The venom stole her sanity.” However, these lyrics are factually incorrect. For one, Ophelia wasn’t the eldest daughter of Polonius: she was his only daughter. In fact, her only other sibling was her older brother, Laertes. Also, Ophelia didn’t live in a fantasy, she was completely sane until her father was brutally murdered. Of course, Ophelia later loses her grasp on reality, but she was incredibly depressed to the point of, as I mentioned, killing herself. The only two lines that could make any sense at all are the last two, but even those don’t correlate with the tragedy that Ophelia suffers. She was convinced to fool Hamlet by her brother and father which only results in her downfall. It could be argued that Swift is claiming that Hamlet’s actions were the reason Ophelia snapped, but that doesn’t negate from the other lines that have proved Taylor Swift at best doesn’t understand Hamlet, and at worst hasn’t read the play at all.

Now, maybe I’m reading too much into this. Understandably, this is supposed to be a silly song about a girl who was saved from loneliness. However, the song doesn’t make any sense when also considering the image that Taylor Swift has projected of herself to the world. Swift wants us to think that she’s a lyrical genius who has somehow outsmarted us all, which she has distinctly stated several times. For instance, she has been quoted saying, “Sometimes when people are mocking me, it’s really fun to mock them back. Sometimes I like to just use words they have to look up in order to talk shit about.” The singer thinks she’s only hated by people who aren’t as smart as her. In addition, under the Instagram post announcing her engagement to Travis Kelce, she wrote in the caption, “Your English teacher and your gym teacher are getting married.” Swift’s image has been carefully curated to reflect class and intelligence. So why choose Ophelia?

I can understand that Taylor Swift is trying to present herself as scholarly and well-read, but there are plenty of options she could’ve chosen from other dignified classics. I’m not coming at her from a place of hate—I used to be a massive fan of Taylor Swift and still undeniably like some of her music—which is why it mostly just confuses me as to why she chose to write a song from Hamlet rather than, say, for example, Daisy Buchanan from The Great Gatsby: a book she has claimed to have read and has even referenced in some of her other songs and music videos. In fact, there are lists online of books that Swift has claimed to have read with women who Swift could have written about instead.