A world expert on William Shakespeare has compared Taylor Swift to some of history’s greatest writers – including the Bard himself – and said she is a “real poet”.
Scholar Sir Jonathan Bate, a former Shakespeare professor at Warwick University, said he believed the popstar is more than “just high-class showbiz” and has a “literary sensibility” that was apparent from her debut album.
In a piece for The Sunday Times Magazine titled Why Taylor Swift is a literary giant, he wrote that he had “one of the best nights of [his] life” at one of Swift’s concerts.
“Listening to her lyrics, which most of the rapturous (mainly female) audience seemed to know by heart, I came away with confirmation of a thought I first had 15 years ago: this isn’t just high-class showbiz, Taylor Swift is a real poet,” he said.
Sir Jonathan analysed how the singer has been inspired by the great English playwright but had succeeded in “rewriting his darker moments” to make them “more palatable”, including in her song Love Story.
He said he first spotted references to Shakespeare in that track, on which she sings: “You were Romeo, you were throwin’ pebbles/ And my daddy said, ‘Stay away from Juliet’.”
The academic called the hit an “almost perfect pop song, with its catchy hook, driving rhythm and ingenious use of banjo and mandolin”.
He said he bought Swift’s debut album Fearless the second he heard that song and used it to show his students at Warwick University how Shakespeare has been changed and adapted over the years. “That balcony, for example,” he wrote. “Try to find it in the original text. There is no balcony, only, ‘But soft, what light through yonder window breaks?/ It is the east and Juliet is the sun.’
“The balcony was introduced in the 18th century, most famously in a Drury Lane stage production by David Garrick.”
He also noted instances where Swift has alluded to or referenced Ernest Hemingway, Robert Frost and Emily Dickinson.
Sir Jonathan signed off the piece with the words: “The enduring advocacy of the distinguished critic Professor Sir Christopher Ricks eventually won Bob Dylan the Nobel Prize in Literature. I’m not sure I would yet go that far for Taylor Swift, but watch this space.”
Having sold more than 200 million records globally, Swift is one of the bestselling musicians in history. She is the most streamed woman on Spotify and the only act to have five albums with more than 1 million copies sold in the US.
Read The Independent’s five-star review of Swift’s latest album Midnights here.
