Taylor Swift is getting a little Shakespearean - except this time, she's writing a happy ending. On Oct. 3, the singer released her new single "The Fate of Ophelia," which serves as the lead track of her 12th studio album, The Life of a Showgirl. With the song, she turns William Shakespeare's famed play Hamlet on its head, but in the catchiest way possible.
Understandably, the scarcity of our insight into the life of Hamnet and his family has inspired writers and artists over the years to fill in the details with their own imaginings. As an opening quote from Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt reminds us, in both Maggie O'Farrell's haunting 2020 novel Hamnet and Chloe Zhao's new adaptation of it: "Hamnet and Hamlet are in fact the same name, entirely interchangeable in Stratford records in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries."