Ophelia

To deepen your understanding of these themes, explore my reflections on traditions and societal critique through this link, which complements the essay’s exploration of pink skies.

https://www.konst.se/jorgen-thornberg

INTRODUCTION

Some figures in literary history never truly leave us. They are born in a writer’s imagination, brought to life on stage, and then wander through the centuries, continually rediscovered and reinterpreted. Shakespeare’s Ophelia is one of them. She has been drowning in the same brook for more than four hundred years, yet her tragic fate has never ceased to fascinate artists, writers, musicians and audiences.

When John Everett Millais immortalised her among the flowers of an English brook in the mid-nineteenth century, he created one of art history's most celebrated images. The young woman became a symbol of unhappy love, lost innocence and the transience of beauty. Yet behind the face in the painting stood a real woman, Elizabeth Siddal, whose life and artistic achievements deserve a story of their own.

In the autumn of 2025, Ophelia was unexpectedly brought back to life when Taylor Swift opened her album, ”The Life of a Showgirl", with the song ”The Fate of Ophelia”. Four centuries after Shakespeare and almost two after Millais, she refused to accept that the story must end in drowning. In her music, love is given the power to change the fate that literature had already decreed.

This essay traces Ophelia from the Danish royal court to the studios of Victorian artists, and onwards through the worlds of cinema, photography and popular music. It is a story of how a female figure can survive her own death, but also of who truly holds the power to tell her story.

Finally, we transport her once more. From Millais’ tranquil English brook, through Taylor Swift’s bathtub, to the magnificent Buckingham Fountain in Chicago, where the city lights shimmer on the water and two swans, one black and one white, glide side by side. Here, Ophelia is given not merely a new landscape in which to exist, but a different future.

As a poetic prelude to this journey, a sonnet in Shakespeare's spirit follows, bringing together four centuries of art and love in fourteen lines.

Perhaps this is what makes great stories immortal: we are never truly finished with them, and each new age may discover a different ending.

“Ophelia – From Shakespeare to Chicago

Beneath the willow, where the waters weep,
Fair Ophelia lay among the flowers of spring;
While Shakespeare sent her to the silent deep,
Her fading lips remembered how to sing.

Then Millais gave her beauty, pale and bright,
And held her in a dream that would not end;
Four hundred years she slept beyond the light,
Until young Taylor came to be her friend.

From Taylor's bath she rose to greet the day,
And left behind the sorrow of her fate;
To Chicago's golden fountain made her way,
Where love and life beside the waters wait.

Now Buckingham's bright waters softly gleam,
And Ophelia lives beyond her ancient dream.”
Malmö, November 2026

OPHELIA – From Shakespeare’s Drowned Girl to Taylor Swift’s Rescued Woman

A cultural-historical essay on love, madness, beauty and immortality – from Elizabethan England and the Pre-Raphaelites to The Life of a Showgirl.

Prologue – The Girl Who Never Stopped Drowning

She lies on her back in the water, surrounded by flowers. Her hair floats around her head, her dress drifts beneath the surface, and her hands are open, as though she has just let go of something she can no longer hold. Her mouth is slightly open. Perhaps she is still singing. Perhaps the song has already fallen silent. She seems neither entirely alive nor dead, but suspended in that strange moment when time has stopped.

Her name is Ophelia, and she has been lying there for over four hundred years.

Or rather, she has been lying there since William Shakespeare, around 1600, let her disappear into a Danish brook. But it wasn't until 250 years later that the young English painter John Everett Millais gave her the face and posture that would make her one of the most recognisable female figures in art history. Ever since, she has continued to float through the centuries, appearing in paintings, photographs, films, theatrical productions, fashion images and music videos. She has become a symbol of the abandoned woman, unhappy love, fragile beauty and the moment when life passes into death.

But in autumn 2025, something remarkable happened. One of the world’s most successful pop artists, Taylor Swift, decided that Ophelia had been lying in the water long enough.

On her twelfth studio album, "The Life of a Showgirl", she titled the opening song "The Fate of Ophelia". She returned to Shakespeare's unhappy girl and Millais’ famous painting, but refused to accept the ending. While Shakespeare allowed Ophelia to drown and Millais immortalised her final moments, Swift wanted to imagine a woman who could escape the tragedy.

It is a seemingly simple change, yet it carries a much larger story about women's position in literature and art. What happens when a character defined by her downfall for centuries is suddenly given the chance to survive? And why is it Ophelia, of all Shakespeare’s women, who still fascinates us?

The answer begins far from the recording studios and arena concerts of our own time, in a London where theatre was entertainment, a mirror of society, and a potentially dangerous form of political art.

Chapter I – Shakespeare and the Girl at the Danish Court

When William Shakespeare wrote "Hamlet", probably around 1599–1601, he had already established himself as one of London’s leading playwrights. Queen Elizabeth I was still on the English throne, but her reign was nearing its end. Questions of succession, power and political stability weighed heavily on the country. The theatre was a place where such matters could be discussed under the guise that the action took place in another country or another age.

Shakespeare set his tragedy in Denmark, at Elsinore Castle, where the young Prince Hamlet returns after his father’s death. His mother, Gertrude, has married his father’s brother, Claudius. When his father’s ghost reveals that he was murdered, Hamlet’s life becomes an obsessive pursuit of truth and revenge.

The story of the Danish prince was not Shakespeare’s own invention. Its roots lie in the writings of the Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus, who, around the year 1200, told the story of Amleth, a prince who feigned madness to survive his uncle’s treachery. Later adaptations brought the story to the English stage. Shakespeare, however, made the old revenge tale far more complex. His Hamlet is not merely a man seeking justice but a human being who questions the very meaning of existence, his own ability to act, and the boundary between reality and appearance.

Ophelia stands at the centre of this drama.

She is the daughter of the king’s adviser, Polonius, and the sister of Laertes. She belongs to the world of the court but holds no independent power within it. Her life is largely determined by her father, her brother, the prince and the king. When we first encounter her, Hamlet has shown her affection, but both Polonius and Laertes warn her against trusting the prince’s intentions. A prince cannot choose his wife solely based on his heart. His marriage is a political matter.

Ophelia is therefore instructed to keep her distance from Hamlet, and she complies.

Looking back, it is easy to regard her as weak, but in doing so we forget the world she lives in. At a princely Renaissance court, a young woman was not expected to defy her father, her brother, or the social order that determined her future. Her obedience is not necessarily an expression of a lack of will. It is also a condition of her existence.

When Hamlet begins to behave strangely, Ophelia becomes involved in the court’s attempts to understand him. Polonius suspects the prince’s behaviour stems from unhappy love, and Ophelia is used as bait in an encounter secretly observed by the king and her father. Hamlet denies or distorts his former love and tells her to go to a nunnery. His words are harsh, at times even cruel, and she no longer recognises the man she believed she knew.

But Shakespeare makes it impossible to reduce the tragedy to a simple story of a man abandoning a woman. Hamlet himself is trapped in a web of suspicion, guilt and a desire for revenge. His behaviour may be a deliberate performance, genuine despair, or a mixture of both. For Ophelia, this uncertainty matters less. She experiences the man she loves as a stranger.

The decisive catastrophe occurs when Hamlet accidentally kills Polonius, who is concealed behind a curtain in the queen’s chamber. The father who has governed her life is suddenly dead. The man she loves is his murderer. Her brother is abroad, and the court that was meant to protect her is rife with lies and political intrigue.

Ophelia stands alone.

When she reappears in the play, her language has changed. She speaks in fragments, sings songs, hints at betrayal and lost innocence, and distributes flowers whose symbolic meanings seem to say more than her words. The court regards her as mad, yet within her seemingly incoherent songs lies a kind of truth. She says what no one else dares say openly.

This is one of Shakespeare’s most subtle observations: when Ophelia loses her place in the ordered world, she simultaneously acquires a language that no longer follows its rules.

Her songs concern death, promises of love, and women abandoned after believing those promises. They can be read as expressions of her personal experiences, as well as as comments on a world in which a woman’s value is tied to her innocence, obedience and relationships with men.

Then she disappears.

And Shakespeare never allows us to see how.

Chapter II – By the Willow Tree: The Death No One Witnessed

Ophelia’s death is one of the most famous scenes in world literature, even though the audience never witnesses it.

In Act IV, Scene 7, Queen Gertrude brings news that Ophelia has drowned. She describes a willow tree leaning over a brook, its silvery leaves reflected in the water. There, Ophelia has gathered flowers and woven garlands. When she tries to hang a garland from the tree, a branch breaks and she falls into the brook.

At first, her clothes keep her afloat. She sings old songs, seemingly unaware of the danger, until the fabric becomes saturated with water and pulls her down into the depths.

Gertrude’s account is so vivid that it almost reads like a ready-made set of instructions for an artist. The willow tree, the flowers, the dress and the song are all there. But above all, there is that strange interval when Ophelia is still floating on the surface and alive, even though her death already seems inevitable.

Was it an accident or a suicide?

Shakespeare offers no unequivocal answer. Gertrude’s description may suggest an accident, but the circumstances and Ophelia’s state of mind leave room for another interpretation. When she is later to be buried, the question arises as to whether she is truly entitled to a Christian burial. The priest suggests that the death is suspicious and that her high social position has granted her privileges that an ordinary person would not have.

This is an important point. In Shakespeare’s England, suicide was regarded as a grave sin, and anyone believed to have taken their own life could be denied a standard church burial. Ophelia’s death thus becomes not merely a private tragedy but also a matter of religion, social standing and morality.

At the same time, Gertrude’s account is strangely beautiful. It almost entirely lacks the physical horror of drowning. Instead, Ophelia is portrayed as a creature who, for a moment, belongs in the water, as though nature itself has received her.

Here lies the aesthetic contradiction to which later artists would return: a young woman’s death is described in such poetic images that it risks being transformed from tragedy into an experience of beauty.

At the heart of this transformation are the flowers.

When Ophelia earlier in the play distributes rosemary, pansies, fennel, columbines and rue, she speaks in a symbolic language familiar to Shakespeare’s contemporaries. Rosemary was associated with remembrance, pansies with thought and love, and rue with regret and sorrow. Other flowers could suggest infidelity, innocence or transience. Their meanings were not always unambiguous, but this ambiguity is precisely what makes the scene so rich.

The flowers become Ophelia’s final means of expression.

In the death scene, the plants return. She has gathered buttercup-like flowers, nettles, daisies, and the orchids referred to in the English original as "long purples". The willow leans over the water, and her garlands float around her.

Nature seems to tell her story when human beings can no longer comprehend it.

But the Ophelia Shakespeare created was, above all, a theatrical character. She lived in words, in actors' voices, and in the audience’s imagination. For a long time, no single image defined what she should look like.

That would change in the mid-nineteenth century.

Chapter III – Millais and the Painting That Changed Everything

In 1851, the twenty-two-year-old John Everett Millais was working by a small river in Surrey, south-west of London. He chose a spot on the River Hogsmill near Ewell, where water flowed through dense vegetation, with willows, nettles, and wildflowers providing the natural setting Shakespeare had described.

Millais was one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a group of young artists who, in 1848, rebelled against the conventions of academic art. They believed that painting had lost something essential through centuries of idealisation and routine imitation of the great Renaissance masters. They wanted to return to an art in which nature was studied with meticulous accuracy and colours could shine with the same intensity as in early Italian painting.

Their name, the Pre-Raphaelites, referred to art before Raphael, but their ambition was not merely to look backwards. They wanted to change their own age by seeing the world afresh.

Millais took this ambition very seriously.

For months, he worked outdoors beside the Hogsmill. He painted leaf by leaf, flower by flower, and branch by branch. It was an almost botanical undertaking. Rather than letting the landscape become a decorative background, he gave every plant its own presence. The dense greenery became as important as the human figure later placed within it.

There is something remarkable about this working method. The artist began with nature and left space for the dying woman. Only after completing the landscape did he return to his London studio to paint Ophelia herself.

The model was Elizabeth Siddal.

She was born in 1829 and grew up in considerably more modest circumstances than most people who bought and commissioned Victorian art. She had worked in a hat shop before coming into contact with the Pre-Raphaelites. Her long reddish hair, pale complexion, and distinctive facial features suited their conception of beauty, which differed from the period's conventional ideals.

But Siddal was not merely a model. Encouraged by John Ruskin and others, she became an artist and poet, producing her own drawings and paintings. She later married Dante Gabriel Rossetti, another founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

In Millais’ studio, however, she was given a task that would make her immortal in a very different role.

She was to lie in a bathtub.

Millais had obtained an old-fashioned, richly decorated dress and had Siddal wear it while lying in the water. Lamps were placed beneath the bathtub to keep the water at a comfortable temperature. According to the well-known story, the lamps went out once without Millais noticing, as he was so absorbed in his work. Siddal remained in the water, became chilled, and fell ill. Her father then reportedly demanded compensation for the medical expenses.

The story has been repeated in countless art-historical accounts. Still, over time its details have become part of an almost mythological narrative about the artist’s ruthlessness and the model’s sacrifice. That Siddal posed in a bathtub filled with water is well documented. How serious her illness became and exactly how events unfolded are more difficult to establish.

In any case, the result was a painting without equal.

"Ophelia", completed in 1852, measures approximately 76 centimetres in height and 112 centimetres in width. It is not monumental in size, yet it often seems considerably larger because of its overwhelming detail.

Ophelia lies almost horizontally across the centre of the picture. The water and her voluminous dress largely conceal her body. Her head is tilted slightly backwards, her eyes half-closed and her lips parted. Her hands float on either side of her body, open and almost weightless.

She does not seem to be struggling.

That is perhaps the painting’s most disturbing feature.

A person in the process of drowning would normally try to save themselves. But Millais’ Ophelia seems to have stopped resisting. She is both present and absent, as though she were already on the other side of the boundary between life and death.

The water is dark and almost impenetrable, while the flowers and vegetation around her glow with extraordinary clarity. A red poppy alludes to sleep and death, the daisies to innocence, and the pansies to love and thought. Nature seems to persist with complete indifference to the destruction of a human life.

It is precisely this indifference that makes the painting so powerful. The world does not pause when Ophelia dies. The flowers continue to bloom, the leaves are reflected in the water, and the brook keeps flowing.

Millais thus created more than an illustration of Shakespeare. He created an independent image of transience, in which beauty and death coexist in the same moment.

Through his composition, he gave posterity a visual pattern that would be repeated again and again: the young woman floating on her back, her hair spread across the water, her arms open, and her face turned towards the sky.

We still recognise the image immediately, even if we no longer know who Ophelia was.

Chapter IV – Elizabeth Siddal and the Woman Behind the Face

There is a particular irony in Elizabeth Siddal becoming famous for portraying a woman who had lost her voice.

Siddal, after all, had a voice of her own, and she sought to make it heard at a time when female artists had very limited opportunities to work independently. She drew, painted and wrote poetry, often exploring themes of love, loneliness and loss. Her work was shaped by the same medieval romantic imagery as the Pre-Raphaelites, but she was not merely a follower. She had a style of her own, marked by quiet intensity and sensitivity to human loneliness.

Yet her legacy was long overshadowed by the men around her.

She was Millais’ Ophelia and Rossetti’s muse. Her face appeared in painting after painting, and her hair became almost a defining feature of the Pre-Raphaelite image of womanhood. When she died in 1862, at only thirty-two, from a laudanum overdose, her life became shrouded in a tragic romanticism reminiscent of the figures she had portrayed.

Whether her death was intentional has never been established with certainty, although it has often been described as suicide. Her health had long been fragile. She had experienced the loss of a child and lived in an age when opium-based medicines were used to treat both pain and sleep difficulties.

After her death, Rossetti buried a collection of his poems with her. Several years later, he had her grave opened to recover the manuscript, an event that further fuelled the legend surrounding Siddal.

It is difficult to imagine a more extraordinary aftermath to a woman’s life. First, she became immortal as a drowning literary character; then her own death became the subject of an almost Gothic story of love, guilt and artistic obsession.

But perhaps this story tells us more about Victorian culture’s need for tragic women than about Siddal.

It is tempting to view her life as an extension of Ophelia’s fate, but in doing so we repeat the mistake of those who regarded her merely as a model. We reduce a real human being to a symbol.

Siddal was not Ophelia. She was an artist who happened to give Ophelia her face.

And that is worth remembering when we look at Millais’ painting. Behind the still body in the water was a living woman with ambitions, experiences and dreams of her own. Her artistic achievement deserves to be considered independently of her beauty and her tragic death.

At the heart of this distinction between the person and the image lies one of the essay’s most important questions: Who really owns the story of a woman who has become an icon?

Chapter V – Ophelia Conquers Art and Popular Culture

John William Waterhouse’s 1894 painting "Ophelia".

Friedrich Heyser’s interpretation of Ophelia, which later influenced Taylor Swift’s visual aesthetic.

Millais’ painting did not immediately become the universal icon it is today. Its status developed through art history, museum collections, and generations of artists returning to the same subject.

One of them was John William Waterhouse, who painted Ophelia on several occasions. His versions differ from Millais’ in that the woman is often still on land, at the water’s edge or among flowers. She is still alive, yet her gaze and posture suggest the tragedy that awaits her.

Around the turn of the twentieth century, the German painter Friedrich Heyser created another interpretation in which Ophelia lies in the water with an almost dreamlike stillness. His painting would attract renewed attention much later, through Taylor Swift’s music video.

Ophelia thus began to lead an independent life within the visual arts. She was no longer merely Shakespeare’s character but also a symbol capable of expressing sorrow, melancholy, beauty, and female vulnerability.

Throughout the twentieth century, the motif continued to move across media. Photographers discovered that a body in water could evoke a strange sense of weightlessness. Filmmakers used the floating woman as an image of dreams, death or transformation. Fashion photographers were drawn to the billowing dresses, the floating hair and the contrast between body and water.

Sometimes the reference to Ophelia was explicit. In other cases, the motif endured without anyone needing to mention her name.

One example is the 1995 music video for Nick Cave and Kylie Minogue’s "Where the Wild Roses Grow". In it, the dead woman appears among flowers and water, imagery clearly reminiscent of Millais. The song tells the story of a man who murders a woman, and its visual interpretation shows how the Ophelia motif can be used to unite romantic beauty with violence and death.

Here, the motif's problematic aspect also becomes apparent.

Why has art history been so fond of depicting beautiful, dead or helpless women?

This question has long preoccupied art historians, literary scholars, and feminist researchers. In Western art, there is a recurring fascination with the woman as a victim, from ancient myths to Romantic suicide scenes and the Victorian idealisation of female weakness.

Ophelia fits this pattern almost too well. She is young, beautiful, unhappy, and unable to save herself. Her death can be portrayed without blood, violence, or the physical destruction otherwise associated with death. She becomes an aesthetic object.

But the motif also allows for resistance. When later artists return to Ophelia, they can alter her position, gaze and relationship with the water. She can open her eyes, meet the viewer’s gaze or rise to her feet.

It is precisely this possibility that Taylor Swift would exploit.

Before we come to her, however, there is reason to pause at another famous woman at another famous fountain.

In 1960, Federico Fellini’s "La dolce vita" premiered. In one of the most famous scenes in film history, Anita Ekberg steps into Rome's Trevi Fountain wearing a black evening gown. Marcello Mastroianni follows her, and the rushing water becomes the setting for a strange encounter among dream, desire and reality.

Anita is no Ophelia. She does not drown; she is not helpless, nor does she wait for anyone to rescue her. On the contrary, she takes her place in the water with such confidence that the entire monumental fountain seems to become part of her personality.

Yet the two images share an art-historical connection. Water, the woman, and the almost unreal beauty recur, but their meaning has shifted. In Millais, water is the element of death. In Fellini, it becomes a place of life and desire.

This transformation is what makes the Ophelia motif so rich. The same fundamental image can tell entirely different stories, depending on who is in the water, how she relates to her surroundings, and what gaze she directs toward the viewer.

When Taylor Swift returned to the motif in 2025, she had more than 150 years of visual history to draw on.

Chapter VI – Taylor Swift and the Tragedy She Refuses to Accept

On 3 October 2025, Taylor Swift released her twelfth studio album, "The Life of a Showgirl". The title itself suggested it concerned life on stage, the attractions and pressures of fame, and the strange existence that arises when a person’s private life becomes part of the world’s public entertainment.

By then, Swift had completed her monumental "Eras Tour", which ran from March 2023 to December 2024 and transformed her career into a global cultural phenomenon. The concerts were not merely musical performances but vast theatrical productions in which she moved through different periods of her artistic career, with stage sets, costumes, and choreography reminiscent of a musical, a pop concert, and a historical retrospective.

At the same time, her private life had acquired a new central figure: the American football player Travis Kelce. Their relationship had become one of the most talked-about celebrity romances, and when the album was released, it was clear that love would play a prominent role in several songs.

But why begin an album associated with happiness, love and success by referencing one of the unhappiest women in world literature?

The answer lies in part in Taylor Swift’s relationship with storytelling.

As a teenager, she already showed a fondness for using literary motifs in her songs. Her breakthrough hit, "Love Story" (2008), drew on Shakespeare’s "Romeo and Juliet", but Swift refused to accept the tragedy’s ending. In her version, the lovers are given a future together.

It was an early example of a recurring feature of her artistry: she uses familiar stories as a starting point but reworks them to express her own experiences and desires.

Seventeen years later, she did the same to Ophelia.

In interviews before the album’s release, Swift explained that she has a particular affection for Shakespeare’s tragic characters. She becomes emotionally involved in their lives and finds it almost unbearable when they meet their downfall. She is therefore drawn to the idea of rewriting their stories so they end differently.

In "The Fate of Ophelia", she imagines that love can save a person from a fate that might otherwise have led to despair and destruction. It is not a literal retelling of "Hamlet", but a modern love song that uses Ophelia’s fate as a metaphor.

But Swift is not content merely to borrow a literary character. She also claims her own image.

The album cover shows her partly submerged in water, wearing a glittering stage costume. It blends Pre-Raphaelite painting with modern show business. Whereas Millais lets Ophelia’s dress spread across the English natural landscape, Swift surrounds her with glitter, stage lighting, and water of an almost artificial colour.

The art-historical relationship is not difficult to recognise. The head, the gaze, and the water's surface belong to a long tradition of Ophelia representations, yet the differences are as significant as the similarities.

Swift is not about to disappear.

She appears present, aware of the viewer and of the image she herself helps create.

This is where her interpretation becomes particularly interesting. Shakespeare gave Ophelia a life in which other people largely determined her future. Millais cast her as an object of the viewer’s gaze. Swift, by contrast, is both the woman portrayed and one of the artists controlling the story.

She is not merely Ophelia. She also decides what Ophelia is meant to signify.

This, however, does not mean the entire album is about Shakespeare or that every song forms part of the same Ophelia narrative. "The Life of a Showgirl" contains twelve tracks, including "Elizabeth Taylor", "Opalite", "Father Figure", "Eldest Daughter" and the title track featuring Sabrina Carpenter. The album’s broader themes are love, fame, identity and life behind the public stage.

Ophelia serves as a gateway into the album’s world. She is the first character we encounter, and her fate becomes a symbol of what might have happened but did not.

A crucial difference separates Shakespeare from Swift. In "Hamlet", Ophelia’s tragedy stems from a world in which love cannot be separated from power, family duty, and political intrigue. In Swift’s work, Ophelia’s fate becomes an image of despair that can be relieved by finding security with someone else.

But another question arises here, one that deserves consideration.

Has Swift truly liberated Ophelia, or has she merely swapped the man who destroyed her life for one who saves it?

The question is not insignificant.

In both stories, the man plays a decisive role in the woman’s fate. In Shakespeare, Hamlet is one of the forces driving Ophelia towards her breakdown. In Swift, the beloved man prevents such a breakdown.

The difference is enormous, but it does not necessarily mean the woman has become fully independent. Her happiness is still partly defined by her relationship with a man.

Swift may be deliberately using this romantic idea because she is writing a love song, not a feminist manifesto. At the same time, rewriting the story can be seen as an expression of self-determination. She refuses to accept the ending tradition prescribes.

Perhaps her true liberation lies there: not in Ophelia being saved by love, but in a woman being allowed, for the first time, to decide how this particular story should end.

Chapter VII – When the Painting Begins to Move

If the album cover referenced Millais, the music video made the link between Shakespeare, painting, and modern pop music even clearer.

The video for "The Fate of Ophelia", directed by Swift herself, unfolds as a journey through distinct visual and theatrical worlds. It begins with a painting that alludes to Friedrich Heyser’s "Ophelia". The still image comes to life, and the woman previously imprisoned in the artwork’s frozen moment steps into a new story.

It is an effective device, not least because it reverses the relationship between film and painting.

Millais tried to capture a moment from a dramatic story and make it eternal. Swift does the opposite. She takes an image that seems eternal and lets time move again.

The dying woman is granted a continuation.

The music video then moves through a series of stylised settings associated with the performing arts, cinema and the history of entertainment. Among other things, we encounter imagery reminiscent of the classic Hollywood musical, Busby Berkeley’s geometrically choreographed dance numbers and the golden age of the American film industry.

This is no coincidence. Swift has described wanting to connect with different eras of entertainment and to allow the video to reflect life as a performing artist.

Here is a connection that's easy to overlook.

Ophelia is a woman who is observed. First by the men at the Danish court, then by the theatre audience, and finally by generations of people standing before paintings and photographs.

A showgirl is also a woman who is observed.

But the difference lies in how she relates to that gaze.

In Shakespeare, Ophelia largely becomes an object of others’ decisions. In Millais, she is literally motionless. In Swift, she is a performer who dances, sings and plays different roles. She is aware of the audience’s presence and uses it as part of her artistic expression.

The music video’s transformation from painting to movement can therefore be read as a symbol of the transition from passivity to action.

But it can also be read as a comment on Swift’s own career.

For many years, her private life, romantic relationships, and public conflicts have been under intense scrutiny. Time and again, others have crafted stories about her, and she has tried to respond through her music.

In this sense, Ophelia and Swift share a parallel, although their lives cannot be compared literally. Both have been subjected to others’ interpretations. But Swift has the opportunity to respond by creating her own stories.

An opportunity Shakespeare’s Ophelia never had.

The music video’s use of water is also significant. Water is no longer merely the place where the woman disappears. It becomes part of the set, a space where the body can move and where the symbolism of death can be transformed into something playful.

The Hollywood-inspired sequences also evoke the swimming star and film actress Esther Williams, whose aquatic ballets in the 1940s and 1950s transformed the swimming pool into a spectacular theatrical stage.

For Williams, water was not a threat but an element to master with elegance, strength, and technical skill. Her films featured choreographed swimming sequences in which the female body did not sink but rose, turned, and moved through the water.

It is almost the complete opposite of Millais’ Ophelia.

Yet the same fundamental fascination remains: the woman in the water.

We can therefore trace a remarkable development across art history. Shakespeare allows the woman to drown. Millais allows her to float. Esther Williams allows her to swim. Taylor Swift allows her to rise out of the narrative.

This is, of course, not an uninterrupted historical progression, but as an artistic comparison, it shows how the same motif can take on entirely different meanings across periods.

Perhaps that is precisely why Ophelia remains so useful to contemporary artists.

She is not a finished story. She is a possibility.

Epilogue – The Woman Who Rose from the Water

There is something strangely comforting in the thought that a literary character can be given new life several hundred years after her creation.

Shakespeare could hardly have imagined that the young woman he allowed to drown in a Danish brook would one day become the subject of a song on an American pop album. Still less could he have imagined that her death would inspire music videos, photographic stagings, and artistic reinterpretations in a world where images spread across the globe in seconds.

But perhaps he would not have been particularly surprised by the principle.

Shakespeare himself drew on history, mythology and earlier literature. He transformed them, deepened them and gave them new meanings. His "Hamlet" was already a reinterpretation of an old Danish story.

When Taylor Swift lets Ophelia survive, she, in a sense, does the same as Shakespeare. She takes familiar material and reinterprets it for her own time.

But between Shakespeare and Swift stands John Everett Millais.

Without his painting, it is far from certain that Ophelia would have become the visual icon she is today. Shakespeare gave us the story, but Millais gave it a body, a face and a moment that could endure beyond the play.

Beneath that face was Elizabeth Siddal, a real woman who sought to create art and poetry in a world where her appearance often drew more attention than her work.

Perhaps she most clearly demonstrates how complex Ophelia’s history is.

For this is not merely about the death of a fictional woman. It is also about how real women have been observed, portrayed and interpreted over the centuries.

In Millais, Ophelia is an object of our gaze. In Taylor Swift, she is still observed, but she has also become the story's creator.

This shift says something about our time’s ideas of female independence, even if it doesn't make the contradictions any less complex.

Love still plays a central role. It can destroy, rescue, blind and transform. It can make people dependent on one another and, at the same time, give them the courage to carry on living.

Shakespeare’s Ophelia perished in a world where love could not shield her from power and violence. Taylor Swift’s Ophelia is rescued by a love that offers her security and hope for the future.

But perhaps the most important difference lies elsewhere.

In Shakespeare, Ophelia is never allowed to tell us herself what happened by the brook. Queen Gertrude recounts her final moments. We never learn what she thought as she fell into the water, why she continued singing, or whether she understood she was going to die.

She disappears without having the last word.

Taylor Swift, by contrast, turns her version into a first-person song. She takes the silenced woman’s fate and uses it to tell her own story.

It is a symbolic act that goes beyond a romantic declaration of love.

It is a means of reclaiming the story.

And when we return to Millais’ painting, perhaps we see something new.

Ophelia still lies there, surrounded by flowers. Her hands are open, her hair floats around her head, and her dress holds her above the depths for one more moment. Nothing has changed in the painting. It is as still as it has always been.

But we who look at her have changed.

We now know that her fate is no longer the only possible story. We have seen her rise again in the hands of other artists; we have seen water transformed from a grave into a stage; and we have heard a song in which her name no longer signifies only death and despair.

Perhaps this is precisely what makes great works of art immortal. Not that they always mean the same thing, but that they can keep speaking to people living in entirely different times and under entirely different circumstances.

Shakespeare created a tragedy. Millais created an image. Taylor Swift created an alternative future.

And somewhere between these three artistic acts, Ophelia continues to float, no longer merely a dying girl but a figure every new generation can return to and try to understand.

Four hundred years after her death, she has still not ceased to live.

Shakespeare gave Ophelia her fate. Millais gave her her face. Taylor Swift gave her a second chance.

And the water, once meant to be her grave, finally became the mirror in which every century could see itself reflected.

P.S. – OPHELIA IN CHICAGO – From Shakespeare’s Quiet Brook to the Glittering Waters of Buckingham Fountain

When John Everett Millais began painting his famous "Ophelia" in 1851, he chose a quiet stretch of the River Hogsmill in Surrey, where dense vegetation almost encloses the drowning woman. Nature is both her shelter and her grave. In our modern interpretation, the English brook has been replaced by the Clarence F. Buckingham Memorial Fountain in Grant Park, Chicago’s heart, with the city’s illuminated skyscrapers as a backdrop. Ophelia has thus been transported not only across the Atlantic but also through almost two centuries of art history, from the Romantic view of nature in Victorian England to the modern American metropolis, with its world of light, movement and monumental architecture.

The choice of Buckingham Fountain is both aesthetic and symbolic. Inaugurated in 1927 and inspired by the magnificent water features of the French Baroque, the fountain is among the largest of its kind in the world. Its enormous basin, richly decorated sculptures and dramatic cascades create a fairy-tale spectacle. The four groups of bronze seahorses represent the four states surrounding Lake Michigan, while towering jets of water and artistic illumination transform the structure into a glowing monument to water's power and beauty.

It was precisely this drama we were seeking. Where Millais let nature’s silence surround Ophelia, we let her rest amid the lights and movement of the great city. Her stillness contrasts with the rushing water, the golden reflections and Chicago’s distinctive skyline. She is no longer an abandoned girl in a lonely English landscape, but a modern woman who seems to have found a moment of complete tranquillity amid the world's clamour.

But Chicago also holds a special place in Taylor Swift’s musical history, and our choice of fountain therefore has a biographical basis. A fountain worthy of a world-famous artist.

On 3 June 2013, the then twenty-three-year-old Taylor Swift stood on stage at the United Centre alongside Mick Jagger and The Rolling Stones. They performed "As Tears Go By", a melancholy 1960s song written by Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and their then-manager Andrew Loog Oldham. It brought together two generations of popular music: the young American country star and one of rock’s most legendary groups. The song’s title, "As Tears Go By", evokes the passing of sorrowful moments, creating an almost poetic connection in retrospect to Ophelia’s fate, where love, grief, and lost innocence are so closely intertwined.

Ten years later, almost to the day, Swift returned to Chicago, this time as one of the world’s greatest artists. Over three sold-out evenings, from 2 to 4 June 2023, she filled Soldier Field with an audience of approximately 190,500 during her monumental "The Eras Tour". It was a triumph of almost historic proportions and a clear expression of her transformation from a young country singer into a global musical phenomenon. During the concerts, she also drew attention to Pride Month and spoke to a vast audience about equality and rights. Her visit to Chicago thus became not only a musical triumph but also an opportunity to use her position as a world-famous artist to convey an important message.

Chicago would, albeit indirectly, return in the love story that later became an important source of inspiration for "The Fate of Ophelia". On 24 September 2023, Taylor Swift sat in the stands at Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City as Travis Kelce’s Kansas City Chiefs faced the Chicago Bears. It was one of the first public moments when their relationship attracted international attention. Although the game was not played in Chicago, the city’s football team provided the opposition as one of the most widely discussed love stories of our time began to unfold before the world's eyes.

These connections are, of course, not the result of any predetermined artistic plan. Taylor Swift herself has not linked Shakespeare’s Ophelia to Buckingham Fountain, and we did not choose Chicago because we already knew about these events. But when we subsequently discovered the connections between the city and her career, our image acquired an additional dimension. What began as an aesthetic choice turned out to have roots in a real history of music, fame and love.

And then there is one further small detail, almost imperceptible within the monumental composition.

Far away, at the foot of the fountain, two swans, one black and one white, glide in peaceful harmony across the golden, shimmering water. They are too small to compete with the woman in the foreground or with the fountain’s enormous cascades, yet their presence lends the image a quiet symbolic meaning. Since antiquity, swans have been associated with love, beauty and fidelity. The black and white can also remind us of the opposites that run through Ophelia's story: light and darkness, sorrow and joy, life and death, despair and hope.

Where Shakespeare’s Ophelia loses her beloved and her life, the swans swim together. They form a quiet counterpoint to the tragedy, a small sign of the togetherness Taylor Swift lets Ophelia’s salvation be.

We have also reimagined the woman’s relationship with water. In Millais, the approach of death gives the body its strange stillness. In our image, she rests in a relaxed position, her head and hands floating on the surface as she meets the viewer’s gaze with open eyes. She is neither unconscious nor helpless, nor is she about to disappear. The water supports her rather than pulling her down into the depths.

Thus, without directly imitating Taylor Swift’s album cover, we have sought to give visual form to the idea that inspired her song. We have borrowed Millais’ composition, Shakespeare’s character, and modern popular music's ability to transform a familiar story. But we have also let Chicago, Buckingham Fountain, and the lights of the American metropolis give Ophelia a new world to live in.

Perhaps this is precisely what makes the old story so remarkably alive. It can move from a Danish royal court to an English brook, from a Victorian painter’s studio to an American pop star’s music video, and finally to an illuminated fountain in Chicago, without losing its original significance.

For it is still Ophelia we see. But her fate is no longer the same. She is no longer the woman who drowns in love, but the one who survives it.

Far away, among the fountain’s golden reflections, the two swans continue to swim side by side, a quiet reminder that love need not always end in tragedy.

Sources and Further Reading

The essay draws on Shakespeare’s "Hamlet", particularly Act I, Scene 3; Act III, Scene 1; Act IV, Scenes 5 and 7; and Act V, Scene 1; Tate’s documentation of Millais’ "Ophelia" and Elizabeth Siddal; and Taylor Swift’s interviews and comments in connection with the album’s 2025 release. The art-historical and literary interpretations are the essay’s own reflections.

Svensk text separat