Taylor Swift's "The Fate of Ophelia" Appears to Be a Reference to 'Hamlet'

Now that we know some details about Taylor Swift's new album "The Life of a Showgirl," fans are quite naturally doing a deep dive on all of the album's various tracks and what they might be about. The album, which is Taylor's twelfth, will have 12 tracks, and she ran through all 12 of them on New Heights with Travis and Jason Kelce.

Among the tracks that received the most attention was "The Fate of Ophelia," which appears to also play a role in the cover of the album. Here's what we know about what that title might mean.

"The Fate of Ophelia" appears to be a reference to William Shakespeare's Hamlet. Ophelia is the daughter of Polonius, the chief counselor to the king, and also Hamlet's chief love interest in the play. She meets a tragic end after she is discovered to have drowned, although it's unclear whether she drowned as a result of her madness over the loss of her father or died by suicide.

The titular "Fate of Ophelia," then, is her drowning death, which appears to be referenced on the cover of the album, which features a picture of Taylor in a pond filled with water.

Crucially, "The Fate of Ophelia" is also a fundamentally tragic character, and it's also the first song on the album, which means that it will work as a tone setter for everything to follow.

While we don't know exactly what Taylor's interpretation of Ophelia's story might be, it's fair to say that she is one of several Shakespearean women who don't get the kind of fulfilling arc that they might deserve. The intentional ambiguity about Ophelia's death, and the questions around whether she might have ended her life just to take control of her own destiny, mean that she is undeniably a fertile character for the songstress to mine.

While we won't know for sure how the song functions on the record until we actually see the album, it seems possible that "The Fate of Ophelia" is a reference to Taylor herself as she moves into something of a new era. The song, which comes first on the album, could be about the death of the "tortured poet" that was the subject of her last album, and the arrival of the showgirl.

Of course, Ophelia's fate is a tragic one, so it seems likely that the song will have an air of sadness to it. The song could be a reclamation project from Taylor, who almost definitely doesn't think that Ophelia gets discussed as much as she should.

Taylor loves to get her fans involved in this kind of speculation, so it seems only fitting that she should give them a couple of months to do that. Even after the song is released, fans might still have different perspectives on what it actually means.