Mary Bly, who writes under the pen name Eloisa James, is a Shakespeare professor and historical romance author. Read more about her post on Swift’s new hit The Fate of Ophelia.
A Shakespeare professor’s breakdown of Taylor Swift’s new hit The Fate of Ophelia has gone viral, striking a chord with both Swifties and literature fans alike.
Mary Bly, 63, who writes under the pen name Eloisa James, is both a Shakespeare professor at Fordham University as well as a historical romance author. Her Instagram analysis of the first single off Swift’s new album, which had received 854,000 views on the Meta platform at the time of writing, delves into how Swift reimagines one of Shakespeare’s most tragic heroines.
“As a Shakespeare professor, I love the embedded fragments of the play—not just Hamlet’s ‘venom’ that drives Ophelia mad, but the way he leaps into her grave,” Bly, @eloisajamesbooks, told Newsweek.
In her viral video, Bly explains that Swift draws on the doomed love story of Hamlet and Ophelia, where the young noblewoman is rejected and humiliated by Hamlet, spirals into madness, and ultimately drowns. In Hamlet, it’s never made clear whether her death was accidental or suicide—a detail that has long symbolized female despair and lack of agency.
“She brilliantly tied together what we know of Ophelia and what we know of young women who drowned in that kind of venomous, scorpion-ridden sexual morass with the man who comes along to save you, the man who comes along and digs you out of your grave,” Bly continued.
