The Lady of Shalott

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Illustration by W. E. F. Britten for a 1901 edition of Tennyson's poems

The Lady of Shalott ( German  Die Lady von Shalott or Die Dame von Shalott ) is a ballad in four parts by Alfred Tennyson about the legendary figure of Elaine from the Arthurian novel, which he published in 1832 and revised for his poems collection Poems from 1842. The subject of the poem has been interpreted in many ways and has had a strong impact in the visual arts as well as with other authors.

Content of the ballad

John William Waterhouse : The Lady of Shalott Looking at Lancelot , 1894

The Lady of Shalott lives, trapped by magic, in a tower on an island in the middle of the river that flows to Camelot . She lives alone and only Reaper (Reaper) who harvest on a nearby field, share their songs. She weaves the images she sees when she looks in a magical mirror into an endless carpet. She is not allowed to look out of the window. One day she sees the knight Lancelot in the mirror, and to get a better view of him, she looks out the window and falls in love with him. At that moment the mirror breaks and a curse comes true.

She gets on a boat to go to Camelot and writes her name on the bow. The Lady of Shalott's life forces dwindle the further she moves from the island. Dying she sings one last song. The boat drifts to Camelot at Arthur's court, there one is struck and amazed by its great beauty, which one had never seen before. Lancelot can put it into words and asks God to grace the Lady of Shalott.

Interpretative approaches

There are various approaches to interpreting the ballad that relate to the position of the artist or woman in society or place the early work in the biographical context of Tennyson. The ballad is closely related to the development of the artistic style of aestheticism in England, of which it is considered an icon. It is understood as a parable for the artist's soul , which can only fully develop the potential of its aesthetic productivity in isolation from the world, so that it has to pay a high price when leaving the " ivory tower ". Tennyson's own, rather ambiguous attitude towards the ideals of aestheticism was also expressed in the poem "The Palace of Art" (1832/1842), which is often compared to "The Lady of Shalott" and which addresses the inadequacy of pure art becomes. Tennyson later dealt with criticism of his later poetry, which was considered too moral, in the form of an epigram in which he connects the phrase L'art pour l'art with the ruler of Hell.

Another approach to interpretation relates to the image of women conveyed in the ballad. Similar to the aestheticist parable of the artist, in Victorianism women are only allowed to observe world events from the secluded private sphere. The direct interaction with the world - for the "fallen" woman - is only possible at the price that, like the beautiful corpse of the "Lady von Shalott", she herself becomes a passive object of aesthetic and sexual desire.

effect

John William Waterhouse, The Lady of Shalott , 1888, Tate Britain , London
William Holman Hunt: The Lady of Shalott , 1905, Wadsworth Atheneum , Hartford, Connecticut

The Lady of Shalott inspired John William Waterhouse to paint pre -Raphaelite style paintings , including the one with the same title from 1888, which interprets the second stanza of the fourth part ( And down the river's dim expanse ...). It was presented by Sir Henry Tate in 1894 at the Tate Gallery of British Art in London, where it can still be seen today, and is one of the most famous and popular paintings in Great Britain . The Lady of Shalott was the most popular text in the Victorian era to stimulate pictorial representations, including the painters Edward Burne-Jones , Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Holman Hunt, and the illustrator Walter Crane .

Agatha Christie used a verse from this poem as the title of one of her Miss Marple crime novels: The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side , in which this poem also plays an important role, the German title Mord im Spiegel has no relation to the content.

An allusion to verses from this ballad is found in the title of the short story Save the Reaper by Nobel Prize winner Alice Munro , as well as at one point in the story. The main character Eve, who is out in the car with her grandchildren, thinks of the line “Only reapers, reaping early”. Immediately afterwards she changes it: “Save the reapers, reaping early -.” However, the title of Munro's work is singular. Isla Duncan comes to the conclusion that Munro is referring to another line from the ballad, namely: "And by the moon the reaper weary". This refers to Eve because she is dull and tired.

The first setting of the poem (for mezzo-soprano, choir and orchestra) was created in 1909 by the English composer Cyril Rootham . Musically, the text was also processed in 1991 by Loreena McKennitt on her album The Visit .

expenditure

  • The Lady of Shalott . In: Christopher Ricks (ed.): The Poems of Tennyson (3 volumes). University of California Press, 1987. Volume II, pp. 109-113.

There are several translations into German, including:

  • The Lady of Shalott . Transferred by Ferdinand Freiligrath . In: English poems of recent times . Transferred by Ferdinand Freiligrath. JG Cotta'scher Verlag, Stuttgart and Tübingen 1846, pp. 348-357.
  • The Lady of Shalott . Transferred from Wilhelm Hertzberg : In: Gedichte von Alfred Tennyson . Translated by W. Hertzberg. Katz, Dessau 1853, pp. 65–72.
  • The Virgin of Shallot . Transferred from Karl Vollheim. In: Deutsches Museum: magazine for literature, art and public life . 13th year, Volume I (January – June), 1863, pp. 548–552.
  • The Lady of Shalott . Transferred by Adolf Strodtmann . In: Tennyson's Selected Seals . Translated from the English by Adolf Strodtmann. Bibliographisches Institut, Leipzig 1880, pp. 27–32.

literature

  • Annabel Zettel: The enigma of the entangled. The Pre-Raphaelite illustrations for Alfred Tennyson's "The Lady of Shalott" . Lukas Verlag , Berlin 2011, ISBN 978-3-86732-091-7

Web links

Commons : The Lady of Shalott  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ In December, 1832, appeared a second volume (it is dated on the title-page, 1833) , in: The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson , edited by John Churton Collins (with a critical introduction, commentaries and notes, together with the various readings, a transcript of the poems temporarily and finally suppressed and a bibliography)
  2. ^ The Lady of Shalott (Poem) in the Encyclopedia Britannica
  3. ↑ Kathy Alexis Psomiades: Beauty's Body: Femininity and Representation in British Aestheticism. Stanford University Press, 1997, ISBN 0804727848 , p. 25.
  4. ^ Norman Page: Critical Commentary. In: Tennyson: Selected Poetry. Routledge, 2013, ISBN 1134967055 , p. 196.
  5. ↑ See also Maya Taylor: Woman as metaphor for the artistic spirit in Tennyson. In: Dies .: Picturing the life of the mind: Pre-Raphaelite Preoccupation with Interiority. , The Victorian Web.
  6. ↑ Maya Taylor: Woman as a metaphor for the artistic spirit in Tennyson. In: Dies .: Picturing the life of the mind: Pre-Raphaelite Preoccupation with Interiority. , The Victorian Web.
  7. ^ Norman Page: Critical Commentary. In: Tennyson: Selected Poetry. Routledge, 2013, ISBN 1134967055 , p. 196.
  8. ↑ Kathy Alexis Psomiades: Beauty's Body: Femininity and Representation in British Aestheticism , Stanford University Press, 1997, ISBN 0804727848 , pp. 25 ff.
  9. ^ John William Waterhouse: The Lady of Shalott (1888). Tate Britain
  10. ^ Art Fund: Top ten British Masterpieces
  11. ↑ Representations of the Lady of Schalott in Pre-Raphaelite Art . In: Kathryn Sullivan Kruger: Weaving the Word. The Metaphorics of Weaving and Female Textual Production , Susquehanna University Press 2002, ISBN 978-1-57591-052-9 , p. 108ff.
  12. ↑ Isla Duncan: Alice Munro's Narrative Art . Palgrave Macmillan, New York 2011, ISBN 978-0-230-33857-9 (hardcover), ISBN 978-1-137-00068-2 (ebook), pp. 85-86.