THE FATE OF A COURT GIRL: OPHELIA’S MUSICAL AFTERLIVES, FROM SHAKESPEARE TO SWIFT
THE FATE OF A COURT GIRL: OPHELIA’S MUSICAL AFTERLIVES, FROM SHAKESPEARE TO SWIFT

Summary/Abstract: The paper aims to explore the musical dimension and fluid nature of Ophelia’s identity by examining some of the ways in which the lead single from Taylor Swift’s 2025 The Life of a Showgirl and other 21st-century revisitations of Hamlet, including Lisa Klein’s 2006 novel and its 2018 adaptation, depart from the traditional representation of her character and story arc in the original Shakespearean text and salient 19th- and 20th- century tributes, ranging from Pre-Raphaelite paintings to Tom Stoppard’s 1966 Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, John Updike’s 2000 Gertrude and Claudius and the lyrics of songs by The Band, Adam Cohen or Natalie Merchant. To this end it will engage in a comparative examination of recent avatars and earlier landmarks in Ophelia’s intertextual journey in an attempt to establish some of the key connections and distinctions between narrative, lyrical and visual reinterpretations of her identity, perception and treatment by others, misguided love for Prince Hamlet, madness and suicide and the extent to which any of her modern afterlives can be said to allow Shakespeare’s elusive female character to escape the confines of a tragic script and tell her own story.

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