“Her tears fell with the dews at even”: The Ekphrastic and Intertextual Dialogue between Victorian Poetry and Pre-Raphaelite Painting

This paper seeks to carry out an analysis of the ekphrastic and intertextual dialogue in the character of Mariana in both Alfred Lord Tennyson’s homonymous poem and its subsequent pictorial representation in a painting by John Everett Millais. The character of Mariana is taken from Shakespeare’s comedy, Measure for Measure, which was published in the First Folio in 1623. By contrast, in 1832, Lord Tennyson introduces the character in his homonymous poem, “Mariana”, as a woman who continuously laments her lack of connection to society. Through interfigurality, Tennyson opts to present her as a “tragic” heroine and she is depicted from a pessimistic perspective. The process of interfigurality entails a conversion stage of reverse ekphrasis through which Shakespeare’s source text is turned into another text, Tennyson’s poem. This interaction between both texts is later turned into two visual expressions. In doing so, both texts are later transferred into John Everett Millais’s painting. Millais’s intertextual dialogue with Tennyson’s poem and Shakespeare’s play involves a process of reverse ekphrasis. Taking this approach, this paper will analyse the ekphrastic and intertextual dialogue between the poem “Mariana” and its visual representation in Millais’s artistic manifestations.