Travis Kelce is the anti-Hamlet. That’s the point of Taylor Swift’s Shakespearean love letter to her fiancé in “The Fate of Ophelia,” the opening track on her album The Life of a Showgirl.

The song recounts their very public courtship, which began when Kelce told the Internet that he wanted to date her.Footnote ¹ “I heard you calling on the megaphone. / You want to see me all alone,” Swift croons in the album’s first lines.Footnote ² As she put it on Kelce’s New Heights podcast, “This is sort of what I’ve been writing songs about wanting to happen to me since I was a teenager.”Footnote ³

Apparently, Swift was in a bad place, as this shockingly confessional song reveals:

Then comes the Shakespearean twist: Swift sings that Kelce saved her from “the fate of Ophelia.” It’s a troubling allusion, suggesting suicide.

In Hamlet, Ophelia is the daughter of Polonius, the King’s closest advisor. She and the cerebral, brooding Prince Hamlet are an item, or they were—they do not really know where they stand. Then he flies off the handle, chiding, “Get thee to a nunnery!”Footnote ⁴ In Swift’s reading of the play:

Knowing Ophelia’s story gives texture to the situation Swift imagined herself in. Knowing Swift’s story also expands our understanding of Shakespeare’s character. What if, instead of seeing Ophelia as the mousy daughter of a nobleman who is helplessly pilloried by the men in her life, we see her as a genius songstress, a romantic who longs for traditional love in a world rapidly changing around her, as a pop-diva superstar whose reluctant entry to politics aggrieves the highest power in the land, as a celebrity with a fiercely loyal following who suffers in silence behind the scenes? The fate of Ophelia in Shakespeare’s play hits different if it follows the life of a showgirl.

Shakespeare conveyed Ophelia’s madness by having her sing songs in public, some of them moody and atmospheric:

And some of them snide and sassy, with veiled allusions to her ex-lover:

Ophelia ultimately drowns. “There is a willow grows askant the brook,” Queen Gertrude relays in the most beautiful poetry in the play. “Therewith fantastic garlands did she make.” In Gertrude’s telling, Ophelia “fell” into this brook:

Ophelia afloat in water has become the icon of her tragedy, informing the imagery (for example) in the pop group the Lumineers’ song “Ophelia”: “Oh, Ophelia, you’ve been on my mind girl since the flood. / Oh, Ophelia, heaven help a fool who falls in love.”Footnote ⁷ This devastating end is the fate that Swift envisioned for herself—until Kelce came along. In contrast to the heavy clothes that drag Ophelia down into the water, Kelce lifts Swift up into the light: “You wrap around me like a chain, a crown, a vine, / Pulling me into the fire.”

At Ophelia’s funeral, Shakespeare’s weirdly jokey gravediggers reveal that her death was a suicide—that’s why she cannot have the full funeral rights of a Christian burial.Footnote ⁸ But her jerk ex-boyfriend, Prince Hamlet, ruins the moment by jumping into Ophelia’s open grave and proclaiming: “I loved Ophelia. Forty thousand brothers / Could not with all their quantity of love / Make up my sum” (5.1.248-50). It’s so awkward.

In contrast, Kelce brought Swift back from the dead, as she sings in the song’s central couplet: “You took me out of my grave and saved / My heart from the fate of Ophelia.” I checked and, yes, it’s iambic pentameter:

After Kelce, Swift is “no longer drowning and deceived,” she sings. Swift avoided the fate of Ophelia because Kelce is not Hamlet. The analogy makes Swift’s other boyfriends into whiny Danish princes who, even though their lives are filled with privilege, spend their time with self-obsessed philosophy. As the fun-loving jock, Kelce is the opposite of Shakespeare’s melancholy prince with his “antic disposition” that drives his lover to despair (1.5.173). “He’s the good kind of crazy,” Swift said of Kelce on the New Heights podcast. “He’s just a vibe booster … a human exclamation point.”Footnote ⁹ That’s all very un-Hamlet. Kelce does not ask, “To be or not to be”; he just is.

Swift’s song marks a new moment in the cultural fate of Ophelia. After Shakespeare largely ignored her to focus on Hamlet, feminist critics and artists have sought to tell her side of the story, as in Lisa Klein’s novel Ophelia and the Daisy Ridley film of it.Footnote ¹⁰ Before there were memes on the Internet, John Everett Millais’s 1851 painting of Ophelia drowned in the brook became a recurring emblem for adolescent girlhood.Footnote ¹¹ Around the year 1900, the German artist Friedrich Heyser riffed on Millais in his own painting of Ophelia, which Swift recreates in the music video for “The Fate of Ophelia,” sending packs of Swifties to the museum that holds Heyser’s painting (see Figure 1). The album cover for The Life of a Showgirl even alludes to the Opheliate woman-in-the-water trope, marrying it with the life of a showgirl who has just come off stage from the Eras Tour (see Figure 2).Footnote ¹² But Swift is not interested in reclaiming Ophelia’s story. She kills it off. Hers is a different story.

Figure 1.

The start of Swift’s “The Fate of Ophelia” music video, recreating Friedrich Heyser’s Ophelia.

Figure 2.

The album cover of Swift’s The Life of a Showgirl, recreating Millais’s Ophelia.

As a Shakespearean allusion, “The Fate of Ophelia” is also a callback to the song that launched Swift’s career, “Love Story.”Footnote ¹³ In that one, she beams, “Marry me Juliet—we’ll never have to be alone.”Footnote ¹⁴

“Love Story” is a remarkably bad reading of Romeo and Juliet. It takes the tragic story of two kids dying because they loved in the wrong way and turns it into a fairytale romance. With her new song, beyond the story of finding the love of her life—which, I concede, is important—“The Fate of Ophelia” shows Swift becoming a better reader of Shakespeare.