Aubrey Beardsley's Drawing Of The “Shadows" In W. B. Yeats'sThe Shadowy Waters

Abstract

As ALLAN WADE HAS NOTED, "Late in 1896 [Yeats] sent either a version or a synopsis of [The Shadowy Waters] to Leonard Smithers, who intended to publish it with illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley. Beardsley hoped to make six pictures for it, but Yeats has stated that he only finished one and died before he could do the rest." No one has pointed out what the illustration was like and what passage of the play it illustrated. Since the illustration does not appear in any of Beardsley's published work and since neither Yeats nor anyone else seemed to know what happened to the original, information about what it looked like would be not only interesting in itself but potentially valuable for identification should the drawing still exist in some private collection. Such information is forthcoming if one examines the Letters from Aubrey Beardsley to Leonard Smithers concurrently with the unpublished manuscripts of The Shadowy Waters.