Swift (as a Shadow): Love

Unrequited love is a timeless theme in Shakespeare’s works that surfaces both in comedies and in tragedies. In Twelfth Night, Viola’s disguise locks her in a love triangle: she silently loves Orsino, even as she sends “Cesario” (herself disguised) to woo Olivia on his behalf. Unable to confess her feelings, Viola poignantly describes a fictional sister who “never told her love” and kept her agony hidden, smiling at the grief while her heart broke quietly. That image, of a woman patient and silent in the face of love unreturned, steps right out of the 7th century and into Taylor Swift's songwriting notebook. Indeed, Folklore and Evermore give voice to a chorus of characters that endure love that is either unreciprocated, secret, or painfully unsustainable. But unlike Viola who must hold her tongue, Swift's narrators end up singing their sorrows out loud for everyone to hear.

Take “illicit affairs”, Taylor Swift's short ballad of a romance that is doomed to remain hidden. The illicit lovers meet in parking lots and in “clandestine” bars, sustaining a fling that is simultaneously euphoric and miserable. The woman at the center of the song knows she is giving far more love than she receives, yet she still can't stop herself. “Don’t call me ‘kid,’ don’t call me ‘baby’ / I look at this godforsaken mess that you made me,” she cries in the bridge, her words echoing the anguish of being used and cast aside by a lover who prioritized someone else.  One hears echoes of Helena in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, chasing Demetrius through the woods, begging for him to give her a glance, or of Ophelia in Hamlet, manipulated by Hamlet, who instead of returning her love tells her “Get thee to a nunnery.” Swift's modern heroine won’t be quiet about her “godforsaken mess,” though. In a way, “illicit affairs” is Swift giving a microphone to Helena and Ophelia’s repressed pain, centuries later in 2020. 

Even more directly, Evermore’s “tolerate it” reads like a monologue delivered by a Shakespearean wife who suffers in silence. Over a piano, Swift portrays a woman who idolizes her partner to the point of worship — “I made you my temple, my mural, my sky” — only to be met by her lover with apathy. She sets the table with the finest things and yearns for a loving glance, “begging for footnotes in the story of [his] life,” yet he barely notices her. The heartache of “tolerate it” recalls the plight of another Shakespearean — Helena in All’s Well That Ends Well, who devotes herself to a man (Bertram) that cruelly rejects her. Like Helena, Swift’s narrator tries everything to please her beloved, even diminishing herself in hopes of being seen. Like Helena, she reaches a breaking point. The song ends with her fantasizing about running away or making some grand gesture that jolts him out of his indifference. Helena even stages her own disappearance, faking her death to spur Bertram’s remorse. Swift’s punchline, “I know my love should be celebrated, but you tolerate it,” distills the resentment that these women feel. Both Swift’s narrator and Helena deserve a love that is returned in full, a basic human yearning understood well by Shakespeare.

Not all love in Swift's catalog is unrequited, however; some is simply star-crossed or misaligned in timing, evoking the near misses of many of Shakespeare’s romances. The triad of songs Swift nicknamed the “Teenage Love Triangle” (“cardigan”, “august”, and “betty”) illustrates young lovers who are caught in a tangle of betrayal and regret, each with their own story. In “cardigan,” Betty reminisces in old age about first love and innocence lost (“I knew you’d haunt all of my what-ifs”). In “august,” the other girl mourns a romance that was “never [hers] to lose” as it slips away. In “betty,” James (the vertex connecting Betty and the unnamed “mistress”) admits his foolishness and hopes it isn’t too late to repent. Listening to these songs is similar to watching Twelfth Night or Much Ado About Nothing: the audience has an omniscient view of all of the misunderstandings that the characters themselves do not. We want to reach through the speaker and tell James to grow up, or comfort the speaker of “august” that she deserved better, just as we wish we could knock sense in Shakespeare's obtuse lovers. The love triangle may also have more ambiguity than a usual Shakespearean comedy, as we never truly know what happens. In that, it resembles a Shakespearean “problem play,” not a neat comedy or a full tragedy, but something in between that is messily and recognizably human