1 Paula Hameleers
5740975
MA Thesis: English Language and Culture
Dr. R.W.H. Glitz
30 June 2011
A Mystery in Paint and Print: Nineteenth-Century interpretations of Tennyson’s
“The Lady of Shalott”.
1. Introd.
‘Poetry is like shot-silk with many glancing colours’
Tennyson (quoted in Stott, 4)
As the above quotation shows, Tennyson strove to make his writing visually powerful.
In his opinion, poetry should flow, like silk, and its changing colors should speak to the
reader’s eye. “The Lady of Shalott”, a famous poem from his poetry collection published in
1833, suits Tennyson’s ideal. Lindsay Smith argues that “the poem refigures the emphasis of
Coleridge’s account of ‘bright colours in motion’ in the Biographia ‘leaving the strongest
impression on the eye’, and becoming ‘the link of association in recalling the feelings and
images that had accompanied the original impression’” (139). When reading “The Lady of
Shalott”, a colorful, medieval fairy-tale unfolds before the eyes. The Lady, eternally confined
to her loom and tower by a mysterious curse, aspires to leave her lonely island and experience
the real, colorful life at Camelot. Gerhard Joseph confirms that “One of the… critical truisms
about Tennyson is that he is the poet of the remote in space and time, the poet of ‘the picture
and the past’, one who prefers the ‘far, far away’ – to echo his favorite echoing phrase” (97).
“The Lady of Shalott” is undeniably such a “picture of the past”, and the “far, far away”
2 aspect has been integrated into the poem’s fairy-tale atmosphere. Not surprisingly, this poem
inspired many artists from the period (up until 1900) to paint widely respected images, and
even masterpieces.
As we will see, “The Lady of Shalott” invited different responses on its first publication in
1833, and regularly received negative criticism. In the London Review of 1833, J.W. Croker
said about Tennyson that he had a “noble wish, beautifully expressed, that he may not be
confounded with the deluge of ordinary poets, but, amidst their discoloured and briny ocean,
still preserve his own bright tints and sweet savor” (Jump, 68). Croker’s remark about
Tennyson not belonging to “the deluge of ordinary poets”, is valid when trying to unravel the
mysteries of “The Lady of Shalott”. The main issue with this poem was, and still is today it
seems, that it is rather vague in its transmission of morals and meaning. This vagueness is
caused mainly by the poem’s (lacking) character description of the Lady, and the
indefiniteness of the Lady’s curse. These “problems” were acknowledged not only by literary
critics, but also recognized in artistic circles. The main character and her curse mark the poem
as mysterious, as do the mysterious “web” that the Lady weaves, the enchanted mirror in the
Lady’s chamber, and the changing appearances of Camelot and Shalott (in terms of scenery,
colors and weather). The poem’s mystery makes this text difficult to unravel, and it could be
said that many critical responses, written or painted, gave little account for the poem’s overall
import and other essential aspects. In order to come to this conclusion and be able to discuss
it, I shall move through several sections. In the first section, different initial responses to the
poem in the 1830s and 1840s shall be analyzed, in order to create an idea about the literary
criticism on Tennyson’s poem. In the next section a set of paintings based on “the Lady of
Shalott” will be discussed and compared to the initial literary criticism. In the third section, I
shall discuss Tennyson’s reasons for revising the poem in 1842, and explore what kind of
changes the poet made. In addition to this, the newly invited interpretations of the revised
3 poem, by both literary critics and painters, will be reviewed. In the fifth section I shall provide
a detailed analysis of a painting that clearly poses a different interpretation of the poem than
the paintings previously discussed. In the last section of this paper, the medium of painting
will be compared to present-day literary criticism, in order to establish which interpretations
could be considered faithful illustrations of “the Lady of Shalott”.
2. The Poem’s Mystery Recognized in Early Criticism
In this section Victorian literary criticism will be listed and discussed, in order to establish
how the poem was received and read by Tennyson’s contemporaries. “The Lady of Shalott”
elicited various responses immediately on publication. Many Victorian critics had no idea
what to do with the poem. The already mentioned Croker for example, wasted little words on
this particular text in his analysis of Poems [1833] in the Quarterly Review (April 1833). The
words he did waste, were strongly disparaging. Croker interpreted the core of the poem as
follows: “The Lady of Shalott was, it seems, a spinster who had, under some unnamed
penalty, a certain web to weave” (71). Croker clearly considered the poem’s core to be very
vague. To express further skepticism about the poem’s vagueness, Croker even interrupted the
poem in his attack on Tennyson:
“A curse is on her if she stay
Her weaving either night or day …
She knows not—
Poor lady, nor we either—” (71), and then continues to quote the poem. Croker concludes his
insultingly short analysis with a summary of the poem’s full story: “The lady stepped to the
window, to look at the stranger, and forgot for an instant her web:—the curse fell on her, and
she died” (71). Even though Croker’s remarks seem fairly harsh, many fellow critics seemed
obliged to agree with him. Leigh Hunt, poet and friend of Shelley and Keats, argued in the
Church of England Quarterly of October 1842 that: “The ‘Lady of Shalott’, we confess, we
4 do not very well understand, except as a series of long-drawn musical reiterations; and as
such, it is very successful” (131). Hunt considered the poem to be pleasant to read, but dared
not to attempt an actual analysis of its meaning.
In response to the vagueness of the poem’s core, other critics argued that the poem
transmits its meaning through the story of a medieval, fairy-tale princess. In the Londen
Review of July 1835, John Stuart Mill argued that “For the benefit of such readers”, by which
he meant readers like Croker, that openly expressed their frustration about the obscurity of
Tennyson’s poem, “we tell them beforehand, that this is a tale of enchantment; and that they
will never enter into the spirit of it unless they surrender their imagination to the guidance of
the poet, with the same easy credulity with which they would read the Arabian Nights, or,
what this story more resembles, the tales of magic of the middle ages” (88). Mill appreciated
Tennyson’s poem for its fairy-tale aspect, and believed the reader should let the story lead the
way to the poem’s meaning. Gerard Manly Hopkins argued in his analysis of Tennyson’s
Idylls (1879) that Tennyson was at his best “when he is rhyming pure and simple imagination,
without afterthought, as in the ‘Lady of Shalott’, ‘Sir Galahad’, the ‘Dream of Fair Women’,
or ‘Palace of Art’” (334). Critics tended to focus on aspects of Tennyson’s poetry that were
more easily conceivable and resolvable, as was remarked by Richard Henry Horne in A New
Spirit of the Age (1844): “The frequent tendency to the development or illustration of tragic
emotion has been less noticed than any other important feature of Tennyson’s poetry” (161).
Another “important feature of Tennyson’s poetry” that Horne refers to, is, especially in the
case of “The Lady of Shalott”, its visual power. This visual power is especially evident in the
first half of the poem, where the scenery surrounding the Lady of Shalott is described in great
detail. In terms of the poem’s setting and visual forcefulness, “The Lady of Shalott” is
reminiscent of a medieval myth of courtship and chivalry. Not only are the names “Lancelot”
and “Camelot” derived from Arthurian mythology, but especially the vision of the town:
5 “And thro’ the field the road runs by / To many-tower’d Camelot”, and Lancelot’s garments
also emphasize the medievalism in the poem: “And from his blazon’d baldric slung / A
mighty silver bugle hung” (87-8). The Lady of Shalott herself resembles the ultimate
medieval fairy-tale princess, glowing in pearly whites and set in a luxurious environment: “A
pearl garland winds her head: / She leaneth on a velvet bed, / Full royally appareled” (33-5).
Critics and poets like Mill and Hopkins focused mainly on the poem’s setting, rather than on
the poem’s tragic plot. Few critics focused on the mysterious Lady and her mysterious curse,
and therefore few critical responses, however praising of the poem’s charm, gave little
account for the poem as a whole. As the following section will illustrate, a response to
Tennyson’s poem similar to that of the Victorian literary critics was evident in the artistic
practice in the nineteenth century.
3. Nineteenth-Century Painted Interpretations
Different interpretations of “The Lady of Shalott” have appeared not only on paper in the
nineteenth century, but also on canvas. In the 1850s “The Lady of Shalott” became an artwork
– in the literal sense – through the artistic interpretations of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
This artistic movement was founded in 1848, by William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais,
and Dante Gabriel Rosetti. Jeffers argues that “Within 20 years of its first publication,
Tennyson’s poem had… an ‘aesthetical’ impact on the Brotherhood” (231). The PreRaphaelites were primarily fascinated by Arthurian mythology, which explains why they
chose this poem as a theme for their art. According to Erin Frauenhofer, the poem also
“attracted various Pre-Raphaelite artists through its theme of tragic love. The poem’s
demonstration of the melancholy aspects of love, and the spiritual state of suffering for love,
fascinated the Pre-Raphaelites”. A third reason for the painters to choose the poem as a
subject was that “The Lady of Shalott … could represent the artist, and her fate could
6 represent the destruction of the artist by the necessity of interacting directly with the world
(Nelson 5)”. In taking the themes of “tragic love” and “the woman as an artist” into account,
the Pre-Raphaelite painters became critics too. Hunt, Millais, Rosetti and their muse Elizabeth
Siddall painted and drew several large images of “The Lady of Shalott”. Elizabeth Prettejohn
argues that “Some of these images have become as famous as the poem itself, and they have
certainly contributed to the notion that Pre-Raphaelitism is a ‘literary’ art form. Both the
poem and the pictures have been taken, in turn, as illustrations of Victorian attitudes toward
women and sexuality” (223). Each painting or drawing expresses these Victorian attitudes
differently. However, most of the artists concentrated mainly on the details of the poem in
order to get to its overall meaning.
Several Pre-Raphaelite images of “The Lady of Shalott” show direct references to the
poem’s medieval setting. Elizabeth Siddall’s Lady of Shalott was one of the earliest images of
the poem to be completed, in 1853 (see illustration 1). Siddall was the Brotherhood’s model
first and foremost, rather than an artist, and she lacked the artistic education of the Brothers.
Siddall clearly chose a specific moment from the poem to portray, the moment where the
Lady “look’d down to Camelot. / Out flew the web and floated wide; The mirror crack’d from
side to side” (ll. 113-5). Even though the scene is recognizable, and the cracked mirror with
its image of Sir Lancelot on a horse has been directly derived from the scene, most elements
in the drawing deviate from the text. Siddall’s drawing shows the Lady sitting in a room
(rather than in a round tower chamber), looking out her window. The back wall of the room
shows the vague contours of a formerly woven tapestry, while the rest of the room lacks
decoration. Of the violently unraveling web we only see black threads, rather than a woven
image. The drawing shows Siddall’s associations with and interpretation of the poem as well.
On the right, the view out the window is blocked partly by a crucifix. This crucifix is
presumably a symbol for the Lady’s sacrifices as an artist. In the first half of the poem the
7 Lady sacrifices her chances for love to remain alive, and in the second half of the poem this
sacrifice is reversed. The addition of the crucifix, and the moment chosen, suggests that
Siddall read the poem as a – slightly feministic – comment on the woman’s place and options
in society. Sacrificing the one would result in losing the other. Prettejohn describes Siddall’s
interpretation as “a bitter comment on the pointlessness of woman’s self-sacrifice in a world
where the patriarchal order remains intact” (228).
Illustration 1
Illustration 2
“The earliest Pre-Raphaelite representation of the subject” was William Holman Hunt’s
drawing from 1850 (Prettejohn 224). Prettejohn argues, quite rightfully, that “Hunt’s drawing,
in the angular Pre-Raphaelite style of that date, gives as much as possible of the Lady’s story
in a set of tiny roundels on the back wall, surrounding the large central mirror” (see
illustration 2). Each roundel shows a moment or a scene from the poem, and one can “read”
the story by following the roundels clockwise. The Lady is standing inside her loom, and
looks down at the threads that entangle her legs. A much more famous Pre-Raphaelite image
of “The Lady of Shalott”, abundant with medieval elements, is Hunt’s masterpiece: the Lady
of Shalott from 1905 (see illustration 3). It took Hunt sixteen years to complete his painting,
8 on which he started working in 1886, and the design for it already existed in 1857. This
design appeared as a drawing (A.J. Thompson after W.H. Hunt) in the Moxon Edition of
Tennyson’s Poems (see illustration 4). Holman Hunt’s painting, like Siddall’s drawing, shows
the Lady in her tower, looking down at her unraveling “web”. Sir Lancelot is envisioned in
the mirror behind the Lady, riding his horse through the yellow barley fields. The painting is
extremely detailed, and strikingly full of emblems and symbolism. The web winds its threads
around the Lady’s body, and her hair violently moves about the room. Hunt stuffed all the
details he could find into a single image. Jeffers summarizes Hunt’s interpretation of the poem
as follows:
A ‘stormy east-wind,’ Hunt wrote of The Lady of Shalott, is hissing through
the chamber, producing a tree-branchy effect on the Lady’s hair and scaring
away the peace-loving doves that had settled by her as she worked. If she’s
going to throw her life away, she’ll be throwing her work away too. Thus her
actual web unravels, and she herself, poor moth, is caught in the ‘threads,’
metaphorically, of the passion-spider’s web. She herself is, in any event, a
believably material presence, however backlit, in a reversal of academic
convention, for the sake of dimming her ‘falling’ body.
(244)
The eight small roundels on the back wall in the earlier drawing have been replaced by two
large roundels in the painting, to the left and right of the large circular mirror. On the roundels
two scenes have been portrayed: the Virgin Mary with her child on the left roundel, and
Hercules picking apples (while peeking to the Lady) on the right. As Prettejohn says, these
oval panels “elaborate the story in symbolic rather than narrative terms” (227). Indeed, the
poem shows no direct references to religion or classical mythology. Prettejohn also tries to
determine the function of the violent movement in the painting:
while the hair flies free, the web imprisons the woman. We may read the
contradiction as exemplifying the paradoxical status of women in patriarchal
society, at once subjugated and feared for their sexual power. In conjunction
with the narrative of Tennyson’s poem, we might remember that the Lady’s
9 ‘act of defiance’ is doomed to failure, but the image itself refuses easy
closure.
(228)
Even though Hunt’s painting clearly portrays feminine sexual power (by means of the Lady’s
voluptuous body and her strong movements), the image indeed “refuses easy closure”. There
seems to be quite a paradoxical relation between the reference to Virgin Mary and the Lady’s
striking body and presence. The Virgin Mary represents eternal virtue, while the Lady’s
appearance invokes a strong sexual association in the painting. Perhaps the references to
virtue and sexuality have been combined to portray an image of “the fallen woman”, a theme
that enjoyed Hunt’s greatest fascination. The fallen woman is first and foremost a mistress,
unmarried, unemployed or a if employed a prostitute, and therefore considered scandalous.
This type of woman was the topic of Hunt’s Awakening Conscience (1851-53), which was so
successful it resulted in the famous art critic and theorist John Ruskin becoming his patron.
Illustration 3
Illustration 4
Prettejohn concludes that Hunt’s painting is morally vague: “Intentionally or not, he has made
the Lady into so striking a mythic figure that her visual image obliterates its own moral
10 content” (228). The moral content of the painting, and especially the moral content in
association to the poem, is obscured by the striking appearance of the Lady and her vivid
room.
Besides the religious and mythological references, Hunt’s painting contains more detailed
elements and symbols that do not directly relate to the poem, but are merely associated with
it. According to Prettejohn, “the picture returns to the fascination for early Renaissance art
that had inspired the Pre-Raphaelite group in its earliest days” (261). Indeed the painting has a
Renaissance feel to it, because of the heavy decoration, the mythological references, the
woman’s rich garments and her voluptuous body. The loose items in the room are, as
Prettejohn illustrates, direct references to Van Eyck’s famous Arnolfini Portrait from 1434
(see illustration 5). The Pre-Raphaelites were primarily inspired by the ‘truth-to-nature’
standards of the high-Renaissance painters (first and foremost Raphael) and therefore it is not
remarkable that Van Eyck’s Portrait enjoyed Hunt’s fascination and praise. Van Eyck was far
ahead of his time, and his Portrait is represented in the London National Gallery as the
prelude to the Golden Age of Western Europe. Inside the Lady’s loom stands “a silver
samovar”, which is reminiscent of “an Orientalised version of the gleaming metalwork
chandelier in the Van Eyck” (261). In front of the loom lies “a pair of wooden clogs that calls
to mind the similar pair in the left foreground of Van Eyck’s Portrait”. Last, “the mirror on
the rear wall seems a magnificently enlarged version of the round mirror in the Flemish
picture” (261).
Dante Gabriel Rosetti created a wood engraving on paper of “The Lady of Shalott”, also
for Moxon’s publication of Poems in 1857 (see illustration 6). Jeffers said the following about
Rosetti’s work in the Moxon edition: “The five engravings Rosetti contributed … were all on
medieval subjects, in which, as he said, one could ‘allegorize on one’s own hook … without
killing, for oneself and everyone, a distinct idea of the poet’s.’ ‘On one’s own hook’ meant
11 creating one’s own ‘poem’ – and doing so on one’s own time and at one’s own price…”
(233). Rosetti’s Lady of Shalott is different from the former two interpretations of Tennyson’s
poem in two respects. First, the painter chose a significantly different scene from the poem to
depict: the final stanza of the poem. Second, the scene has been chosen from the revised
version of the poem. The painting shows the Lady dead, in a boat, on a landing-stage in
Camelot. Lancelot attracts the most attention, for he covers the largest amount of space in the
painting. Rosetti’s painting is also loaded with elements and symbols that are not evident in
the poem. The scenery in the background shows flames, water with a large set of swans, and a
second landing-stage packed with people. According to Thomas L. Jeffers these latter two
elements have been derived from miniatures in a fourteenth-century manuscript titled
Lancelot du Lac, on which Rosetti’s engraving was based. Rosetti’s choices in his engraving
suggest that he focused on the details in the manuscript rather than tried to unravel the core of
the poem itself. He placed Lancelot in the limelight rather than the Lady.
Illustration 5
Illustration 6
Of John Everett Millais’s hand, no more than a reproduction of his interpretation of “The
Lady of Shalott” is known (1854, see illustration 7). This image resembles Rosetti’s in the
sense that it depicts a different moment from the ones by Siddall and Hunt. Millais’s image
shows the Lady floating in her boat, either dying or – most likely – already dead. The chain
12 that she loosed earlier hangs behind the boat. Millais’s image is different from all formerly
discussed images in the sense that its setting lacks references to medieval Camelot or Shalott.
The Lady floats around a swamp-like landscape, and her body is surrounded by spiky
branches from barren trees. Like in Rosetti’s engraving, a set of swans circles the Lady’s
lifeless body. The scene conveys a certain mystery, and raises the question whatever
happened to the poor lady in her boat. The drawing suggests that Millais read the poem as an
utter tragedy, rather than as a fairy-tale.
Illustration 7
In the previous sections, we have discussed different (painterly) readings of “The Lady of
Shalott”. As will be illustrated in the next section, Tennyson was known to have a hard time
dealing with critical responses to his work.
4. Tennyson’s Revision
Tennyson regularly responded to the different written and painted interpretations of his
poem, and was, presumably, insecure about how his poem was received by his readers.
Rosemary VanArsdel states that “Tennyson, during his long career, maintained a love/hate
relationship with periodical publication of his work” (177). VanArsdel illustrates this by
saying that literary annuals from the nineteenth century showed “the poet wrestling with
13 commercialization of his work, and later, as his reputation grew, with the struggle between the
public and private lives of a poet” (178). Tennyson was Poet Laureate from 1850 until his
death in 1892, so clearly his public and private life were bound to mix. Tennyson struggled
with the duties as Poet Laureate, especially since, as Erik Gray argues: besides a poet,
“Tennyson too was a critic first” (46). Even though “Tennyson was not the first to recognize
avowed failure or mistake as an essential aspect of poetic creation… Tennyson was painfully
conscious of the myriad faults he perceived in his own poetry” (47). Gray believes this
insecurity to show in “The Lady of Shalott”, especially in the first five lines of the final
stanza. These lines serve as “evidence of Tennyson’s anxiety concerning the reception of his
poem” (55):
They cross’d themselves, their stars they blest,
Knight, minstrel, abbot, squire, and guest.
There lay a parchment on her breast,
That puzzled more than all the rest,
The wellfed wits at Camelot.
(ll. 172-6)
By copying this passage, Gray suggests that Tennyson was afraid of the public’s perception of
his poems. The idea that the Lady’s identity “puzzled the wits at Camelot” suggests that
Tennyson was anxious about how she would be received by his readers. Aside from having a
hard time dealing with the literary criticism his poetry received at the time, Tennyson was
also known to be dissatisfied with certain painted interpretations of “The Lady of Shalott”.
Thomas L. Jeffers illustrates this with a documented conflict between Tennyson and William
Holman Hunt:
Tennyson asked Hunt why he’s shown the Lady ‘with her hair wildly tossed
about as if by a tornado’ and was told ‘that I had wished to convey the idea of
the threatened fatality by reversing the ordinary peace of the room and of the
lady herself,’ such that she and the spectator alike could understand that ‘the
catastrophe had come.’ This, or the motif of the web wound ‘round her like
14 the threads of a cocoon,’ were liberties the painter had to take if in a single
image he was to convey as much as the poet had conveyed in so many pages
of text. Feeling protective of his text, Tennyson refused to sympathize with
Hunt’s point, insisting that ‘the illustrator should always adhere to the words
of the poet!’- period (Hunt 1.124-25).
(235)
Since Hunt’s painting was completed no earlier than in 1905, Tennyson only saw Hunt’s
drawing from the Moxon edition of 1857, or maybe the first stages of the incomplete painting
between 1886 and 1892. The drawing is, though without colors, almost identical to the
painting in terms of composition and contents (see illustrations 3 and 4). The only difference
lies in the image on the roundel to the Lady’s right, which portrays Christ gesturing towards
heaven rather than a peeking Hercules. As Jeffers shows, Tennyson was not pleased by the
overload of symbolism in Hunt’s painting, nor with the Lady’s violent disposition.
According to many present-day critics it is most likely that the 1842 revisions of his
Poems were the result of Tennyson’s response towards the criticism it received. Gray: “It has
generally been understood that Tennyson’s hyper-sensitivity to criticism led him first to delay
publication of his early poems and then to revise them extensively in response to negative
comments from reviewers” (47). Tennyson took the criticism seriously, and revised a large
selection of poems. John Davies Jump, editor of Tennyson: The Critical Heritage (1967),
argues that Tennyson, “With his self-criticism aroused, … went beyond the reviewers and
produced incomparably superior work in the second versions of such poems as ‘Oenone’ and
‘The Lady of Shalott’; but in these instances he was often correcting along lines the critics
had indicated” (4). This last argument deserves exploration: in how far did Tennyson take the
literary criticism and artistic interpretations into account in his revision of “The Lady of
Shalott”?
Among others, “The Lady of Shalott” was indeed heavily altered with the revisions of
1842. The main difference between the first and second version of the poem is that the Lady
15 is treated as a substantial human being in the first version, and almost lacks an identity in the
second. Isobel Armstrong argues that “In 1842 Tennyson swept away the descriptive material
which decorated her in jewels and colours, replacing these with images of work and toil and
making her blanker, more empty, the mysterious other who defeats signification” (Stott, 645). The Lady no longer has any accessories, while the surroundings (especially Camelot) have
gained in details. Her appearance is described quite sufficiently already in the fourth stanza of
the original poem: “a pearl garland winds her head” (l. 33). As opposed to stanza four of the
original poem, stanza three of the revised version (which resembles stanza four of the original
version), lacks the description of the Lady:
But who hath seen her wave her hand?
Or at the casement seen her stand?
Or is she known in all the land,
The Lady of Shalott?
(ll. 24-7)
This lack of description creates the idea that the Lady lacks an identity, an existence, or even a
substantiality. In the final part of the original poem, the Lady’s garments are described to give
her a serene and enchanting appearance:
A cloudwhite crown of pearl she dight,
All raimented in snowy white
That loosely flew (her zone in sight
Clasp’d with one blinding diamond bright)
(ll. 127-30)
This stanza (the second of Part the Fourth) is completely omitted in the revision of 1842, and
the new poem’s second stanza wastes only two lines on the description of the Lady’s
appearance: “Lying, robed in snowy white / That loosely flew to left and right-” (ll. 136-7).
Also, in the original poem the Lady inhabits an evidently rich interior: “She leaneth on a
velvet bed, / Full royally appareled velvet” (ll. 34-5), while the revised version pays no
attention to the tower’s interior.
16 Not only have the Lady’s appearance and her living space faded with Tennyson’s
alterations of 1842, the island of Shalott, too, has lost its charm. In the original version, the
island is described – as though from a distance – as a colorful and flowery environment:
The yellow-leaved waterlily
The green-sheathed daffodilly
Tremble in the water chilly
Round about Shalott
(ll. 6-9)
This stanza has been replaced in 1842 by a stanza that draws attention to the inhabitants of
Camelot wandering around the mysterious isle, rather than a stanza that describes the scenery
around the Lady:
And up and down the people go,
Gazing where the lilies blow
Round an island there below,
The island of Shalott
(ll. 6-9)
The lilies are still there, but they are no longer “yellow-leaved”. The daffodils have
disappeared, and the description of the “chilly”, moving river has been omitted. Overall, the
description of Camelot and its inhabitants received emphasis in 1842, as opposed to Shalott
(which lost its descriptive vividness and even its Lady to some extent). In both versions of the
poem, Camelot with its “yellow barley fields” is described as a colorful town, and the town’s
citizens are colorful beings:
And the red cloaks of market girls
Pass onward from Shalott.
Sometimes a troop of damsels glad,
An abbot on an ambling pad,
Sometimes a curly shepherd lad,
Or long-hair’d page in crimson clad
(ll. 53-8)
17 Lancelot, the poem’s main character from the other side of the river, is dressed in colorful
garments and shiny armor. He seems to light up the environment with his powerful presence:
A redcross knight for ever kneel’d
To a lady in his shield,
That sparkled on the yellow field,
Beside remote Shalott
The gemmy bridle glitter’d free,
Like to some branch of stars we see
Hung in the golden Galaxy
(ll. 78-84)
The description of the sky in the poem is also visually powerful in both versions: “As often
thro’ the purple night, / Below the starry clusters bright, / Some bearded meteor, trailing
light,” (ll. 96-8). The Lady can only look at the sky through her mirror, and the mirror only
shows her the sky above Camelot. The rephrasing of the concluding line of this last stanza in
1842 emphasizes that Camelot has gained in color and description, while Shalott has lost all
its color. In 1832, the stanza ended with “Moves over green Shalott” (l. 99), while in 1842 the
line said “Moves over still Shalott”. Overall the revised poem emphasizes the colorfulness of
Camelot through the Lady’s artwork. While the Lady merely wove a “charmed web” in 1832
(l. 38), the Lady now “…weaves by night and day / A magic web with colours gay” (ll. 37-8).
The Lady of Shalott weaves the vivid images of Camelot she sees through her mirror on her
loom in her gray, undecorated tower.
Somehow, though it might have been intended, the revisions of 1842 did not diminish the
mystery concerning the Lady in the poem. Erin Frauenhofer argues that “although Tennyson
introduces the Lady in this stanza [this being the second stanza], the poem’s sense of mystery
continues. Throughout the poem, Tennyson thoroughly details the outside world, while the
Lady remains a woman of mystery. Tennyson does not explain what the Lady looks like, why
the Lady is cursed, or her inner state of mind”. The lack of description concerning the Lady’s
18 appearance, surroundings, and life in general already resulted in the Lady becoming a
shadowy being in the original poem from 1832. The emphasis on the Lady’s natural
environment in the revised version from 1842, makes the Lady an utterly mysterious entity,
befallen with a mysterious, undefined curse. In this sense, it seems as though Tennyson
revised the original poem with all the criticism about the poem’s obscurity kept in mind, but
then created a version that emphasized the initial mystery concerning the Lady’s life. This
observation poses several suggestions. For starters, Tennyson was the only person who
understood the underlying thoughts inherent to this poem, and presumably he wanted to keep
it that way. Clearly he deliberately kept his poem open to interpretations from any critic,
either writer or painter. This openness shows in Jeffers’s ideas about the poem’s continuation:
Reading her name, and resting content with this mysterious and yet benedictory
ending, has rarely been enough for Tennyson’s readers, either. I for instance
have in another place liked to imagine that, following the Lady’s proper burial,
some ‘damsels’ would enter her deserted studio, discover her hung tapestries
there and throughout the house, and mount a show that would be an immediate
success and, long-term, provide inspiration for people, women and men alike,
who might want to become artists too. More, they would become artists with a
wider range than she was ever granted.
(231)
Secondly, since the sense of mystery conveyed by the poem was increased rather than
diminished with the poem’s revisions, one might suspect that Tennyson emphasized the
mystery on purpose in his revised poem. One could even go as far as stating that the poem’s
mysterious main character and her curse are the most crucial aspects, for they mark the
poem’s overall import and mysterious atmosphere. As this section has shown, Tennyson’s
revisions retained the poem’s original obscurity of the Lady’s existence and personality, and
even emphasized this obscurity by making the Lady even more mysterious. It is not
remarkable, therefore, that the criticism towards the mysterious poem did not change radically
19 after the revision. The newly invited responses to and (mis)interpretations of “The Lady of
Shalott”, and the recognition of the changes made, will be discussed in the next section.
5. Newly Invited Interpretations in Paint and Print
Despite the differences between the first and second version of the poem in terms of visual
power and the Lady’s mysterious existence, the criticism of the revised version was not all
that different from the criticism Tennyson received a decade earlier. Some critics, like James
Spedding did in April 1893 in the Edinburgh Review, claimed that the poem gained in clarity
and simplicity, which resulted in the Lady becoming a more pure and beautiful character:
The poems originally published in 1832, are many of them largely altered;
generally with great judgment, and always with a view to strip off
redundancies—to make the expression simpler and clearer, to substitute
thought for imagery, and substance for shadow. ‘The Lady of Shalott’, for
instance, is stripped of all her finery; her pearl garland, her velvet bed, her
royal apparel, and her ‘blinding diamond bright,’ are all gone; and certainly,
in the simple white robe which she now wears, her native beauty shows to
much greater advantage.
(143)
It could be argued in addition to Spedding’s idea about the Lady’s pureness that the loss of the
Lady’s princess-like appearance resulted in the story becoming more clear-cut: the poem’s
chronology and the vivid descriptions of Camelot and Lancelot make the story easier to
follow. Yet, one might argue that the lacking description of the Lady did not result in the
poem’s overall import becoming any more clear to the reader: the Lady’s life, the poem’s core
and morals remain unclear. Other critics said fairly little about the overall meaning of the
revised poem, presumably because they hardly perceived and understood the changes made.
Some Victorians were so confused by the poem that they often left out the topic entirely.
Several critics discovered that they appreciated the original poem more than the revised
version. In Fraser’s Magazine of September 1850 Kingsley said that:
20 Some of our readers, we would fain hope, remember as an era in their lives the
first day on which they read those earlier poems; how, fifteen years ago,
‘Mariana in the Moated Grange’, ‘The Dying Swan’, ‘The Lady of Shalott’,
came to them as revelations. They seemed to themselves to have found at last a
poet who promised not only to combine the cunning melody of Moore, the rich
fullness of Keats, and the simplicity of Wordsworth, but one who was introducing a method of observing Nature different from that of all the three, and
yet succeeding in everything which they had attempted, often in vain. (174)
This passage shows that not only Tennyson’s original poem could be preferred over the
second version, but also that Tennyson’s poetic skills were considered to be of a remarkably
high quality. Few critics believed to have worked out the mystery that is Alfred Lord
Tennyson. Hutton praised Tennyson in Literary Essays (1888), and was quite confident he
understood the meaning of the Lady’s “curse” in the poem:
The curse, of course, is that she shall be involved in mortal passions, and
suffer the fate of mortals, if she looks away from the shadow to the reality.
Nevertheless, the time comes when she braves the curse… And probably it
was the vision of a ‘funeral’, at least as much as that other vision which made
the fairy Lady of Shalott more than half sick of shadows, that first led the
author of this beautiful little poem into his true poetic work.
(354)
Even though Hutton believed to have unraveled the mystery of the curse, he still called “The
Lady of Shalott” a “beautiful little poem”. As we will see, this title suggests that even Hutton
understood little of the curse’s function in the poem.
The two versions of the poem invite – separately – different interpretations of the poem’s
general import and especially of the Lady’s role in it. Concerning the Lady’s role, Elizabeth
Prettejohn argues that:
This story can be allegorised in more than one way. If the Lady is seen as a
Victorian woman artist, then her story is a grim one: relegated to the decorative
art of weaving, rather than one of the fine arts reserved for male artists, she is
not permitted to study ‘nature’. Moreover, her awakening sexuality destroys
21 her creative power, when the web flies from the loom. Sexual potency for the
male artist is an analogue for creative power, as feminist interpreters of
Rosetti’s images of women have often observed; but for the female artist
sexuality is seemingly at odds with the ability to make art.
(231)
Prettejohn lists all the possible roles that the Lady may fulfill (or actually fulfills) in the poem,
and speculates on what more she could represent: “However, Tennyson’s poem can also be
seen as a more general allegory about the role of the artist in society. Thus the Lady’s
isolation in her tower may be interpreted as a figure for the artist’s detachment from society.
The artist, in this kind of allegory, is always gendered feminine, as one who passively
observes rather than playing an active role in the affairs of men” (231). The problem with this
interpretation is that this poem is more than just an allegory of the fallen woman, or of the
sexually suppressed woman, or of the isolated artist. The Lady seems to represent more.
Perhaps she can be said to symbolize an artistic entity that maintains the story’s mystery, and
therefore underlines Tennyson’s artistic motivations and skills. There is a lot to say for John
Stuart Mill’s approach to Tennyson’s poem: “The reader must not, in this case, look for the
definiteness of the ‘Lady of Shalott’; there is nothing statuesque here. The object to be
represented being more vague, there is greater vagueness and dimness in the expression. The
loveliness of a graceful woman, words cannot make us see, but only feel” (90). Mill remarked
that Tennyson’s Lady is not “definite”: her role, her function, and even her identity remain
undefined throughout the entire poem. Despite her indefiniteness, she is indeed a “lovely,
graceful woman” and thereby radiates a certain mystery that the perceiver can only imagine
and “feel”. Many Victorians seemed to have missed this aspect of the poem in their
interpretations (like the formerly mentioned Hutton).
Not unlike the literary critics, most Victorian painters also seemed to have left out the
poem’s mystery in their interpretations of “The Lady of Shalott”, regardless of which version
of the text they used. According to Frauenhofer, the painters misinterpreted the poem due to
22 the freedom they were given (which was provided by the text’s mystery and open ending):
“Tennyson’s sparse descriptions of the Lady allowed artists a great deal of freedom in
illustrating the poem, yet these artists often did not remain faithful to what little details were
given them”. This seems to be a true statement, because the drawings and paintings differ
greatly from each other in terms of composition, colors, symbolism and intertextual
references. Not only the “sparse descriptions of the Lady”, but also the medium of art
provided the Pre-Raphaelites with many possibilities to paint images of their interpretations of
the poem. Yet, rather than being “unfaithful to the little details”, the artists focused on the
text’s details especially, or their detailed associations with it, and focused little on the poem’s
central theme. The practice of painting requires the insertion of color, which poses a problem
for artists attempting to create an image of a text: artists are obliged to focus on the text’s
details. Holman Hunt’s Lady of Shalott is a proper example of an artwork excessively filled
with details. John Killham has tried to list all the poem’s icons and symbols:
In ‘The Lady of Shalott’ we have what I interpret as another symbol of poetic
experience: the silent isle apart from movement and life, the mysterious web,
the charmed mirror which cracks when the lady turns to reality. We notice a
groping towards symbolic colouring: the ‘colours gay’ of the magic web, set
within ‘four gray walls and four gray towers’, duplicate the jewel colours of
the knight as he rides through yellow fields, and ‘pale yellow woods’. (121)
One could easily relate this summing-up to Hunt’s visualization of the poem: Hunt seems to
have tried to insert all of these elements into his painting. As discussed earlier, Tennyson did
not believe that all the details in the poem could, or should, be represented in a single image.
The beauty of Hunt’s painting; its composition, its colors and its details are striking, but the
painting does not convey the poem’s mystery concerning the Lady and her curse, nor the
Lady’s position in the poem. Relevant aspects of the Lady’s struggles and of her mysterious
curse have been left out. Ruskin, however fond of the Pre-Raphaelites’ work, agreed with
23 Tennsyon that the painted Ladies: “’are very noble things, though not, it seems to me,
illustrations of your poems” (Ruskin in Frauenhofer). With Hunt as his best example, Jeffers
argues (through Ruskin) that the Pre-Raphaelites often created their own stories rather than
conveyed Tennyson’s messages in their paintings:
When painting her story, they were not ‘illustrating’ the poem. As Ruskin
remarked in a letter, ‘good pictures never can be [illustrations]; they are
always another poem, subordinate but wholly different from the poet’s
conception, and serve chiefly to show the reader how variously the same
verses may affect various minds’ (quoted in Nelson 15-16). … What we can
ask of such derivative ‘poems,’ then, is whether, in Harold Bloom’s terms,
they are strong or weak ‘misreadings’ of their precursor poem, the one
Tennyson created.
(232)
If one expects representational accuracy, the Pre-Raphaelite images of “The Lady of Shalott”
could indeed be labeled “misreadings”, but it could best be said that these images are based on
the poem rather than faithful illustrations of it. The Pre-Raphaelites took the poem’s elements
and the revision’s changes into account in terms of emphasis on color, scenery, and the fairytale, but the mystery concerning the Lady’s life and curse has been left out in most images (as
was the case in literary criticism). Siddall’s calm and isolated Lady, Hunt’s voluptuous yet
virtuous Lady, Rosetti’s admired Lady and Millais’ tragic Lady do not capture the core of the
poem, nor show adequate descriptions of the Lady’s role(s) in it. Rather, the images contain
references to Tennyson’s poem; the artists’ associations with the poem, and the painted ladies
are the main characters of their own stories.
The scene that was chosen most frequently by artists was the one where the Lady’s curse
befalls her: inside her tower. Yet in a certain sense, the artists (especially Siddall and Hunt)
made the wrong choice in thus choosing their scenes. Considering that the poem’s central
theme and meaning is revealed no earlier than when the Lady leaves her tower, the painted
interpretations of the poem by Hunt, Rosetti, and Siddall misrepresent their source text(s). As
24 Pre-Raphaelites, they were clearly fascinated by the medieval aspects of the poem, the visual
power of the poem, and, especially in Hunt’s case, its vivid colors. But none of the images
shows reference to the poem’s climax or more importantly: the poem’s action. Rather than
attempt to establish the Lady’s position as an aspiring artist in the world, or a Victorian
woman’s strive for freedom, the Pre-Raphaelites chose to portray the Lady inside her tower
(probably because of their fascination for the poem’s setting in the first half of the poem), or in
her boat, already dead. Siddall and Hunt chose the passage in which the Lady decides to leave
her loom – but does not leave it yet. This is an important and dramatic moment in the poem, for
her weaving unravels and her mirror cracks, but the curse does not really befall the Lady yet.
The effect of the curse: the Lady’s gradual death, becomes effective only after she has actually
left her tower. Rosetti’s and Millais’s images show the final outcome of the curse: they show
the Lady dead in her boat. None of these images shows what happens in between the befalling
of the curse and its final outcome. As this section has shown, in all Pre-Raphaelite images the
poem’s setting has had the main focus, rather than the poem’s action. It could be argued that
this focus on the setting has not allowed the artists to capture the poem’s overall import and
mysterious atmosphere (except for perhaps Millais, with his swamp-like setting and barren
branches). In the next section, an exceptional Pre-Raphaelite painting will be discussed, which
somehow captures the poem’s action as well as its mystery.
6. An Exceptional Mystery in Artistic Circles: Waterhouse
There was one artwork of exception in Pre-Raphaelite circles, which held the middle
between the commencing of the curse and its final outcome: The Lady of Shalott by John
William Waterhouse (1888, see illustration 7). Obviously, Pre-Raphaelite paintings depicting
moments from Tennyson’s poem are not rare, but Waterhouse’s seems to be the only painting
that depicts a meaningful moment from the poem’s tragic plot, which is based outside of the
25 medieval setting. Millais’s drawing is also based outside of this setting, but his scene relates
to the poem’s fairy-tale plot rather than to its tragic plot: it depicts the curse’s outcome, not
the curse’s development and its function in the poem. As Jane Wright says: “Interestingly,
J.W. Waterhouse’s painting The Lady of Shalott (1888)—one of very few depictions of the
story to show the Lady outside the tower—shows her sitting in the boat on a tapestry” (289).
As this section will illustrate, Waterhouse’s painting captures the poem’s mystery concerning
the Lady and her mysterious curse.
Illustration 8
Waterhouse’s painting can be (loosely) associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
On the one hand, the painting resembles the most famous Pre-Raphaelite painting based on a
tragic story: Ophelia by Millais (1851-52, see illustration 8). On the other hand it is rather
modern in comparison to earlier Pre-Raphaelite paintings. Frauenhofer: “Pre-Raphaelite
artists often drew from literary sources in their artwork, using subjects of literary narration to
26 portray individualized emotional conflicts”. This portrayal of “individualized emotional
conflicts” is especially evident in Millais’s and Waterhouse’s masterpieces. Waterhouse’s
Lady is, as is Millais’s Ophelia, clearly based on a Pre-Raphaelite model: she has long red
hair, full red lips, and a serene but slightly flat face. Jeffers adds her “toothsome figure
emphasized by the low-slung belt and snug bodice à la Rosetti’s Beata Beatrix” (247) to the
list of her Pre-Raphaelite features. Waterhouse’s painting also resembles Ophelia in terms of
background and setting: the plants, the flowers, the dark and slushy water, the overall
atmosphere of serenity mixed with a macabre touch, and the woman’s glazy look.
Illustration 9
Despite the resemblances to the Brotherhood’s most famous painting, and the use of the
typical Pre-Raphaelite, red-haired model, Waterhouse’s Lady is different from the Ladies in
the earlier paintings and drawings. Frauenhofer rightfully argues that “Waterhouse asserts the
Lady’s emotional distress through her facial expression: her eyes stare forward in trancelike
grief, and her mouth has dropped open slightly”. Even though the Lady could also be taking
27 her last deep breath to commence her final song, Frauenhofer is right about the “trancelike
grief” in her serene face. In the earlier paintings, the Lady was either facing her loom or her
window, or she was already dead, while in Waterhouse’s painting the Lady is sitting up
straight, alive, holding the boat’s chain in her hand. Her face is fully visible and her serene
expression is the painting’s main attraction.
The painting contains several direct references to the poem’s medieval setting. The Lady’s
appearance is clearly inspired by the original version from 1832: not only does she wear a
“white robe”, but she has luxurious accessories around her neck and head. A fragment of the
tower she just exited is visible in the upper left-hand corner. A direct reference to the scene
chosen is the chain in the Lady’s right hand, and also the Lady’s ‘name’ is carved “Below the
stern” (170). Another aspect of the scene chosen is, as Prettejohn suggests, the Lady’s open
mouth: “Her slightly opened lips may indicate that she is beginning to sing her last song”
(229). The most obvious reference to the poem’s medieval setting in Waterhouse’s painting, is
the tapestry the Lady sits upon. The tapestry combines several aspects of the poem: the web,
the curse, and the mirror. In the tapestry the Lady has woven “the mirror’s magic sights” of
Camelot, as is visible in the second medallion in the painting (from the left) that portrays
Lancelot and three other knights. The Lady’s curse is also portrayed on the tapestry. The first
medallion on the cloth shows the Lady herself, in her boat, reversed, with her own tower (or
maybe Camelot) in the background.
Several (additional) references to the poem as well as external references that are visible
in the painting somehow deviate from the text. The tapestry that the Lady wove herself, for
example, is present in the painting. Wright remarks that: “Waterhouse… appears to suggest
that the tapestry survived” the Lady’s curse, while in the poem, the tapestry does not survive:
“out flew the web and floated wide” (l. 114). The “floating wide” of the web suggests that the
weaving unraveled and was never to be seen again. Wright continues by saying that in the
28 painting, “Since it is in the boat, one might also be led to assume that the crowd at Camelot
would see the tapestry when the boat arrives there” (289). In the poem the “crowd at
Camelot” only sees her name, or rather: her title, carved below the stern of the boat. There are
several elements in the painting which do not directly refer to the poem, which Jeffers calls
Waterhouse’s “own emblematic touches” (246). These emblems are the three candles and the
crucifix on the stern. The candles are known to represent the Lady’s life: two of the three
candles have already been put out, and the third, we assume, will be extinguished once the
Lady has died. The crucifix gives the Lady’s tragedy a Christian association, which brings to
mind the short reference to religion in the revised poem of 1842: “God in his mercy lend her
grace” (l. 179), as uttered by Lancelot at the sight of the dead Lady in her boat.
All the references previously discussed, either direct references to the poem or external
associations with it, relate to the specific moment chosen by Waterhouse: the moment the
Lady steps into her boat, loosens the chain (142), and commences her final “deathsong” (152)
on her way to Camelot. The Lady’s name below the stern refers to her mysterious role in the
poem as an artist or a woman struggling with Victorian attitudes. The image of the Lady on
the tapestry might represent the Lady’s journey towards death, and this journey is what
defines her curse. The Lady’s open mouth and the three candles refer to her approaching
death. The additional, heavy symbolism in the earlier Pre-Raphaelite paintings – especially in
Hunt’s Lady of Shalott – do not necessarily relate to the specific moments they depict, but
merely have referential purposes to the poem’s details. The painters concentrated on the
poem’s symbols and on the Lady’s emblematic function (the Lady as an emblem for the fallen
woman, or the isolated artist), and inserted oblique symbolism (religious references,
mythological figures or swans) into their artworks to create their own mysteries.
Even though the painting shows clear references to the poem’s medieval setting, the
medievalism does not have the main focus in the painting. The medieval references are there:
29 we see a fragment of the Lady’s tower, and the tapestry the Lady sits upon bears the clearly
medieval images of Sir Lancelot and his Knights. Yet, the medievalism is less on display than
the Lady’s natural environment and especially the poem’s mysterious atmosphere.
Frauenhofer argues that “An atmosphere of mystery pervades the poem”, and that this was
once “one of the reasons it so intrigued Pre-Raphaelite artists, who were eager to express the
images of their imaginations (Nelson 4)”. As we have seen earlier, the poem is indeed marked
by “an atmosphere of mystery”, but it could be said that the Pre-Raphaelites have not captured
this mysterious atmosphere in their paintings and drawings (except for Millais, perhaps).
Waterhouse is one of very few painters who chose a crucial event from the tragic plot to
depict on his canvas, in order to capture the Lady’s mystery. Even though Waterhouse’s
painting, like any other painting, represents a single moment from its source text, Waterhouse
chose a moment from the text’s action: the Lady is in motion. The former paintings, as
opposed to Waterhouse’s dynamic image, are static, for they capture merely a happening from
the poem: a fraction of a moment, rather than a meaningful scene from the tragic plot. Since
Waterhouse chose to depict the scene of the Lady’s journey in his painting, which lies in
between the coming upon the Lady of the curse (as depicted by Siddall and Hunt) and the
Lady’s death (as depicted by Rosetti and Millais), it could be said that Waterhouse’s painting
suits the poem’s overall import and especially Tennyson’s ideals. Tennyson believed “the
illustrator should always adhere to the words of the poet” (Jeffers 235), and the artist should
stay true to the text’s action and plot.
Arguably the medieval setting, on which the Pre-Raphaelites placed their main focus, is
not necessarily the most significant aspect of the poem’s visual power. Rather, it is through
colors that the poem conjures up a vision in the reader’s mind. The Pre-Raphaelites loved
colors, especially those “favored by the Gothic or medieval painters the Brotherhood revered”
(Jeffers, 241). As opposed to earlier Pre-Raphaelite paintings or Hunt’s later painting,
30 Waterhouse’s painting contains very little of the “dominant greens (for volumes), reds (for
edges), and blues (for highlights or backgrounds)” preferred by the Brotherhood. Prettejohn
confirms that the colors in the painting set Waterhouse’s apart from other Pre-Raphaelite
paintings: “… the emerald green and precision of detail of early Pre-Raphaelitism are
replaced by muted colours and a sketchier touch” (229). The color palette Waterhouse chose
first and foremost seems to serve a referential purpose: the colors refer to several important
aspects of the poem. The tapestry, for example, retains Camelot’s varied colors, as described
in the poem. The tapestry thereby forms a direct reference to the revised poem of 1842, which
stresses the vividness of colorful Camelot and its contrast with the Lady. More important than
the vivid, colorful, medieval towers in the poem, is the icy ‘shadow’ that seems to hang over
the Lady’s tower on the island: “Four gray walls, and four gray towers / Overlook a space of
flowers” (15-6). These flowers “tremble in the water chilly / Round about Shalott” (8), which
underlines that there is an ‘iciness’ surrounding the tower of Shalott. Waterhouse depicted this
iciness over Shalott rather than the warmth of cheerful Camelot: he captured it in the Lady’s
serene face, her white dress, the somewhat gray and brown trees and plants, and the dark,
slushy water.
The overall appearance of the painting gives it a somewhat modern appearance, because
in terms of color, composition and background the painting is, to some extent, impressionistic.
Prettejohn named Waterhouse a “Late follower of Pre-Raphaelitism”, working “in a modified,
impressionistic style” (285). Waterhouse’s color palette somehow suits the crucial scene from
the poem that Waterhouse chose to depict. The climax of the poem, which unfolds once the
Lady leaves her tower, starts with a certain “climate change” in the poem’s atmosphere, and
this climate change is reflected in the painting. Except for perhaps Millais’s and Rosetti’s
drawings, the other Pre-Raphaelite paintings and drawings (though without color), show the
Lady inside her tower, with sunny Camelot “All in the blue unclouded weather” (l. 91) visible
31 in the mirror on the back wall. The most crucial part of the poem where the mystery unfolds,
however, is marked by different weather: “In the stormy east-wind straining, / The pale
yellow woods were waning” (118-9). Visually, the climate change in the poem brings about
the idea that the sun disappears: the blue sky becomes gray and all the colorful fields and
flowers waste away. Waterhouse took this change in appearance and color into account. As
Prettejohn describes, Waterhouse’s “moody” and “autumnal” landscape is, or at least seems,
“faithful to Tennyson’s description of the scene,…” (228). It looks as if the background, the
scenery, fades away with the arrival of the Lady. It looks as though the paint colors melt, or
the paint starts to trickle down the canvas. By choosing this impressionistic style and color
palette, Waterhouse stayed true to the Lady’s transformation as suggested by the poem as
well: with the changing climate, the Lady changes. As Jeffers argues, the impressionistic
aspect of Waterhouse’s painting results in the Lady and her transformation becoming the
centre of attention:
The plein-air style offers an illusion of reality – a truth to nature – that can be
quite as convincing as Hunt’s Pre-Raphaelite style. Look especially at the
grasses on the distant shore, the lilies in the foreground, and the Lady’s hair,
all treated with an impressionistic spontaneity that, by introducing a blur of
motion into the picture – or simply a sense of semi-focused fore- and
background, leaving the Lady and her boat in the fully-focused middleground – persuades us like a hand-held, as against tripod-mounted, camera”
(246).
The Lady moves from a gray and isolated place into the real world, and develops from a
shadowy and unreal substance into a real, mortal human being. It could be said that in this
respect, Waterhouse’s impressionistic color palette conveys more of the Lady’s mystery than
the earlier paintings’ bright colors.
Waterhouse’s painting shares its modern aspect with Tennyson’s poem in a way, and this
makes the two works of art compatible. Gerhard Joseph believes the unfathomable aspect of
32 the poem’s mystery to be due to Tennyson’s modern sensibility; Tennyson was always far
ahead of his time:
From my own cell within that dwelling, I would thus read ‘The Lady of
Shalott’, despite its feudal and fairy-tale trappings, as a figure of the change, a
parable of recent literary history charting the movement from a New Critical
analysis of authored ‘works’ to a post-structuralist reading of unauthored
‘texts’. For within her poem the Lady, a proto-worker of space transforming
aesthetic categories, has moved from weaving a work to becoming a text.
(Stott, 30)
Considering the number of approaches applicable to this poem, in paint or in print, Joseph is
not wrong about the “post-structuralist” aspects of the text. Gray formulates Tennyson’s
uncontroversial and “modern” quirks as follows: “It has long been a critical commonplace
that ‘The Lady of Shalott,’ like many of Tennyson’s early poems, is concerned with the role
of the artist… But Tennyson’s distinction lies in his equation of artistic creation with a
compulsion to pursue what is worse, a consciousness of getting things wrong” (46). It seems
to be exactly that “modern” aspect; that attempt to be different, that one finds in Waterhouse’s
painting as well, in his impressionistic color scheme. As argued earlier, the painting’s colors
make the image an accurate interpretation of the mysterious atmosphere in “The Lady of
Shalott”. Tennyson disapproved of Hunt’s interpretation of his poem, and he emphasized the
mystery in his revision as a response to the early criticism. This suggests that he wanted a
certain mystery to be maintained.
The poem and the painting are also compatible in their representation of the mysterious
Lady. Where literary critics failed, or the earlier Pre-Raphaelites, Waterhouse did manage to
portray the Lady’s mystery. The immobility of Waterhouse’s Lady, and the painting’s
atmosphere generated by the impressionistic color palette visualize this mystery. John Stuart
Mill argued that “Though the agency is supernatural, the scenery, as will be perceived,
belongs to the actual world. No reader of any imagination will complain, that the precise
33 nature of the enchantment is left in mystery” (88). This seems to apply to the painting as well
as to the poem. Even though Waterhouse stayed true to the poem by choosing a particular
moment and depicting it as accurately as possible, the painting manages to maintain the
poem’s undeniable mystery. Waterhouse’s painting shares the poem’s mystery in the sense
that it portrays the Lady in her state of cursedness. Jeffers describes as the poem’s core aspect
“the related, and decadent, Romantic associations linking beauty and death – beauty made
more precious because it is mortal” (248). This is exactly what Waterhouse managed to
depict: a mortal Lady, outside for the first time and never before perceived by other people,
now slowly approaching her death with an enchantingly dramatic, tragic, yet serene
expression on her refined face. Waterhouse emphasized the relevance and especially the
beauty of the story, and the (to some problematic) mystery of the poem overshadows the
poem’s colorful setting. Waterhouse wove the medieval aspects, the Romance, and the
tragedy into a beautifully coherent image, and thereby captures the poem’s overall import. As
will be argued in the following section, Waterhouse’s modern interpretation of the poem
seems to suit present-day criticism better than Victorian criticism.
7. Present-Day Criticism and Nineteenth-Century Paintings
Waterhouse’s painterly reading of the poem is not only compatible to Tennyson’s modern
poem, but is also relatable to present-day (literary) criticism (perhaps more than to general
Victorian criticism). Waterhouse’s portrayal of the Lady resembles Edgar F. Shannon’s
interpretation of the Lady’s mysterious life. Shannon believes a certain approach to
Tennyson’s poetry could clarify the poem’s overall import: “the reader must derive,… clues
as to the identity and circumstances of the mysterious Lady (and indeed as to whether or not
she exists as a person at all)” (209). It could be said that Waterhouse inserted several of these
clues. “As to the identity of the mysterious Lady” Waterhouse gave her medieval garments,
34 rich accessories, beautiful hair, and an expensive looking tapestry to sit on, and “as to the
circumstances of the Lady” Waterhouse added the three candles as representing her
predicament. Shannon argues that “‘The Lady of Shalott’ is richer and more complicated than
a mere consideration of literary alternatives. ... It addresses as well the claims of ordinary life
and personal commitment and the substance of reality” (223). Waterhouse’s painting captures
this “ordinary life” in the Lady’s appearance and expression, for she looks rather normal and
real. Waterhouse’s portrayal of the Lady’s facial expression lies close to Shannon’s
interpretation of the Lady’s disposition and her role in the poem. Shannon argues that “the
Lady’s unvarying mood of self-satisfaction, even as she witnesses funerals… verifies the
defectiveness of her sensibility and further distances her from common experience. Through
the funerals also, death as an aspect of life enters the poem and the Lady’s consciousness”
(213). This latter remark is relatable to Waterhouse’s interpretation of the poem. The Lady’s
“consciousness” returns in her expression in the painting; her eyes are set on a specific goal (a
goal invisible to the viewer), which suggests she knows where she is going. Shannon argues
that, once the Lady leaves her tower, she
becomes resolute and prophetic too—‘Like some bold seer in a trance, / Seeing
all his own mischance’ (ll. 128-129). As the simile implies, besides perceptual
clarity, she has gained prescience concerning her destiny. Now endowed with
vision—her ‘glassy countenance’ (l. 130), fixed, smooth, lustrous, is indicative
of her metamorphosis—she moves from sight to insight.
(218)
This “glassy countenance”, and her becoming “resolute and prophetic” is visible in
Waterhouse’s painting: the Lady’s serene expression makes her face slightly transparent
(glassy), and with her goal in sight and her crucifix on the stern the Lady is “resolute and
prophetic”. Christopher Ricks’s reading of the poem’s ending could, in this respect, apply to
Waterhouse’s painting as well: “The Lady slowly dies as by some mysterious suicide, some
consumptive wish not to go on living. The river that had been like a mirror is now a ‘dim
35 expanse’; and the ‘glassy countenance’ is now the Lady’s” (81). Also, Waterhouse’s Lady
seems “distanced from common experience”, for nothing happens in the background of the
painting. Lively Camelot has been left out completely.
Waterhouse chose the moment from the poem that Shannon considers to mark the poem’s
crucial break:
When the Lady leaves her castle and comes down to the stream,… she rejects
isolation and assumes the level of ordinary mortals. By writing her name
around the prow of the boat, she states her human identity; and through loosing
the chain and launching herself upon the river, she symbolically releases
herself from her previous bondage to illusion and enters mortal time.
(219)
This is the exact moment, including the “loosing of the chain” and the “launch upon the
river”, that is depicted in Waterhouse’s painting. This suggests that Waterhouse believed this
moment, as well as its symbolic meaning, to be the central moment in the poem: “the Lady is
now part of the sounds of nature and of humanity as well as of the flow of time” (219). As
earlier established, Waterhouse paid a lot of attention to the colors in his painting: he
considered the weather as described in the poem. The climate change relates to the Lady’s
transformation from insubstantial mystery to a mortal human being. Shannon also recognizes
the strength of the changing weather in the poem: “At the beginning of the fourth and
concluding section, the shift in weather, which punctuates the change in the Lady’s outlook,
and the travail of nature—the ‘straining’ of the ‘stormy east-wind,’ ‘waning’ yellow leaves,
the full river, the heavy rain (ll. 118-121)—stress the physical cycle of which the Lady has
become a part” (217). The painting shows the pale climate, the poem’s scenery, and this
physicality of the Lady that Shannon stresses.
Shannon’s views also allow us to further specify the difference between Waterhouse’s
reading of the poem, and that of other Pre-Raphaelite painters. Unlike the earlier PreRaphaelites, Waterhouse chose to focus on the second half of the poem (Part the Third and
36 Part the Fourth), rather than on the first half in which the Lady’s medieval, fairy-tale
environment is stressed. The first half of the poem is difficult to capture, because, as Shannon
argues, the Lady “has no societal being, and her identity remains problematic, not only to
others but to herself” (210). Shannon later remarks that, “When in Part II the poem brings the
reader inside the castle to observe the Lady from her own point of view, she continues to be a
shadowy figure. Preoccupied with seeing and recording the ‘sights’ (l. 65)” (211). Waterhouse
would clearly have agreed with Shannon on this, for he chose to portray the Lady outside of
her tower: after her substantiality has been confirmed.
Several present-day interpretations of Tennyson’s text seem to resemble the readings of
the earlier Pre-Raphaelite painters. Clearly the poem was, and still is today, considered to be
heavily symbolic, as Christopher Ricks manages to confirm: “Impatience with ‘The Lady of
Shalott’ for being a ‘tale of magic symbolism’ and not that more conclusive thing, an
allegory, manifested itself immediately on publication” (79). In the sense that the early PreRaphaelites, especially Hunt, inserted a significant number of symbols and icons to
reconstruct the poem’s allegorical morals, Chadwick’s literary analysis seems to echo the
readings of the early painters. In terms of story, the poem indeed resembles an allegory: it
explores the issues of a troubled Lady, who is confined to her tower and her artwork on the
island of Shalott. If she were to leave her art for the real world in colorful Camelot, a curse
would befall her. The curse befalls the Lady when her attraction to Lancelot forces her to
leave her tower. Armstrong argues that the Lady “is unaware of the constraints worked upon
her and obedient to the mysterious power until the appearance of lovers in the mirror forces
her to reconceptualize her world as phantasmal and secondary, mere representation. It has not
seemed so to her until this point: ‘I am half sick of shadows’ ([l.] 71)” (63). This
interpretation suits the earlier Pre-Raphaelite images, especially Siddall’s drawing and Hunt’s
painting, because these images depict the exact moment where the Lady lets go of her
37 weaving, because she is “half sick” of it. Waterhouse also chose this moment to depict in two
later paintings based on “The Lady of Shalott”. These paintings from 1894 (see illustration 9)
and 1916 (see illustration 10), quite remarkably, resemble the earlier Pre-Raphaelite paintings
more than that they resemble his own earlier painting from 1888. Both paintings show the
Lady inside her tower, with her mirror in the background and her loom besides the Lady. The
earliest painting shows the Lady slightly hunched-over, as if she is in the act of standing up.
As Jeffers says: “Waterhouse catches the critical point when ‘The curse is come upon me,
cried / The Lady of Shalott’: her rising body, momently stayed by the golden threads wrapped
round her knees, is disturbingly like a tout bow” (248). She looks straight at the viewer with
an intense look of determination. The later painting shows the Lady, a larger and darkerhaired Lady than the 1888 Lady, staring at her loom with her hands in her supporting her. She
seems bored: she is “half sick of shadows”. The rooms in both paintings have been heavily
decorated, after the descriptions in the original poem from 1833, like the earlier PreRaphaelite images. The Ladies are rich-looking and voluptuous. Nothing of Waterhouse’s
mystery in his earlier Lady is conceivable.
Illustration 10
Illustration 11
38 Not unlike the earlier Pre-Raphaelites, other present-day readings of “The Lady of
Shalott” focus on the visual power of the first half of the poem, or on the allegorical aspect of
the story, or even on symbolic details in order to grasp the poem’s mysterious nature. The
general perception nowadays is, not unlike the Victorian perception, that “The Lady of
Shalott” is an easily determined allegory of the artist. Joseph Chadwick recognizes this
general perception of the poem: “’The Lady of Shalott’… has often been read as yet another
allegory of artistic autonomy, albeit one which, tinged with Victorian pessimism, emphasizes
the costs of such autonomy for the artist” (15). Thomas Jeffers summarizes “The Lady of
Shalott” as a poem of which “The moral allegory still centers on the calamity of yielding to
the devil’s own world and flesh: the textile artist, like any other, has the duty of staying chaste
inside her studio and ignoring come-ons from people like the playboy-knight of the Round
Table” (237). Jeffers clearly reads the poem as a simple allegory of lust and temptation; a
light story, with an undeniable reference to Arthurian mythology. Due to the emphasis on the
autonomy of the artist, and since the Lady is a symbol for this artist (rather than an actual
human being), critics from any period have remained reluctant to define the Lady’s
personality. Rather, they try to define the poem’s meaning in terms of the text’s symbolism,
elements, or even objects, and assign the Lady a symbolic function rather than an identity.
Some critics argue that the Lady is an artist or even an artwork; a symbolic representation of
the isolated artist that struggles with societal understandings of the artistic world. Erik Gray
argues that the original and revised versions of the poem are the same in their portrayal of the
Lady: “The revisions blur the distinctions between Shalott and Camelot and so reinforce the
sense that the Lady remains an artist when she submits to the curse and quits her tower” (48).
Other critics propose the idea that she is a shadow or a reflection rather than a human being:
To the active social world she is mysterious, insubstantial, shadowy. …The
absence of her own reflection in the mirror (which suggests that she, like a
shadow, cannot cast her image there) is a sign that she has no independent
39 existence, even if she has a separate one. … Showing the Lady no image of
herself, the mirror reveals that the Lady’s apparently autonomous subjectivity
and desires—her ‘here’—are shadows or effects of the sights that appear in it,
that no matter who she is or what she loves, her identity and desires are
always already another’s.
(Chadwick, 18)
Chadwick’s argument seems valid when considering that Camelot is at first rich, colorful and
sunny, while in the river around Shalott the “Willows whites, aspens shiver. / The sunbeam
showers break and quiver” (10-11). Once the Lady leaves for warm Camelot and colorful
Lancelot in the final part of the poem, the image of Camelot changes:
In the stormy east-wind straining,
The pale yellow woods were waning,
The broad stream in his banks complaining,
Heavily the low sky raining
Over tower’d Camelot;
(118-122)
The ever so bright yellow woods and barley-fields have now turned ‘pale’, and the sunny sky
turns ‘heavy and low’ (cloudy and gray) and even becomes ‘rainy’. The shadow seems to
move along with the Lady, from Shalott to Camelot. Despite the validity of Chadwick’s
argument, the shadow does not actually define the Lady’s personality.
Critics unable to fathom the Lady’s personality, have often tried to define the Lady’s curse
instead. It has been described countless times, in countless ways. Christopher Ricks believes
that the Lady’s curse simply “forbids her to look directly at life—she must see life only in her
mirror” (80). Armstrong marks a religious association with the curse: “The curse, suggesting
the biblical curse of labour and sexuality, is invoked. But there is a strange irony here: if this
is the curse of labour and sexuality the Lady was already subject to these in her isolated life in
the tower. What was lacking was the sense of lack which forces a realization of estrangement
and oppression” (63). Chadwick underlines the question of the feminine as a cause for the
Lady’s curse: “critics see the Lady’s death as a sign of some conflict between art and
40 ‘ordinary living,’ or between the artist and ‘his world’ (my emphasis). None sees the Lady’s
femininity as having anything to do with that death. But her particular form of femininity is
precisely what gives that death its meaning” (15-6). All these understandings of the curse, and
thereby the poem’s moral and meaning, define the Lady as a symbol for an isolated artist, or a
symbol for the societal struggle with femininity in the Victorian Age. None of these critics
seem to accept that the Lady was perhaps meant to invoke something more, or at least
something less obvious; that she was merely a product of Tennyson’s artistic creation, or
maybe even an autobiographical reference to Tennyson’s own life as Poet Laureate. Richard
Holt Hutton read the poem as “a confession that the poet was sick of the magic mirror of
fancy and its picture-shadows, and was turning away from them to the poetry of human life”
(Literary Essays 1888, 353). After all, Tennyson’s contemporaries were unable to grasp the
full meaning of Tennyson’s art, as the Camelotians were unable to understand the Lady’s
function in society.
Those unable to resolve the mystery of the curse, try to define the poem’s meaning in
terms of the poem’s objects: the mirror or the web. Shannon argues that: “since the product of
her loom is endless, it is presumably formless” (212). Indeed, the tapestry is never properly
defined in the poem, and how it is capable to “fly out” once the mirror cracks is a complete
mystery. It seems to be an imaginary product, made merely out of shadows and reflections, or
it may even be a figment of the Lady’s imagination (her imagined visual of Camelot). Gerard
Joseph tries to define the poem’s core in terms of the symbolic function of the “web”:
Rather, both Lady and poet are themselves the media through which, in the
current parlance, a warp and woof weaving of a ‘text’ happens – and the
serendipitous fact that the word ‘text’ comes from the Latin ‘texere’, ‘to
weave’, has been conceptual/etymological pun which the likes of Barthes,
Derrida, Michel Serre, and especially J. Hillis Miller, the master of our
weaving guild for the year, have pursued down some fanciful avenues.
(Stott, 29)
41 Joseph focuses on the deeper, symbolical meaning of the Lady’s task, rather than reads the
entire poem as a whole that is meant to uncover Victorian attitudes towards women and
(female) artists. The fact that the tapestry and the mirror from which this tapestry has evolved
disappear from the poem once the Lady leaves her tower, suggests that the tapestry and the
mirror, with its images of Camelot, play no direct role in the poem’s most climactic scene.
As the analysis of present-day critical responses to “The Lady of Shalott” illustrates, the
Lady’s obscure existence and mysterious nature are issues still raised in literary criticism.
“The Lady of Shalott” has always been a poem capable of baffling literary critics and artists
because the Lady’s identity, substantiality and functions raise questions, and the Lady’s curse
with its outcome forms the poem’s greatest mystery. Present-day critics seem uncomfortable
with the Lady’s lack of name or personality. In terms of deeper message, the poem is obscure:
the curse remains undefined both to the Lady and to the readers, the Lady herself is nameless,
and lacks the knowledge about her curse and – most importantly – she lacks an identity. John
Killham argues that the poem seems brilliant, but is incomplete:
Like Spenser, Tennyson adapted the Arthurian material for his own ulterior
purpose, omitting the girl’s name, using an obscure form of the name of her
residence, and introducing an element of the supernatural. The story, while
much better developed than in ‘Mariana’, is still incomplete; there is no
explanation as to why a spell has been laid upon the lady or how it causes her
death
(129)
Killham blames the incomplete and unclear morals of the poem on the incomplete main
character: the Lady’s character is unfathomable, and therefore so is her function in the poem’s
message. Different critics prefer one version of the poem over the other in order to reach
conclusions as firm as possible in their criticism. Shannon calls the revised poem “The
canonical version of ‘The Lady of Shalott’” (208), while Prettejohn focuses entirely on the
original version of the poem. Tennyson revised the poem to emphasize the Lady’s mysterious
identity, which suggests that the mystery was supposed to be central and unresolvable.
42 Waterhouse seems to have chosen to take into account different aspects from both versions of
the poem. The poem’s mysterious nature was emphasized in the 1842 version of the poem:
indicating that Waterhouse took both versions into account in his painting, and especially
tried his best to maintain the poem’s mystery.
8. Conclusion
In conclusion, it could be said that the poem’s mystery was, and is until this day,
undeniable and arguably: to be maintained. While the different critiques and artistic
interpretations may have confused Tennyson at first, he confused them right back by
strengthening the initial obscurities of his text in 1842. It is understandable in the case of “The
Lady of Shalott”, that critics and artists chose to focus on the poem’s visual power, because
that is the only aspect of the poem that is fixed: it is obvious. The poem’s mystery is
considered unfathomable even until this day. Yet, it was not Tennyson’s purpose to write a
medieval myth, so the medieval aspect is, arguably, not the poem’s most important aspect.
The poem’s deeper meaning unfolds once the Lady leaves her medieval environment and the
curse starts to claim the Lady’s life: the medieval scenery fades once the tragedy actually
commences. The mysterious Lady, and her mysterious curse are the most meaningful and
crucial aspects of the poem, and these aspects have often been left out in written and painted
interpretations of the poem.
Considering Tennyson’s attitude towards and responses to different written and painted
interpretations of his poem, one might expect Waterhouse’s Lady of Shalott from 1888 to
have been to Tennyson’s satisfaction (at least to some extent). The painting depicts an actual
moment from the tragic plot rather than that it tries to tell the Lady’s entire story through the
insertion of excessive symbolism (like in Hunt’s painting). The earlier Pre-Raphaelites chose
to insert as many (self-explanatory) symbols and icons as possible in order to summarize the
43 poem’s story and create their own stories, while Waterhouse tried to capture the poem’s
central theme by choosing a specific moment from it and represent this theme with a serene,
calm, determined and above all: mysterious Lady. Waterhouse also chose an impressionistic
color palette that differed strongly from the Brotherhood’s general color preferences, and it is
this impressionistic aspect that conveys and captures the poem’s mysterious nature. Except for
the colorful tapestry and the Lady’s hair, the painting contains no other direct references to
the sunny and colorful Camelot as described in the poem. The “moody” and “autumnal”
colors of the landscape (Prettejohn, 228) underline the mystery at the core of the poem, where
the climate change occurs, and underline the depth of the Lady’s predicament. Considering
the differences between Waterhouse and his preceding Pre-Raphaelites, that, despite its “lack”
of symbols and vivid colors as opposed to earlier paintings, Waterhouse’s painting conveys
more in terms of the overall import of the poem, and its mysterious atmosphere.
It could be said that John William Waterhouse stayed relatively close to Tennyson’s work
ethic in his painterly reading of the poem, and that the two works of art are compatible in
different ways. Even though both artists never defined for themselves what they wanted their
art to mean – they kept their work open to interpretation for the public – they seem to have
had a similar perception and goal. The Lady serves a strong symbolic purpose in both works
of art, even though it remains unclear what exactly the Lady is supposed to symbolize. Most
importantly, the poem and the painting share a certain modern aspect, a certain
unconventionality, that emphasizes the text’s powerful mystery. Also, Waterhouse’s painting
seems to respond to all the criticism from 1832 onwards, it combines the original and the
revised version, and Tennyson’s responses to the criticism may even have been taken into
account. Tennyson’s poem is in the first place a medieval tale of chivalry, in the second place
a (Romantic) Tragedy of the Victorian artist and woman, and in the third place a modern,
psychologically and visually powerful work, intended to raise issues about the role of the
44 artist and about femininity. Waterhouse’s painting is in the first place a Pre-Raphaelite
painting, inspired by the medieval aspects of the original text, in the second place a work of
art that portrays a Lady’s tragic position in society, and in the third place a modern,
impressionistic work, intended to raise but also establish the role of the artist in general.
Considering these comparisons, Waterhouse’s painting could be accepted as a very proper
portrait of Tennyson’s Lady of Shalott. Waterhouse has captured the central characteristics of
the poem – both ancient and modern – by choosing the poem’s most significant moment, and
managed to capture the poem’s mystery by choosing an impressionistic color palette.
45 Works Cited
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47 Illustrations
Illustration 1: Elizabeth Eleanor Siddall, The Lady of Shalott. 1853.
Illustration 2: William Holman Hunt, The Lady of Shalott. 1850.
Illustration 3: William Holman Hunt, The Lady of Shalott. 1886-1905.
Illustration 4: William Holman Hunt, The Lady of Shalott. 1857.
Illustration 5: Jan van Eyck, The Arnolfini Portrait. 1434.
Illustration 6: Dante Gabriel Rosetti, The Lady of Shalott. 1857.
Illustration 7: John Everett Millais, The Lady of Shalott. 1854.
Illustration 8: John William Waterhouse, The Lady of Shalott. 1888.
Illustration 9: John Everett Millais, Ophelia. 1851-1852.
Illustration 10: John William Waterhouse, The Lady of Shalott Looking at Lancelot. 1894.
Illustration 11: John William Waterhouse, I am Half Sick of Shadows. 1916.