Swift (as a Shadow): Women's Experiences

One thing Shakespeare and Taylor Swift have in common is they have never shied away from the darker emotional terrain of women’s experiences. Ophelia’s mental breakdown in Hamlet, during which she sings folk songs about betrayal and death after losing both her lover and her father, remains one of the most haunting depictions of female despair ever shown on the stage. In Macbeth, Lady Macbeth’s resolve slowly turns into guilt-ridden madness, leading her to sleepwalk and hallucinate blood on her hands. These women are driven “mad” by a world that silences or sacrifices them. And too often in literature, their madness is where their story ends. Ophelia drowns, and Lady Macbeth dies offstage, presumably by suicide, once her usefulness as a partner in crime is spent. Shakespeare, very radically for his time period, gave these women moments to use their own voices, such as the performance of Ophelia’s songs, or Macbeth’s famous monologue, but one can’t help wondering —what if these heroines had their despair truly heard before it was too late?

On Folklore, Swift picks up this thread in the poignantly titled song “mad woman.” She adopts the persona of a woman that society has labeled unhinged, a woman that has been gaslit and pushed to the brink by cruelty, and speaks her truth with vengeful clarity and honesty. Over a low, melancholy melody, Swift’s lyrics drip with scorn for the hypocrites who created the very “mad woman" that they now mock. “Every time you call me crazy, I get more crazy… What a shame she went mad, no one likes a mad woman, you made her like that.” These lines could be Ophelia’s ghost addressing Hamlet and the court that ended up failing her, or Lady Macbeth indicting the brutal patriarchy that drove her to connive the only path she saw to power of her own, ultimately leading to her collapse. Swift's “mad woman” refuses to go quietly, and, instead of drowning, she lights a fire. Notably, the song goes as far as to nod to witch imagery (“women like hunting witches too, doing your dirtiest work for you”) recalling how outspoken women have long been branded as witches and undermined by other women, themselves seeking safety by displaying allegiance to the patriarchal order. In Macbeth, Lady Macbeth invokes dark spirits and is later reduced to a mumbling phantom, pitied by the men around her. Swift flips that script, filling her mad woman with agency and anger. The phrase “no one likes a mad woman” is steaming with sarcasm and double entendre. Swift knows that a woman's anger is often dismissed, used as evidence of mental instability, but she delivers the message anyway, unapologetically furious and aware. 

Swift’s line “What about that?… You made her like that” points a finger at everyone who vilified or underestimated her narrator. It’s as if Ophelia had stood up amidst her ramblings and directly accused the Danish court: “I didn’t just go mad — you broke me..” By blending vulnerability with venom, “mad woman” stands as a modern response to the literary archetype of deranged and morally compromised women which derives from the Ophelias and Lady Macbeths of lore but continues to define the experiences of non-fictional women. Swift ensures that the inner life of the “mad” heroine isn’t lost in misery. Instead, it becomes a battle cry, echoing with empathy across the ages.

Even outside of “mad woman,” Swift’s music is tinged with the stories of tragic heroines. Her album Evermore opens with “willow,” a love song that Swift herself has described as about intrigue and spellbinding attraction. Fans familiar with Shakespeare’s works quickly noticed an eerie connection to Desdemona’s “Willow Song” in Othello. In the play, Desdemona sings a folk tune about a woman abandoned by her lover (“sing all a green willow must be my garland”) on the night she herself will be murdered. It’s a moment heavy with foreshadowing. Centuries later, Swift releases her own “willow” with its witchy music video and lyrics such as “Life was a willow and it bent right to your wind.” The song’s refrain, “Wherever you stray, I follow,” carries an underbelly of fatalistic devotion. While Evermore’s “willow” is ultimately a love song with a much happier fate than Desdemona’s, the intertextual nod is there. This era of her songwriting leans into the same moody atmosphere that Shakespeare captured in his tragic heroines’ most intimate moments, perhaps going so far as to rewrite their fates.