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  • Just Like the Song, “The Fate of Ophelia” Video Has Little to Do With Shakespeare’s Character in Hamlet

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    Because Taylor Swift has increasingly decided to cast herself in the role of “English teacher” to the masses, maybe it should come as no surprise that she opted to not only write a song called “The Fate of Ophelia” for The Life of a Showgirl, but to make it the first track on the album and the lead single. Even though, to be quite honest, of all the schlock on this record, the title track featuring Sabrina Carpenter probably would have been her best bet for “first single” material. But it’s obvious that Swift wants to style herself as some kind of literary authority with this track, even if, for the most part, what comes across is the fact that Swift kind of just likes all the imagery surrounding Ophelia, including plenty of water-related scenes, as well as the famed painting of her by Sir John Everett Millais. Finding it “actually romantic,” Swift delivers her own “Pre-Raphaelite” take on the image by opening the video on a scene of a rather generic-looking rich person’s house (think: the “Blank Space” video) before panning over to a painting off to the side that features Swift in a white dress in “Ophelia pose.”

    Naturally, the painting “comes to life,” with Swift rising up as though now on a set. And oh, turns out she is, with the backdrops behind her suddenly lifting as she walks along the sound stage and sings, “I heard you calling on the megaphone” as the presumed director of the “production” does just that (though, needless to say, “megaphone,” within the context of the lyrics, is all about the cheerleader connotation as it relates to football). Swift continues the literalism of the lyrics by taking an oversized matchstick from someone else on the set, miraculously igniting it against her chest and then tossing it casually toward someone else (conveniently, a fire breather) while singing, “As legend has it, you are quite the pyro/You light the match to watch it blow.”

    From there, Swift does another costume change into something decidedly more “showgirl”: a sequined red leotard, rounded out by platinum blonde hair. This as she joins her fellow “Eras Tour family” in the dressing room. Commenting on the reunion with her dancers (who appear in various other scenes as well), Swift gushed, “Writing, rehearsing, directing and shooting the music video for ‘The Fate of Ophelia’ was the thrill of a lifetime because I got to be reunited with my Eras Tour family!! I wanted each one-take scene to feel like a live performance and remind us all of how it felt to be at those shows together. Making every moment count. It’s a journey through the chaotic world of show business.” Though, if that was the intent, it certainly doesn’t come across—at least not even one iota as effectively as the chaotic world of show business displayed in, what else, Showgirls. Nor does it have much to do with Ophelia in Hamlet.

    Then again, nothing Swift yammers on about in this song really does, least of all the shudder-inducing chorus (which is the part of the song that sounds most like Demi Lovato’s 2011 hit, “Give Your Heart a Break”), “All that time I sat alone in my tower/You were just honing your powers/Now I can see it all/Late one night/You dug me out of my grave and/Saved my heart from the fate of Ophelia.” Never mind that likening Travis Kelce to Hamlet is in extremely inaccurate taste (for intelligence level alone), but, lest anyone forget, he was no Prince Charming positioned in any way to “save” Ophelia from her “fate”: death. What’s more, even if Kelce isn’t the Hamlet to her Ophelia, per se, that Swift likens a fairy-tale romance to being saved (while repurposing Shakespeare in the process) isn’t exactly a “cute look” for 2025. Though it does certainly fortify the long-standing speculation that she’s fundamentally Republican, ergo right at home with the MAGA crowd despite her “bad blood” with the Orange Creature.

    In any case, to heighten the cornball factor of it all, Swift gets into the weeds as usual with her special breed of arithmomania by having chosen to release the video on Kelce’s birthday, October 5th. Worse still, she urges, “Keep it one hundred on the land, thе sea, the sky.” This being a reference to his jersey number, eighty-seven, and her favorite/lucky number in general, thirteen, adding up to one hundred.

    The video isn’t always quite so precise, coming off like a, that’s right, kaleidoscope of random scenes as one of the showgirls backstage pulls back the curtain to reveal yet another iteration of Swift, who is now dancing onstage (this time with a brunette wig) in something more akin to a 1960s-era getup. Here, too, the intent appears less about promoting an awareness of Shakespearean plays, and more about announcing all the ways in which no one works harder than Swift. During a portion of this performance, Swift and her backup dancers (wearing the same wigs and dresses as her) are presented as though through a kaleidoscope—this tying into how her visualizers for each song on The Life of a Showgirl are also presented in a kaleidoscopic way.

    From there, Swift (who obviously directed) cuts to another stage backdrop that features her on a ship as she strums a mark tree (you know, that wind chime-looking instrument) and remembers that this song is supposed to be, at least somewhat, about Ophelia, singing, “The eldest daughter of a nobleman/Ophelia lived in fantasy/But love was a cold bed full of scorpions/The venom stole her sanity.” Naturally, there are some listeners who won’t bother to read that “scorpions” line as a metaphor, and take it to mean that there was, in fact, a scene of Ophelia lying in bed and suddenly getting stung by scorpions. But no, there is no mention of scorpions at any point in Hamlet, with that “symbol” being more prominent in Macbeth (specifically, when Macbeth says, “O full of scorpions is my mind”). Nor did “venom” steal her sanity, men did. Most especially Hamlet, who killed her father, Polonius. Thus, for Swift to liken her Prince Charming to being the proverbial Hamlet to her Ophelia is a bit…ill-advised.

    As the camera pans out to show that the ship is part of a more theatrical kind of production than a film one (perhaps another attempt at “paying homage” to Shakespeare), Swift continues to prattle on about how Kelce “saved her” from, for all intents and purposes, suicide. Or rather, emotional suicide. She thus persists in thanking him for “rescuing” her, praising, “And if you’d never come for me/I might’ve lingered in purgatory/You wrap around me like a chain, a crown, a vine/Pulling me into the fire.” And yes, Swift clearly thinks she’s endlessly clever for referencing fire instead of water here, seeing as how Ophelia drowned. But what she’s really indicating is that Kelce is pulling her into the depths of hell. If for no other reason than to co-sign some Faustian pact with the NFL.

    Funnily enough, Swift then kind of does “commit suicide” by jumping into the fake water that then transitions into her starring in some kind of 1930s/1940s Busby Berkeley-inspired production (and, by the way, Jennifer Lopez already tread that ground pretty thoroughly with the “Medicine” video) called Sequins Are Forever (they definitely aren’t, but one supposes that was the best “riff” that Taylor could come up with for Elizabeth Taylor’s famed documentary/general philosophy, Diamonds Are Forever). The camera then pans out to once again reveal that this is just a big-budget film production, with the clapperboard informing viewers that the “film” is “featuring” Kitty Finlay (a nod to the “character” that “The Life of a Showgirl” mentions in the first verse, as well as to her grandmother’s last name) and that it is “Take 100” (because Swift splooges every time she self-references, here reminding that she says, “Keep it one hundred on the land, thе sea, the sky”).

    The “spectacle” keeps going in the next scene as Swift, now in a brown-haired wig again, sports a “rope dress” to match with the piles of ropes around her as she’s then lifted into the air. This followed by a cut to her doing her Las Vegas showgirl cosplay because she remembered she didn’t play up the showgirl aesthetic enough.

    By the final scene, Swift seems to have lost the plot completely with what whatever “meaning” this video was supposed to have by showing Swift being pushed on a cart in a getup that harkens back to her “Lavender Haze” look as she again sings, oh so “eloquently,” “Pledge allegiance to your hands, your team, your vibes.” However, this time when it’s said, Swift ramps up the cringe factor by having someone offscreen pass a football to her to catch. As if the viewer/listener wasn’t already well-aware that the track is all about Travis being a hero/“knight in shining armor” (or rather, in a shining football uniform).

    The cart leads Swift through some 1920s-looking hotel, complete with the aesthetic of the bellhops (maybe she had recently rewatched AHS: Hotel and took notes). And, evidently, these bellhops are having a party (one that looks decidedly New Year’s Eve-y, which would make sense considering Swift’s song, “New Year’s Day”). While Swift feigns getting down with “the help” for a minute, she soon steals away to the bathroom where the final shot is of her lying in the bathtub (from the same photoshoot featured on the standard edition of her album cover). Driving home the point that she’s been spared from the fate of Ophelia in that she’s just taking a bath in her showgirl-wear, not drowning. All because some big, strong meathead saved her! Shakespeare would be so proud.

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    Genna Rivieccio

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  • Jeremy McCarter’s Audiodrama Puts Us Inside Hamlet’s Head

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    McCarter’s audio adaptation of Hamlet embraces audio experimentation to renew one of theater’s most familiar texts. Courtesy Make-Believe Association and the Tribeca Festival

    For early modern audiences, the question of how to represent Hamlet’s dead father was answered by trapdoors, white flour on an armored face or an actor playing a bloodied corpse. After lighting and sound technology standardized the spectral stage, film answered with the magic of superimposition and the green screen. More recently, the 2023 Public Theater production uniquely possessed Hamlet by putting the ghost inside him. In a rapturous performance, streaming on Great Performances through tomorrow, Ato Blankson-Wood rolls his eyes back into his head, fiercely mouthing his father’s fiery plea.

    In a new audio production, Jeremy McCarter, disciple of Oskar Eustis’s Public Theater and founder of the production company Make-Believe Association, goes a step further than the Delacorte staging. McCarter places not the ghost but us, the listeners, inside the character of Hamlet. The sounds of his environment merge with the sounds of his body. We hear what he hears.

    Readers might know McCarter as Lin-Manuel Miranda’s co-writer of Hamilton: The Revolution and as a public historian in his own right. But since the founding of Make-Believe in 2017, McCarter’s collaborative efforts have centered around original, live audio plays by Chicago writers. With the pandemic, the company shifted to longer form studio productions, including most recently Lake Song, which is something of a Waterworld for the modern ear. Listening through Make-Believe’s stream, I thought: Is this what would have happened if Studs Terkel, Norman Corwin and Octavia Butler got together and played around with 21st-century recording technology?

    Maybe so. But even today’s listeners will need to warm up to any version of Hamlet told only from the main character’s perspective. And McCarter knows this. Episode 1 begins not with the “Who’s there?” of the famous sentinel scene (Hamlet’s absent from it, after all), but instead with listening directions for the modern commuter: “The tale that you’re about to hear, with its carnal, bloody and unnatural acts,” whispers Daveed Diggs, in a playful pastiche of the playtext, “will come most vividly to life, if you listen to it…on headphones.”

    And so it does. When we first encounter Hamlet, sound designer Mikhail Fiksel conjures a scene reminiscent of an actor readying to enter a stage. We hear footsteps echo across the solitary silence of the stereo soundscape, a deep inbreath and then a heavy door opening unto Claudius’s coronation scene. Suddenly, the social space—the music, the laughter, the chatter—of Elsinore is upon us. Daniel Kyri, who plays Hamlet with a subtleness rarely afforded to stage actors, pummels himself, right from the get-go, with the wish that “this too too solid flesh would melt.” Soliloquies, under McCarter’s direction, are not private thoughts uttered aloud but instead long-running interior monologues.

    Adapting Hamlet to audio is not a new thing. Orson Welles’s Columbia Workshop took it up in fall 1936, and the BBC 12 years later. These adaptations sound dated to us today, but they were part of a vibrant auditory culture of their time. As Neil Verma has written, radio dramatists constructed a fourth wall for listeners at the same time that stage dramatists attempted to break it down for spectators. Contemporary productions on Audible tend to eschew the declamatory style of these earlier works, and also, sadly, their acoustic experimentation. This is where McCarter’s production is a welcome intervention into this overproduced yet underheard play: a return to the imaginative possibilities of the acoustic medium.

    Hamlet: World Premiere Listening Event - 2025 Tribeca FestivalHamlet: World Premiere Listening Event - 2025 Tribeca Festival
    Daniel Kryi, who plays the titular character, at the “Hamlet: World Premiere Listening Event” during the 2025 Tribeca Festival. Photo by Roy Rochlin/Getty Images for Tribeca Festival

    The series doesn’t sacrifice the visual sense but instead spatializes it: a complex arrangement of lavalier, shotgun and binaural mics captures sound in all directions. Purists might cry that McCarter slashes up the text to highlight Hamlet’s point of audition, but they are posers. Any Shakespeare scholar knows that the text we read today is itself highly mediated, a composite of at least three different versions. In the age of Grand Theft Hamlet, this version offers remarkable fidelity despite its formal innovation.

    Intimacy might just be the word to describe what the Make-Believe team achieves here. And it’s true: We do hear Hamlet’s heartbeat, breath and memory against the backdrop of his social world. I think the experiment works best when we hear Hamlet not foregrounded but embedded in the specificities of his place and time; when the mic is not inside him, or even him, but instead on his lapel, capturing the soundscape as it merges with his fractured perceptions. This happens most memorably in Episode 3, when the sound of bells decreasing in half steps tells not just the time of day but also the scale of mental descent.

    Yet there is a danger in achieving this intimacy by reducing Hamlet the play to Hamlet the character. We might call this McCarter’s “Hamilton-ization” of Hamlet: the individualizing of the character against his social world. The “To be or not to be” soliloquy, for instance, is done completely underwater. It makes for riveting audio, methinks, but it erases the fact that most of the soliloquies of the play are overheard. This includes the usurping King Claudius’s speech, where he laments that his “O limèd soul, that struggling to be free / Art more engaged.” This speech is translated as overheard noise in the audio, but we’d do better to listen broader. Claudius is comparing his soul to an animal caught in a glue trap, and at times, Make-Believe’s production, too, becomes more ensnared as it attempts to become more free.

    McCarter’s stated aim is to resist the commonplace that Hamlet, as Laurence Olivier famously voiced over the 1948 film, “could not make up his mind” by, well, getting us into his mind. But this rhetoric ends up perpetuating that romantic individualism instead of challenging it, making what is social—primogeniture, murder, love—solely a problem of the conscience. In doing so, the artwork, too, ends up privatizing very public questions: What system do we resort to when an injustice has been enacted? How do we test the truth of our beliefs when we cannot trust our own perceptions? As McCarter explains in his New York Times op-ed, he is most interested in this question: “Who among us hasn’t felt,” he writes, “that ‘the time is out of joint’?” But in making the play into a universal coming-of-age narrative, we lose out on asking what an “us” is.

    And so, how does this production stage “Enter Ghost”? I won’t give it away. It sounds awesome, even if it doesn’t quite make sense. (Especially if you’re a nerd like me and study the script along with the audio. How exactly does Hamlet write something down when he’s in the ocean?) But that’s no matter, because this adaptation is less about making sense than remaking the senses.

    Indeed, the most compelling adaptation of the stage direction “Enter Ghost” is not an adaptation at all, but Isabella Hammad’s 2021 novel Enter Ghost. It tells the story of a British Palestinian actress caught up in a production of Hamlet in the West Bank. The novel doesn’t aim to make its characters like us but instead attempts the opposite: to force readers like me to confront a world that is radically different from their own. This is what all great art should do. Or so I’ve heard.

    More in performing arts

    Jeremy McCarter’s Audiodrama Puts Us Inside Hamlet’s Head

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    Alex Ullman

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  • In ‘Hamnet,’ Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal Spin a Shakespearean Fairy Tale

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    William Shakespeare’s name isn’t spoken for quite a while in Hamnet. Instead, we get to know the man that Agnes falls in love with: a gentle if stoic artist who’s grown up with a hard father, who feels deeply but struggles to express himself. Zhao and Mescal felt aligned from the jump in how to present the Bard, about whom so much remains unknown. “Paul’s performance may be more restrained, but you feel that, without him, there’s no her,” Zhao says. “Jessie and Paul as two actors were extremely giving to each other in that way.”

    “It’s no mean feat to step into the shoes of Shakespeare and to bring so much humanity to him, and that’s what Paul, as a person, threads,” Buckley adds. “He has this greatness about him in an old-school way, like Richard Burton had. He’s got a weight that is bigger than his years, and you can really lean on it. Working with him, I was like, ‘Oh, I want to meet you so many times in my life in different ways and work together.’ It felt so alive. Anything was possible.”

    After Hamnet’s death, Agnes and William lead parallel lives—Agnes continuing to hold down the home front with their two daughters, and William processing their collective loss through his writing back in London. He is, in a sense, containing their emotional wreckage and figuring out how to make sense of it all. Hamnet absorbs this idea as its own. Zhao found that this version of Hamlet’s creation was not dissimilar from how she should make her own movie. Things got meta.

    “We created a working environment where our own lives and what we were dealing with as human beings—not just artists—were allowed to be projected onto the art we were making,” Zhao says. “That is the whole point of this story: how these things we experience in life that are sometimes impossible to deal with can be alchemized and transformed through art and storytelling.”

    Which brings us back to the ending, and what the Hamnet team discovered together on those last days. One small gesture inside the Globe transforms the tenor of the play, and in turn, of Hamnet. “We were all waiting for this moment,” Zhao says. “Did Hamlet actually have this moment in the original production? Maybe, maybe not—we don’t know…. But by the time we got there, the veil between past and future, real life and fiction, was very, very thin.”

    Hamnet will screen at the Toronto International Film Festival before it’s released in US theaters on November 27. This feature is part of Awards Insider’s exclusive fall film festival coverage, including first looks and exclusive interviews with some of the biggest names set to hit Venice, Telluride, and Toronto.

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    David Canfield

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