The Lady of Shalott

Published 1832, much revised 1842. Written, at least in part, by 5–9 Oct. 1831 (Hallam to Frederick T.: ‘I would fain know where the Lady of Shalott abides at present’; AHH, p. 487); then by 31 May 1832 (FitzGerald’s Letters, Kraken’, whose whole body ‘in all likelihood no human eye ever beheld’. i 112–3). T. says it was ‘taken from an Italian novelette, Donna di Scalotta’. T. noted in T.Nbk 23: ‘Legends. / The Lady of Scalot. Novelle Antiche’. The source is quoted in Italian, Mat. iv 461: ‘The following is the Italian novella on which The Lady of Shalott was founded: Novella LXXXI Quì conta come la Damigella di Scalot morì per amore di Lancialotto de Lac. From the Cento Novelle Antiche, dated conjecturally before 1321. Text from the Milan edn, ed. G. Ferrario, 1804.’ The source had been mentioned by F. T. Palgrave and by John Churton Collins, and was investigated by L. S. Potwin, MLN xvii (1902) 473–7, and by D. L. Chambers, MLN xviii (1903) 227–8. But the story is very different; the poem has no Arthur, and no Queen; the source has no mirror, weaving, curse, song, river, or island. Apart from the Lady’s death, the main links are that Camelot is the end of the funeral voyage, and is — unusually — on the sea-shore, and that there is an astonished crowd about the body. G. R. Jackson notes that, like the source, 1832 has no Lancelot among the onlookers at the end. The 1832 text is slightly closer in some details, e.g. her death-letter. F. J. Furnivall quotes T. in Jan. 1868: ‘I met the story first in some Italian novelle: but the web, mirror, island, etc., were my own. Indeed, I doubt whether I should ever have put it in that shape if I had been then aware of the Maid of Astolat in Mort Arthur’ (Rossetti Papers 1862–1870, ed. W. M. Rossetti, 1903, p. 341). T. may have seen Thomas Roscoe’s translation (1825), where she is ‘the Lady’, not ‘Damsel’. T. says: ‘The Lady of Shalott is evidently the Elaine of the Morte d’Arthur [cp. Lancelot and Elaine, p. 834], but I do not think that I had ever heard of the latter when I wrote the former. Shalott was a softer sound than “Scalott”.’ See Malory xviii. J. M. Gray (TRB ii, 1976, 210–11) suggests that T. may have forgotten that Malory influenced the poem; he compares l. 73 with Malory’s distance, ‘as nigh … as bow-draught’, and ll. 78–80 with Malory’s Lancelot and his ‘shield all of sable, and a queen crowned in the midst, all of silver, and a knight clene armed kneeling afore her’ (Malory i and xii). Paden (pp. 156–7) notes the general influence of T. C. Croker’s Fairy Legends (1825–8) and of Thomas Keightley’s Fairy Mythology (1828), both of which T. knew. He also argues for the influence of G. S. Faber’s religious mythologizing: ‘It may be suggested that she is one of those nymphs, occupied in weaving, whom Porphyry explained as human souls about to be born into the world’; Faber claimed them as symbols for the epoptae of the mysteries. ‘Bishop Percy had affirmed, in a note at the end of the ballad on the death of Arthur, that “Ladies was the word our old English writers used for Nymphs”. In a very Tennysonian revision of Faber, the birth of a soul is identified with the coming of love, and love brings with it the doom of God.’ On T.’s later owning books by Faber, see p. 149. R. Simpson takes up J. M. Gray’s reference to Louisa Stuart Costello’s poem The Funeral Boat (1829), indebted to the same Italian novella (TRB iv, 1984, 129–31). L. Stevenson (Critical Essays on Tennyson, ed. Killham, pp. 129–30) suggests the influence of Shelley’s Witch of Atlas, for an onlooker who weaves, and who has a magic boat: ‘’Tis said in after times her spirit free / Knew what love was, and felt itself alone.’ T. comments (Mem. i 117): ‘The new-born love for something, for some one in the wide world from which she has been so long secluded, takes her out of the region of shadows into that of realities’. H.T. comments: ‘The key to this tale of magic symbolism is of deep human significance and is to be found in the lines [69–72].’ Culler (p. 44) notes that the authority for the comments by T. and H.T. is Canon Ainger’s Tennyson for the Young (1891), where there is however no ‘indication that they come from Tennyson’. Cp. the companion poem, Life of the Life (I 548). G. Cannon suggests that The Arabian Nights (269th Night) provided the mirror: that is, a magic jewel with five facets, one of which shows a river, another a knight on a steed; the story also has a funeral scroll. The tale was available in various English and French versions by 1832, but Cannon adds: ‘Unfortunately, no version seems to contain details close enough to T.’s terminology to suggest an actual borrowing of phrases and images. The 269th Tale is not in Edward Forster’s fivevolume edition (London, 1802) which T. apparently knew’ (VP viii, 1970, 344–6). S. C. Wilson (misprinted as ‘Allen’, TRB ii, 1975, 171–2) suggests the influence of Sappho, fragment 102, in particular for the weaving; he notes other similarities, along with the fact that T. later marked with a small pencilled cross this fragment in Poetae Lyrici Graeci (Lincoln). For an account of previous interpretations and a new reading, see E. F. Shannon, VP xix (1981) 207–23. M. A. Lourie argues for Shelley’s influence on the poem, especially Prometheus Unbound, and describes T.’s new kind of Romanticism (Studies in Romanticism xviii, 1979, 19–21, 27): ‘Between 1830 and 1833 T. had essentially invented Pre-Raphaelitism.’