It’s impossible to talk about love in pop culture without mentioning or running into Taylor Swift. One of the biggest voices in the music industry—currently and of all time—Taylor Swift’s prolific works have the potential to rival Shakespeare. The woman can write a song—from a love ballad like Love Story, to a prayer that someone she loves can beat cancer, to a scathing social commentary on how easily women are vilified—every word she writes is raw, succinct, and real. There could be an entire argument to how Taylor Swift’s writing is as crucial to our culture as Shakespeare’s is, but it’s best to stick to the overlap.

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Love Story has been out for longer than ten years, and with the re-released version of Swift’s Fearless album, the popularity around the song has been piqued yet again. The song itself has plenty of evidence of being a remix of Romeo & Juliet, especially with lines like, “Romeo save me / they’re trying to tell me how to feel / this love is difficult / but it’s real” and “marry me Juliet, you’ll never have to be alone / I love you and that’s all I really know”, but the addition of the music video adds another layer to this modern adaptation.

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The music video begins with a dramatic sweep of a modern-day college campus, where Swift, our Juliet for all intents and purposes, is outfitted in jeans and a sweater, a stack of books tucked under her arm. As she’s walking, she comes across her love interest—our Romeo, of course—sitting beneath a sprawling maple tree. They lock eyes and are instantly transported back hundreds of years to a high-society version of Verona. There’s a castle on green grass, and an ornate ballroom in which R & J dance, their eyes still trained on one another. The scenes of the two lovers are intercut with Swift singing in a ballgown to the camera, inserting the written narrative of Romeo & Juliet through her fourth wall breaks as well as in her character of J within the scenes with her love interest.

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Throughout, there are lyrics that are both allusions to forbidden love: “keep quiet / cause we’re dead if they knew” and ones that directly reference Shakespeare’s famous narrative: “Romeo take me somewhere we can be alone / I’ll be waiting / all there’s left to do is run / you be the prince and I’ll be the princess / it’s a love story baby just say yes”. With the added context of the music video, Swift adds another layer to her remix—R & J are seen reborn in a modern setting just as they are pictured in the past. This adds another layer of transcendence to Shakespeare’s original narrative—this teenaged, desperate love is not only a timeless story, it also has the potential to transcend entire lifetimes. While the ages are certainly a lot higher in Swift’s version than Romeo & Juliet’s budding adolescence in Shakespeare’s text, the example of young college students still participating in a familiar, fated and doomed love highlights just how timeless Shakespeare’s original idea was—Romeo & Juliet is a story for the ages, from the 1500s to the 21st century.