Taylor Swift announced her 12th studio album, "The Life of a Showgirl," will drop Oct. 3.

Shakespeare may have sidelined Ophelia, but Taylor Swift is "keeping it 100" and bringing the heroine center stage in her pop-infused, foot-tapping track.

On the opening track of her 12th studio album, "The Life of a Showgirl," Swift explains how she could have suffered "The Fate of Ophelia" if not for fiancé Travis Kelce.

"And if you’d never come for me / I might’ve drowned in the melancholy / I swore my loyalty to me, myself and I / Right before you lit my sky," the showgirl sings.

What is 'The Fate of Ophelia'?

For those who haven't cracked open the Shakespeare play: Ophelia is a noblewoman pulled in every direction by the men in her life. Her romance with Hamlet crumbles under pressure. It doesn't help that Hamlet kills her father and turns cold, sending her into a spiral of madness.

In Act IV, Scene VII, Queen Gertrude recounts how Ophelia fell into a brook and drowned after tumbling from a willow tree.

Whether her death was intentional or accidental remains unknown, but her heartbreak is unquestionable.

Swift rewrites the forsaken lover's fate through her own lens. In 2021, she released "Willow" from her ninth studio album "Evermore." She wrote the single with her then-partner Joe Alwyn under the alias "William Bowery." With their breakup, one could argue she fell out of a figurative "Willow" tree. But unlike Ophelia, Swift found her way back into love.

Pre-Raphaelite painter Sir John Everett Millais immortalized Ophelia in an oil based painting. Swift recreated a similar visual of her submerged in a bathtub wearing a sequined corset.

On the Aug. 13 episode of the New Heights podcast, Swift revealed that Hamlet helped inspire her new era.

"He may not have read Hamlet, but I explained it to him,” Swift said of Travis Kelce during the two-hour podcast.

"Don't tell my middle school English teacher," Kelce joked, as his brother Jason Kelce replied, "SparkNotes."

'And baby, that's show business'

If Swift turned heartbreak into "The Tortured Poets Department," she's turning the spotlight on glamour, glitz and full-on showbiz for her 12th era, "The Life of a Showgirl."

"My day ends with me in a bathtub, not usually in a bedazzled dress," Swift told Jason Kelce during the podcast on the inspiration behind her opulent and vivacious era. "I wanted to glamorize all the different aspects of how (the Eras Tour) felt."

Blistered heels and sore joints from her three hour concert didn't slow her down as she flew in and out of Sweden between European stops to collaborate with longtime producers Max Martin and Shellback on the 12 tracks. The trio worked together on her "1989" and "Reputation" albums along with some "Red" songs.

Travis couldn't hide his excitement on the podcast.

"That’s a banger," he said of "Cancelled!," later adding that the entire album is filled with "banger after banger."

The other 11 tracks are "The Fate of Ophelia," "Elizabeth Taylor," "Opalite," "Father Figure," "Eldest Daughter," "Ruin the Friendship," "Actually Romantic," "Wi$h Li$T," "Wood," "Honey" and the title track.

"This album is going to make you dance," Travis told Jason. Swift described her fiancé as a "human exclamation point."

"The Life of a Showgirl" is Swift's first chapter since she bought her masters. "All of the music I’ve ever made now belongs to me," she said in a letter posted to her website after fully acquiring her catalog from Shamrock Capital in May.

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This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Taylor Swift rewrites Ophelia's fate on 'Showgirl,' with Travis Kelce as her saving grace

Reporting by Bryan West, USA TODAY NETWORK / Nashville Tennessean

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