Dear listeners,
When Taylor Swift first released the track list for her 12th original album, “The Life of a Showgirl,” one title piqued my interest: “The Fate of Ophelia.” I’m something of an Ophelia obsessive — so much so that when I was in college, I wrote my undergraduate thesis on representations of Ophelia in popular culture.
So when I saw that Swift had not only written a song referencing the doomed heroine of “Hamlet,” but that she also seemed to be referencing her — and John Everett Millais’s famous 1852 painting — on the album cover, I got to work on a playlist of other songs that reference Ophelia. And they say majoring in English doesn’t provide you with a practical skill set in the workplace!
One reason Ophelia has been such a reliable muse to songwriters is that her name itself sounds musical, given its vowel-y lilt. The Lumineers take advantage of it on their contribution to this playlist, adding an extra “oh” for some alliteration: “Oh, Ophelia / You’ve been on my mind, girl, since the flood.” But there’s also plenty of drama, romance and tragic poetry in her narrative arc, as an innocent young maiden who goes mad, starts speaking in riddles and distributing flowers to everyone she sees, and eventually ends up drowned — but beautifully so, Shakespeare and all who have portrayed her want to reassure — in a muddy brook. Her subsequent absence haunts the other characters in the play, and accordingly her name is sometimes associated with wistful disappearance. Robbie Robertson taps into that on a stutter-stepping 1975 single he wrote for the Band, in which he asks, “Ophelia, where have you gone?”