In Taylor Swift's version, Ophelia has a fairy-tale ending

The alluring ambiguity of Shakespeare's tragic heroine has inspired artworks and songs for centuries.

- Lindsay Zoladz

The music video for Taylor Swift's The Fate Of Ophelia begins with the singer posing as a model for a portrait of the doomed Danish maiden Ophelia, most likely based on John Everett Millais' 1852 painting.

(PHOTO: TATE GALLERY)

"No one likes a mad woman," Taylor Swift sings on a haunting track off her 2020 album Folklore.

It's not exactly true: 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” former 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 feminised insanity: Ophelia, the tragic heroine of Hamlet who goes mad and is driven “to muddy death” by drowning in a brook.