Taylor Swift and Shakespeare

In the spring of 2024, Harvard English professor Stephanie Burt taught a course on “Taylor Swift and Her World,” in which she thought about 20 students would enroll. Instead, as she explains in “I Taught the Taylor Swift Class at Harvard. Here’s My Thesis,” in the July/August 2024 issue of Vanity Fair, it attracted almost 200 students, as well as the attention of numerous news organizations, from The Today Show to TMZ, the BBC, Australian public radio, and many more. As she writes, “ours was hardly this year’s sole college class on Swift,” but it got a lion’s share of attention, most likely because it was held at Harvard, “a college famous for being famous.” The course followed the development of Swift’s career, tracing some of her influences (from Carole King to William Wordsworth), and looking at Swift alongside other authors and poets, including Alexander Pope and Sylvia Plath. 

All of which led us to ask Professor Burt if she could write a blog post on a related topic, one which is, of course, dear to our hearts: Taylor Swift and Shakespeare. It’s a perfect primer for anyone planning to attend the Folger Institute’s August 15 Mixology event, “Shakespeare for Swifties.”

Can Taylor Swift help us read Shakespeare? Certainly yes; and can Shakespeare help us read Taylor? Also yes—but not in the way that Swifties might first bring to mind. The few potential references to Shakespeare amid the collected works of the biggest pop star in the world say more about popular idiom than they do about the plays or the playwright. You don’t need to know much about Romeo and Juliet to understand that the last part of Swift’s hit “Love Story” turns a romantic tragedy into a happy ending for young lovers. In fact, given the mess that Shakespeare’s teenage couple makes, the celebratory key change in Swift’s last chorus might be more fun if you have only hazy memories of the original. Similarly, while the title track from Red gives colors to phases of Swift’s attachments, and Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73 assigns colors to feelings, the lessons here involve (as UT-Austin professor and Swiftie Elizabeth Scala has told the world) colors and symbols and literature  in general, rather than any special affinity between, say, the yellow of leaves in the sonnet and the leaves in Swift’s “The Best Day” that change in the fall.

We can see more of Shakespeare in Swift, and more Swift in Shakespeare, once we remember that Shakespeare wrote, and co-wrote, songs too: sometimes he took existing songs (as in Othello) to use in his plays. Swift’s way of fitting phrases to rhythm and melody places her in a tradition that goes back as far as you please: all the way back to medieval carols (see Richard Thompson’s 1000 Years of Popular Music for sonic confirmation), a tradition of riffs and choruses that certainly includes songs from Shakespeare’s plays. Writing for a singing voice means paying attention to vowel sounds and phrase length, above and beyond a poem’s regular meter. It means making sense the first time a listener hears the song and leaving room for individual vocalists’ flourishes: “Converting all your sounds of woe,” to take an especially self-referential example, “Into Hey, nonny nonny” (the modern equivalent could be “la-la-la”).

Words in a great song allow themselves to ride the music; music energizes a song’s key words, so that the same elements that might weaken other kinds of writing strengthen song lyrics. Almost always great songs deploy repetitions, lean on choruses, emphasize sameness as well as difference in the words. “Hits Different”—a song almost as self-referential as Shakespeare’s “Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more” (below)—repeats the two-word title four times in each chorus! The phrase changes its meaning as the syllables change pitch, going up two whole steps, and then back down two whole steps, and then doing it again. It hits different each time: it hits different because it’s sung.

You can find these effects throughout Swift’s catalog (where she wrote or co-wrote both music and words) as well as in lyrics from Shakespeare’s plays, which have lived long and prospered at the hands of many composers. You can find “Sigh no more,” for example, performed according to settings by Roger Quilter, by Ruth Morris Gray, by Ralph Vaughan Williams, by 1980s songstress Alison Moyet (a beautifully restrained treatment),  and in a big band jazz version from 1939 by Bob Crosby and the Bob-Cats, with vocals by Marion Mann. Each time its claim that “men were deceivers ever” hits different: that’s how melodies work.

Henry Singleton (artist), Charles Taylor (printmaker), “Desdemona… the poor soul sat singing, sing willow, willow, willow. Othello Act 4, scene 3.” 1792. Folger Shakespeare Library.

And yet you could say the same about songs in general. Indeed the experts who write about how songs get written sometimes do say the same.  The songwriting teacher Pat Pattison, in his 1995 textbook Writing Better Lyrics, explains why song lyrics “depend heavily on repeated content.” They hit different each time, whether it’s “willow” in the willow song that Shakespeare adapted for Desdemona, the graveside willow in the bluegrass classic “Bury Me Under the Willow Tree,” the resilient branch in Taylor Swift’s “willow” or the sheltering tree in Joan Armatrading’s “Willow.”

There’s something else going on in Swift’s songs and in the songs from Shakespeare’s plays as well, something that sets them apart from most pop, folk, and concert songwriting. We can take “Hits Different,” or “willow,” or “Back to December,” or (going back to 1989) “Style” as catchy masterworks on their own, just as we can look at the worldly advice in “Sigh no more,” or at the consolatory pastoral of “Under the greenwood tree,” and admire them for themselves. The songs in Shakespeare’s plays (those he probably wrote and those we know he didn’t) make sense, and their lyrics work, outside the plays. Otherwise composers would not set them for the concert stage, and figures like Donovan would not turn them into pop tracks (Donovan’s “Under the Greenwood Tree” is a delight).

But we can also encounter those songs, or return to them, within a larger story not set to music. Desdemona’s willow song predicts her tragic end. Amiens’s promise, in “Under the greenwood tree,” about “no enemy/ But winter and rough weather,” hits different when we remember that the Duke and his court now live in the Forest of Arden thanks (or no thanks) to the Duke’s own personal enemy and that Oliver (at the time, an enemy to Orlando) will stalk the forest soon. Balthasar’s performance of “Sigh no more” in Much Ado About Nothing, advising women to live with men’s frailties, speaks both to Benedick’s future as a man worldly enough for Beatrice and to Claudio’s naivete.

Taylor Swift’s songs, too, gain extra force through the way they fit into a larger nonmusical story: in this case, the story, or stories, we know of her life. Up through the pandemic albums folklore and evermore (where she insisted some characters were fictional) Swift explained in repeated interviews that she made her songs from the material of her real life: not that they reflected every detail literally, but that the songs fit into her ways of growing up and growing into herself. “Never Grow Up,” a song about leaving home, talks back to “The Best Day”—her earlier tribute to family—and the songs say more once we read Speak Now (where “Never Grow Up” appears) as an album about leaving your teens behind, thinking you’re on your own. “Back to December” apologizes to Swift’s ex-boyfriend Taylor Lautner: he “made time to see” her, when she hadn’t made enough time to see him.

“Style” gets more fun (and holds more ironies) once you recognize its white T-shirt on the real singer Harry Styles: will he go out of “style”? Not while he’s with her (oops). And by the time of The Tortured Poets Department, Swift’s songs take their place in a life story that includes not only her family and her love life but also her earlier songs: “The Manuscript,” for example, interacts with “All Too Well”—she isn’t just reading some manuscript, any manuscript, but the words of a previous song about a real person, and with a romance depicted in the “All Too Well” film.

It’s not true, at all, that Swift’s new songs (or her old) require us to know her life and her work beforehand, to connect all the dots before we can love them, though a provocative New Yorker essay argued otherwise. Nor is it true that we cannot care about Shakespeare’s songs, or Shakespeare’s plays, without Shakespeare scholarship, or outside the context of the plays (just ask Donovan). Rather, the songs can come to us with or without a literally un-sung context, a story that gives them additional meanings. We as listening Swifties (or potential Swifties) get more, a lot more, when we place the songs in a timeline created by other stories and songs. In similar ways, playgoers and Shakespeareans (and future Shakespeareans) can place the songs in the plays inside the plays: they light up the plots and the characters there, even as they also hold up on their own. That’s part of why some of them work onstage ironically, even as others strengthen a character’s case: we might even say that the songs work all too well.