On my ride into work yesterday, my mother mentioned “That popular singer has a song about a Shakespeare character.”
I watched the video right before teaching my “Shakespeare in Context” class, and I felt kind of overwhelmed. I recognize it was well-produced, that Spears has tremendous talent, and that her work means a lot to millions of people around the world.
One of my colleagues teaches a “Taylor Swift and Feminism” course, and I’m happily letting students know about it.
But I’m so unfamiliar with the music video genre that I just don’t have the experience or the vocabulary to process what I saw.
I was a teenager in the 1980s, but my family didn’t get cable TV, so I only watched “MTV” when I was a friend’s house. As a theater kid, by default I learned a lot of showtunes but I had no particular interest in popular music or music videos.
When I listen to a song, my brain pays attention to the lyrics, and I want to know how the song fits into the plot, and my brain doesn’t know what to do when there is no plot beyond the song, or when the plot comes from details the audience knows about the real-world personal life of the performer.
Just before I started teaching my Shakespeare class this term, I went to see the opera Tales of Hoffmann, about which I knew from my previous research into literary representations of robots. I know a lot about theater, and I have at least performed in musicals, but because I just don’t have experience with operatic voices, I just didn’t have the vocabulary to write about it.
I went to that opera specifically in order to experience that disconnect, thinking it would help me empathize with my students who might be as unfamiliar with Shakespeare as I am with opera — and as I am with pop music videos.
The Folger Shakespeare library posted a blog on Ophelia, but reading it didn’t actually help me make sense of Swift’s video. Which is fine. Swift’s video doesn’t have to appeal to me; as long as the artist and her fans find it authentic and meaningful, that ought to be good enough for everyone.
One of Shakespeare’s best known female characters, the role of Ophelia has also been taken on by generations of famous actresses. Judi Dench’s first professional acting role was playing Ophelia in an Old Vic Company production of Hamlet. Kate Winslet portrayed her in Kenneth Branagh’s 1996 film, and Daisy Ridley played the titular character in a 2018 re-imagining, Ophelia.
Ophelia’s name continues to be a watchword for a young woman fated to a tragic end. Beyond drama, she’s appeared or been referenced in paintings, novels, poems, ballets, songs, and psychology books (1994’s Reviving Ophelia). In Victorian England, artists painted numerous portraits of her; many of them perhaps inspired by one of the most famous paintings of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, John Everett Millais’ c. 1852 depiction of her death. The Indigo Girls and Tori Amos both dedicated albums to her. Bob Dylan includes Ophelia as one of the characters residing on Desolation Row.
Reclaiming her story is a popular modern approach. In 2025, the Folger Theatre produced Lauren Gunderson’s A Room in the Castle, imagining what was happening to Queen Gertrude, Ophelia, and her maid Anna behind the scenes. This modern treatment gave Ophelia a rich interior life, working with Queen Gertrude to try to save the man she loves from his own grief and madness.
Ophelia is having a particularly eventful 2025. In addition to Swift’s “The Fate of Ophelia”—and an album cover referencing our drowned heroine— Netflix’s Wednesday features references to a missing Aunt Ophelia, a woman whose psychic ability led to madness. –Folger Library, “The fate of Ophelia.”
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