THE LADY OF SHALOTTAlfred Tennyson

A grey towerAn evil curseA knight in

shining armourA mirror

Task 1: Matchy Matchy!

Match the modern-day translation with the event in the poem in chronological order

Arthurian LegendsThe medieval legend of the Lady of Shallot tells

of a young maiden who fell in love with Lancelot.

Spurned in her advances because Lancelot loved

Guinevere, she died of grief. Weakened by

lovesickness, she sailed in a richly ornamented

boat to Camelot. King Arthur discovered her body

and a letter describing the reason for her death

and had her buried with full honours.

Victorians valued ideals of chivalry, love at all costs and honour. How do these values align with the myth on which the poem was based?

A Quick Biography• Tennyson was fascinated by medieval

literature and culture. He had a particular

interest in Arthurian legends and was drawn to

the romance of a lost era and its chivalry

• He looked to both mythological and historical

pasts in his poetry

• Today, many critics consider Tennyson to be

the greatest poet of the Victorian Age; he

stands as one of the major innovators of lyrics

and metrical form in all of English poetry.

Understanding the Text

1. How many stanzas are devoted to the description of Lancelot and

his horse? How many are devoted to the description of the Lady?

2. What types of conflict (physical, moral, intellectual, or emotional)

do you see in this poem?

3. The poem does not specify why the young lady is under a curse.

In your opinion, why is she cursed? For what could the curse be a

metaphor?

4. A critical point in the poem

occurs when the Lady says she

is ‘half sick of these shadows’.

How could this be interpreted?

5. Identify the behaviour and status

attributed to men and those

attributed to women. How are

they different?

6. Why is Lancelot’s response to

her death unusual or ironic?

Camelot as portrayed by Alan Lee, 1984

So what is the invited reading?• Warning to frivolous young girls?

• Giving voice to a silenced character = everyone has a story to tell?

• Challenging prescribed femininity in Victorian England?

• A true artist must keep their creative world separate from the real world?

• The mirror is a metaphor for our phones and computers = we can’t handle the real world because we are so used to the fake one?

Jan Marsh's Pre-Raphaelite Women (1987/1998)

“The rejection of seclusion in the shadowy sphere of prescribed femininity, where the approved activity is weaving or embroidery, leads immediately to ostracism and social death. The enclosed rooms in which these ladies live, looking out on inviting sunlit landscapes, and the tangled threads binding their vigorous limbs, are surely metaphors of woman's condition, signifying the docile, passive, reflective and domestic role that dominated Victorian ideas of femininity (p. 152).