The story of Ophelia revolves around a young woman from an upper-class background, figuring out her place in a patriarchal world under immense pressure. She is in love and ruined by it, told by her family to forget about the man whose affections she so deeply desires; told to stay away. Her emotions are weaponised against her and her lover, and her story revolves around men who attempt to control her. She finds some kind of power and relief in singing about her rage, even when they call her mad; she sings even as she drowns, broken-hearted and consumed by everyone else’s expectations.

It’s not difficult to see why Taylor Swift might find Ophelia relatable, so much so that she opens her 12th album, The Life of a Showgirl, which dropped on October 3, with a song called “The Fate of Ophelia,” a reference to the tragic character in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The song is, in many ways, a rewriting of Ophelia’s ending — and of Swift’s.

In the prologue to her 10th album, The Tortured Poets Department, Swift pleads “temporary insanity” as the explanation for the behaviour she outlines on the record: falling for a self-sabotaging Dylan Thomas-wannabe the world condemned her for, whose sins she “would have died for,” and thinking she could fix him. She describes the romance-induced “madness” as a “mutual manic phase” and “self-harm.” She casts herself as Ophelia to her lover’s tortured, self-obsessed Hamlet.

Ophelia isn’t the main character in Hamlet, but she is a crucial one — and she is particularly subject to the viewer’s perspective. She has been reinterpreted and even rewritten by a rich lineage of artists and writers, perhaps because she’s an unfinished canvas.

“Part of the reason that women artists in different media have been interested in trying to look again at Ophelia is that she’s a bit crowded out of the play,” Emma Smith, professor of Shakespeare studies at the University of Oxford, tells GLAMOUR. “I mean, one feature of that play is that everybody is crowded out by Hamlet’s own intensity and ego and self-centredness.”

The lack of backstory for Ophelia, of a point of view or inner monologue, has left her vulnerable to projection over time. Everything from her image to her clothing to her words to the play as a whole has been subject to artistic reimagining, whether on the stage or in film depictions like Hamlet (2000, starring Ethan Hawke and Julia Stiles) and Ophelia (2018, starring Daisy Ridley), or in other media, like the video game Elsinore.

Taylor is now part of that history of representation. What she takes from the character is illuminating for understanding both The Life of a Showgirl and its predecessor, The Tortured Poets Department, and the stories Taylor has been drawn to for nearly two decades. More than anything, Taylor’s invocation of Ophelia makes sense because what is her public image if not an unfinished canvas, one that her fans continue to colour in with their own projections?

Who is Ophelia? Why might she matter to Taylor Swift?

In Hamlet, Ophelia is the daughter of Polonius, the chief advisor to King Claudius (Hamlet’s uncle), and the sister of Laertes. The play indicates early on that Ophelia and Hamlet previously had some sort of romance, though there aren’t many details. (“The question about the level of their relationship… is really ripe for other artists to imagine or reimagine,” Emma notes.) Meanwhile, Hamlet’s father, the previous King of Denmark, is dead, and his ghost comes back to tell Hamlet that Claudius murdered him and that Hamlet should seek revenge on Claudius for killing his brother and marrying his brother’s wife, Gertrude (Hamlet’s mother), in quick succession.