We cannot be certain of the identity of the author of Le Morte D’Arthur and several theories have been advanced as to his historical circumstances. However, the theory put forward by an American scholar, G. L: Kittredge, has prevailed. He claimed that the author was a Sir Thomas Malory or Maleore of Newbold Revell in Warwickshire, born in the first quarter of the fifteenth century, who spent the greater part of the last twenty years of his life in prison. Contemporary accounts accuse him of a number of crimes, including attempted murder, rape and armed robbery and he is also credited with a couple of dramatic escapes from prison. Other records suggest that he was a fighting man rather than a criminal. He was certainly in the service of Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, and fought with him in the siege of Calais in 1436. It is not surprising that some scholars have found it difficult to reconcile this violent man with the author of these moral tales.
Another possible candidate is a Thomas Malory of Studley and Hutton in Yorkshire and it has been suggested that the language of the tales points to an author living north of Warwickshire.
It is generally accepted that the author was a member of the gentry and a Lancastrian who deeply mourned the passing of the age of chivalry. He describes himself as a ‘knight-prisoner’ and it is clear that he spent many years in prison and Le Morte D’Arthur was probably written while the author was incarcerated. It would seem that he had seen service in south-western France and it is possible that some of this book was written while he was held captive by Jacques d’Armagnac, who had an extensive Arthurian library. He is thought to have died around 1471.
JOHN LAWLOR was Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Keele and has held visiting appointments at the Folger Shakespeare Library, Brandeis University and the Universities of California, British Columbia and New Mexico. He is the author of The Tragic Sense in Shakespeare, Piers Plowman: an Essay in Criticism and Chaucer.
JANET COWEN was formerly Senior Lecturer in English at King’s College, University of London.
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Published in the Penguin Books 1969
Reprinted with Further Reading 2004
34
Introduction copyright © John Lawlor, 1969
Notres, Glossary and Further Reading copyright © Janet Cowen, 1969, 2004
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EISBN: 978–0–141–91305–6
FACT and fiction, romantic impossibility and historical likelihood, are intertwined at many stages of Arthurian story. There is, to begin with, the richness and enigmatic quality of all things connected with Arthur – a beguilingly beautiful labyrinth (Arturi regis ambages pulcerrime) for Dante at the end of the thirteenth century, and a continuing attraction in the seventeenth for Milton, who thought he might find a theme fit for epic in a tale of Arthur ‘moving wars beneath the earth’. That is one side, and a lasting side, of Arthurian story. In such reincarnations, we have Rex quondam Rexque futurus, the King who once was and who will be again: given the archetype, the appropriate magic follows. Who would have thought that a hero of this order might in fact be traced in history? Yet there is ground for believing in the existence of a victorious commander, a Briton of the later fifth century, leading a series of successful encounters with invaders (and, possibly, traitorous Britons)1 – a glorious career which later generations thought of as ended not by external defeat but by dissension within the war-band. This is the Arthur who is first reflected in the pages of Geoffrey of Mon-mouth (1136): and it is this Arthur who continued to appeal to medieval English writers – a leader whose triumphant course ends in the lamentable division of his kingdom; he passes from men’s sight as one whose glory is not overthrown but temporarily eclipsed. French writers, on the other hand, appear from the outset to be chiefly interested in one outstanding member of Arthur’s company. Sir Lancelot; and in handling this theme they seize from the beginning on the tragic possibilities that lie in wait for chivalry when it is drawn aside from the only true quest, ‘the seeking out of the high secrets and hidden things of Our Lord’. The Grail is the goal of man’s highest endeavour; and by this standard Sir Lancelot, best of earthly knights, falls short. An English author who has before him both English and French tellings of Arthurian story is dealing with potentially irreconcilable material; and this point is central to all assessment of Malory’s Morte. Since French sources bulk large in his work, Malory has been subject to what his best exponent has, with characteristic modesty, called ‘almost a necessary evil’, an English author edited by a French scholar;1 and all learned debate must run the risk of strong, if latent, preconception in favour of an ‘original’ which Malory may be thought of as ‘translating’. In this light he is always in danger of being judged, for good or ill, in terms of his faithfulness as an intermediary; his individuality as a writer is liable to be underrated or all but ignored.
Malory’s individual being as a man, his historical identity, has provided a paradox, too. Since the 1890s, beginning with the skilful advocacy of the American scholar Kittredge, it has been generally accepted that the author was a certain Sir Thomas Malory or Maleore (with variant spellings) who lived at Newbold Revell in Warwickshire, soldiered at Calais in his youth under the great Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, and came to see in the decline of the Lancastrian fortunes a parallel with the overthrow of King Arthur’s rule. He even gives Mordred, the insurgent in his story, a Yorkistlike army, drawn from south-eastern England. All very pleasing and probable, no doubt: but this Sir Thomas turns out, on later inquiry, to have been a prisoner, and his offences include armed assault and rape. Apologists have reminded us of the turbulent times in which he lived; but the rape with which Malory was charged cannot be explained away as a technicality in the forcible eviction of a tenant. Two offences were alleged, and the charge reads unambiguously cum ea carnaliter concubuit. This rather unpromising figure, then, appears to be the author of ‘the noble and joyous historye of the grete conquerour and excellent kyng, Kyng Arthur’; and, to crown all, there came to light (at Winchester in 1934) a manuscript which showed clearly how the writer had set about his task. The work is divided into clearly-defined sections; a series of prayers for ‘help’ or ‘deliverance’, occurring throughout the book, amplify the single prayer that Caxton had printed at the end, and one of them makes it plain that the petitioner is ‘a knyght presoner’; and one section (that on the Roman war, Caxton’s Book V) is notably longer in the manuscript than in the printed text. By this single discovery we are given new information about the author; about the mode of composition; and, by implication, about the. first editor, William Caxton, who published his edition in 1485.
This, of course, in turn raised other problems, and the effect was to suspend Malorian studies until a full text of the Winchester Manuscript was available. It appeared in 1947, as The Works of Sir Thomas Malory, edited by Eugène Vinaver, with a revised edition, based on a fresh collection and incorporating new matter in the Commentary, appearing in 1967. With the text of Winchester before them, scholars have begun to engage in lively discussion. In the field of interpretation, one matter has been strikingly dominant, the question of unity. Could Malory be said to have written a ‘hoole book’ or instead eight separate romances (hence the significance of Vinaver’s title, The Works of Sir Thomas Malory)? As to the author himself, William Matthews has recently come forward with a vigorous claim for a Yorkshire Knight in place of Kittredge’s ‘ill-framed’ candidate.1 The debate, on these counts as on others, continues; and the general liveliness of interest in Arthurian matter can be seen from evidence as widely different as the musical Camelot, based on T. H. White’s serio-comic re-shaping of Malory, The Once and Future King, and excavation, begun in 1966 and still continuing, at South Cadbury ‘Castle’, which appears to have been the base of a British ruler of some substance, whether Arthur or another. ‘Camelot’, according to John Leland, was a local name for it in the sixteenth century: and the name is perpetuated in the Camelot Research Committee which has charge of the work. As their President stirringly puts it, we may yet live to see ‘another convergence of fact and tradition’ similar to that which brought Troy and Mycenae out of legend into fact.1 Leaving aside all further question of historical identity, Malory’s no less than Arthur’s, what shall we say of Malory’s contribution to the legend, his labour to tell ‘of Kyng Arthur and of his noble knyghts of the Rounde Table’?
Arthur, the monarch of a kingdom that falls by treachery, makes his first appearance in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain, written in 1136. There he is at the height of success, ready to march into Italy having defeated the Roman army, when he hears of Mordred’s treachery in seizing the throne and marrying the Queen. Arthur returns to Britain and is at first victorious against the rebels; but in the last battle (beside the river Camel, ‘in Cornwall’) though Mordred falls, Arthur himself is fatally wounded and, appointing a successor to the crown, he is taken to ‘the island of Avallon for the healing of his wounds’. When this matter is first handled in French, all interest is focused not upon Arthur but upon Sir Lancelot. Le Roman de Lancelot du Lac (1225–30) consists of Lancelot, an account of the Quest for the Holy Grail, and the death of King Arthur; and this was later enlarged by the Estoire del Graal and the Estoire de Merlin. The focus, from the beginning, is firmly upon Lancelot; and his failure to achieve the Grail gives the measure of earthly chivalry. The son, Galahad, succeeds where Lancelot falls short. More important, from our present point of view, is the function of the Mort Artu, the section dealing with Arthur’s defeat and death. It is there ‘to describe Lancelot’s final failure – that which occurred when he was called upon to save Arthur and his kingdom’.1 The French Arthurian cycle establishes clearly the gap between earthly and spiritual. By this standard knights who have shown little secular prowess – Galahad, Bors, Perceval – shine forth: and Lancelot and Arthur are inevitably headed for disaster. The distinction is well summed up in terms first used by E. K. Chambers.2 Corbenic (the castle where the Grail is achieved) predominates over Camelot (the region par excellence of the chivalric life). Readers who come to Arthurian story with this tradition (derived perhaps from Tennyson or from Wagner, rather than medieval writers) colouring their thoughts will find it difficult to know what Malory is about, and may find him unduly prosaic, insensitive to what they take to be the true import of his material. We must, however, remind ourselves that there is no one version of Arthurian material towards which all others must aspire.
In contrast with the French the earliest English versions of the story, Layamon’s Brut (written in the closing years of the twelfth century) and the alliterative Morte Arthur (about 1360) tell the story simply, in terms of the chronicle tradition. Here, as in Geoffrey of Monmouth, the centre of attention is Arthur, and the story is of stark disaster overtaking his kingdom once loyalty is breached. There is only one instance before Malory of an English writer working from a French source (the stanzaic Le Morte Arthur, dating from the late fourteenth century); and it is very noticeable that this writer disregards the link between the Grail and the Lancelot themes. He leaves his readers to confront the dire events of which Lancelot, Arthur and Guinevere are the victims. Like Lancelot’s seven companions, now turned hermit, we must resign ourselves to things which pass our understanding:
Off lancelot du lake telle I no more,
But thus by-leve these ermytes sevyn;
And yit is Arthur beryed thore,
And queue Gaynour, as I yow nevyn;
With monkes that ar Ryght of lore.
They Rede and synge with mylde stevyn:
‘Ihesu, that suffred woundes sore,
Graunt us All the blysse of hevyn!’
Amen.
Explycit le morte Arthur
Here is something which, it may be argued, has qualities equal and opposite to those of the French romances. Where they provide explanation and continuity, the English writer presents unmitigated reality, what indubitably happened in all its sharpness. If he refers to Fortune’s wheel – that convincing instrument of destiny – it is in terms that only underline cruel inevitability. The wheel turns in Arthur’s nightmare before the last battle, and he falls into darkness (a ‘blake water’), to be rent limb from limb by monsters. Here, then, is a version which, notwithstanding French sources, is graphically simple, leaving the audience free to make what they can of the connexions between what men are and the things that befall them. Malory, in his turn, must be allowed the same freedom; and if he does not link the Death of Arthur with the quest for the Grail and if he does not expatiate on the meaning of Fortune’s wheel, he may, so far from misunderstanding the superiority of Corbenic over Camelot, have contrived it that Corbenic becomes ‘a province of Camelot’.1 In that event, the chivalric life will not be explained from without, as a thing inferior to the spiritual order: it is to be ‘reinterpreted’, as Vinaver acutely notes, ‘from within’.2 The changes Malory makes can be treated under several heads – structure and incidental detail; the matter of love; and style, the choice and ordering of language. In all of these aspects we are concerned with an English writer pursuing his own course and, in the absence of any clear model, learning in the doing.
The essential structural difference between the French Arthurian prose cycle and Malory’s work may be expressed as the difference between complex interweaving and a more sequential treatment.3 In the French, no one section of the work exists in isolation from the next; ideally, ‘each episode or group of episodes was to be either a continuation of what occurred earlier on, or an anticipation of what was yet to come, or both.’4 An analogy from visual art may help. The French mode of narration may be thought of as a process of intertwining, the themes of the complex story being ‘entwined, latticed, knotted or plaited’ so that they resemble ‘the themes in Romanesque ornament, caught in a constant movement of endless complexity’.5 Malory’s first and essential response to that complexity is to cut clear swaths, to establish lines of demarcation between major sections of the story. Whatever impact his work is to have will be sequential and cumulative; and since his eye is firmly upon the Morte, the unrelieved disaster (Morte Arthur Saunz Guerdon) of the death of Arthur and the passing of the goodly fellowship of the Round Table, the pattern of significance will have to become increasingly apparent in a rising tide of events and their inevitable train of consequence, not be immovably evident in any overriding system, however exalted. Certainly, the ‘Tale of the Sankgreal’ will have an honoured place, as ‘a tale chronicled for one of the truest and one of the holiest that is in this world’. But that is all Malory’s design allows. We must return to the plane of the earthly chivalry, and to the disaster that impends when Lancelot, the King’s most redoubtable champion, is seen to be a man of fatally divided loyalties – first, as lover of Guinevere, then as the unwitting slayer of Gareth, brother of Lancelot’s most faithful friend, Gawain. There is no need to credit Malory with great artistry. Faced with what might have seemed the threatening complexity of his French sources he very possibly reacted with healthy mistrust. But, equally, there is no question that as events draw near to the fated end he writes with greatest authority. He deserves the praise of having kept his eye on the object; of having at the very least felt his way through to the things that made coherent sense, and constituted a manifest warning, for him and for all Englishmen.
Malory began with a tale of King Arthur and the Roman Emperor Lucius, where Arthur stands forth as a veritable military hero – one who, in the language of the Winchester colophon, ‘was Emperoure hymself thorow dygnyté of his hondys’. This, shortened, constitutes Caxton’s Book V. Malory then went on to draw from the Suite du Merlin more material which gave background to this figure – his beginnings and some notable earlier exploits. This made up his Tale of King Arthur’, which forms Caxton’s Books I to IV. It is thought that there was an interval of time before he resumed his work with ‘The Noble Tale of Sir Launcelot’ and the ‘Tale of Sir Gareth’ (Caxton VI and VII). There next lay in his path the formidable matter of the Tristram story and of the Grail, and here his powers were above all tested, before the culminating power and irresistible sequence of the last two sections of his work, the ‘Book of Sir Launcelot and Queen Guinevere’ and the conclusion of the whole in The most piteous tale of the Morte Arthur saunz guerdon’. Structurally, Malory’s work gains pace and authority as it advances: virisque adquirit eundo. The design draws to a head; ambiguities and lesser things – among them, in this telling, the Grail quest itself – fall into place as total and irreversible, loss threatens. In the end we are left with a kingdom and the values it epitomized breached from within:
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.
This difference in structure is paralleled in a characteristic difference of tone, evident in the incidental detail of Malory’s work as against the French. Most notably, the marvels cease to multiply: Malory prunes them, sometimes omitting, sometimes telescoping. He is less interested in a world where magic is evident in a dozen particulars than in the one detail that transforms the world we know. Here again it would be inept to press for conscious art over natural bent. All we can say is that Malory’s preference is for singleness and simplicity over variety and multiplicity. The same is true of his preference for realistic, often homely, detail. For example, in the story of Tristram, he alters his source, in which Tristan’s first falling in love arose from a desire to oust Palomides from Iseult’s favours: now love is an unprompted growth. On the other hand, at the parting of the lovers, not even mentioned in the French, Malory adds detail: there is an effusion of grief (‘comédie larmoyante’, as Vinaver once severely called it) and the exchange of pledges. This has less the air of conscious realism than of an entire naturalness – an unstudied concern to handle matters that are within the narrator’s range and, where opportunity offers, to establish their credibility in human terms. Such a narrator comes into his own when the matter lies within his own field of experience. The Grail quest in Malory has the air of a real expedition. The French writers may choose to have their eyes on higher things: but Malory’s field expedition has to be financed. Malory’s Guinevere sends to Bors, Hector and Lionel ‘tresour ynough for theyr expencys’: and when Guinevere’s steadfastness in seeking the mad Lancelot is to be brought home to him. Sir Ector’s words carry the stamp of truth: ‘Hyt hath coste my lady the quene twenty thousand pounds the sekynge of you.’
If we call this quality prosaic, we must mean a habit of concentration on what is within the narrator’s range, what he can, in this sense, be understood to vouch for. Arthur the King, the earthly chivalry in its accomplishments – what Spenser called ‘derring doe’ – this is the centre of his attention. When that world is to be destroyed he himself is the first to grieve; and then only Malory can find appropriate words for this Arthur:
Wyte you well, my harte was never so hevy as hit ys now. And much more I am soryar for my good knyghtes losse than for the losse of my fayre quene; for quenys I myght have inow, but such a felyship of good knyghtes shall never be togydirs in no company.1
These are the priorities in Malory’s handling of his material. The matter of love has therefore a subordinate interest; and on two occasions this is strikingly apparent. They deserve to be set out in full, as instances of Malory’s own invention, without parallel in his sources, and as such directly expressive of his own characteristic temper.
The first occurs early in Malory’s career as a writer, if the account earlier given is correct. It is in ‘The Noble Tale of Sir Launcelot du Lake’, where Lancelot is about to take leave of a ‘damesell’ whom he has saved from ‘dystresse’. Praising him as excelling all other knights for courtesy and ‘meekness’, the lady goes on:
‘But one thyng, sir knyght, methynkes ye lak, ye that ara knyght wyveles, that ye woll nat love som mayden other jantylwoman. For I cowde never here sey that ever ye loved ony of no maner of degré, and that is grete pyté. But hit is noysed that ye love quene Gwenyvere, and that she hath ordeyned by enchauntemente that ye shall never love none other but hir, nother none other damesell ne lady shall rejoyce you; where[fore] there be many in this londe, of hyghe astate and lowe, that make grete sorow.’
‘Fayre damesell,’ seyde sir Launcelot, ‘I may nat warne peple to speke of me what hit pleasyth hem. But for to be a weddyd man, I thynke hit nat, for than I muste couche with hir and leve armys and turnamentis, batellys and adventures. And as for to sey to take my pleasaunce with peramours, that woll I refuse: in prencipall for drede of God, for knyghtes that bene adventures sholde nat be advoutrers nothir lecherous, for than they be nat happy nother fortunate unto the werrys; for other they shall be overcom with a sympler knyght than they be hemself, other ellys they shall sle by unhappe and hir cursednesse bettir men than they be hemself. And so who that usyth peramours shall be unhappy, and all thynge unhappy that is aboute them.’
And so sir Launcelot and she departed.
(Works, pp. 270–71; Caxton VI 10)
Here Sir Lancelot, the arch-exemplar of those who love peramours, is made to disclaim both marriage and adultery. What can this mean? We must turn to the context in which this Lancelot comes forward; and it is at once apparent that we are not dealing with the Lancelot of French romance. Malory has turned from Arthur, the pre-eminent figure, whose deeds are chronicled in the Roman War (Caxton, Book V) to deal with the one who stands next in chivalrous prowess – a Sir Lancelot who ‘encresed so mervaylously in worship and honoure’ that ‘therefore he is the fyrste knyght that the Frey[n]sh booke makyth me[n]cion of aftir kynge Arthure com frome Rome.’ There is Lancelot’s significance defined; and it has an appropriate consequence:
Wherefore quene Gwenyvere had hym in grete favoure aboven all other knyghtis, and so he loved the quene agayne aboven all other ladyes dayes of his lyff, and for hir he dud many dedys of armys and saved her from the fyre thorow his noble chevalry.
Guinevere honours Arthur’s most proficient knight and he in response (‘agayne’) reveres her above all others, throughout his life (‘dayes of his lyff’). Malory concludes the sentence with a glimpse of what those ‘dayes of his lyff’ will include – many feats of arms on her behalf and a rescue from the stake; but in the close we are firmly reminded of the source from which all springs, Lancelot’s ‘noble chevalry’. It cannot be maintained that the purpose of this Book is to show Lancelot setting out ‘to prove himself… in order to win the approval of Guinevere, whom he already loves’.1 Lancelot in fact, in the passage already quoted and in two others, is made to deny the rumour that he and Guinevere are lovers. Malory’s mood in the present passage is proleptic: he brings into play his knowledge of where things will end. But the Lancelot who occupies the stage is Lancelot in his original brightness, ‘the fyrste knyght… aftir kynge Arthure com frome Rome’. The criterion of excellence is one and the same for liege-lord and follower – ‘armys and worshyp’, ‘prouesse and noble dedys’, ‘noble chevalry’.
Lancelot’s response to the lady’s questioning therefore places ‘armys and turnamentis, batellys and adventures’ in the forefront of proper endeavour. Marriage, in this light, is a renunciation. Do we have here, undeveloped as it is, a hint of the idiosyncratic and temperamental difference between Arthur and Lancelot? Lancelot stubbornly clings to his single state, as though it were the only one proper to ‘adventurous’ knighthood. Yet in King Arthur we do not have an inactive hero, married though he is.1 At all events, it is not marriage but loving peramours that is condemned; and Lancelot’s language is firm, modulating from solemnity (‘in prencipall for drede of God’) to simple certainty. The key to Malory’s handling of the passage is in words that the modern reader may easily misread – ‘happy’, ‘unhappe’, and the repeated ‘unhappy’ which seals the conclusion. We must think of this in much stronger terms than the ordinary sense of ‘happy’ or ‘unhappy’ allows today. ‘Mishap’ is a step towards it, if we go beyond the sense of a minor slip to the gravity of ill-fortune, things going grievously and unalterably wrong. For example, Arthur, at the final parting of the ways, turns away from the traitor with the single exclamation, ‘Alas, this unhappy day!’ Even more strikingly, cause and effect are brought together in the one word when, after battle is joined, Arthur catches sight of Mordred:
‘Now, gyff me my speare,’ seyde kynge Arthure unto sir Lucan, ‘for yondir I have aspyed the traytoure that all thys woo hath wrought.’
‘Sir, latte hym be,’ seyde sir Lucan, for he ys unhappy. And yf ye passe this unhappy day y[e] shall be ryght well revenged.’
It is this long prospect of ‘unhappiness’ which momentarily darkens the scene when Lancelot assures the lady ‘who that usyth peramours shall be unhappy, and all thynge unhappy that is aboute them.’ Lancelot is not yet the lover of Guinevere peramours; but what he asserts as established doctrine – a consequence which, since it cannot be set aside, has the force of destiny – will one day become a matter of disastrous experience. Lancelot speaks more than he knows; Malory invests his words with tragic irony.
The second major instance of Malory dealing with the matter of love occurs in the penultimate section of the whole work, ‘The Book of Sir Lancelot and Queen Guinevere’. Caxton places this section at the very end of Book XVIII (Chapter 25): but in any ordering, it is clearly designed to serve as prologue to what immediately follows – the events of ‘the moneth of May’ when Guinevere rides forth with ‘ten knyghtes of the Table Rounde… on-maynge into woodis and fyldis besydes Westemynster’. This time Malory speaks in his own person. He begins with the praise of ‘the moneth of May… whan every lusty harte begynnyth to blossom and to burgyne’. This, above all, is the time when lovers callyth to their mynde olde jantylnes and old servyse’. Things are gathering to a head in his story; but the new stage is rooted deep in the past. This prompts the next reflection. The seasons pass: ‘grene summer’ is followed in the natural order by ‘wynter rasure’ which ‘dothe allway arace and deface grene summer’; and this, Malory affirms, is the pattern of ‘unstable love in man and woman’ –
for in many persones there ys no stabylité; for [w]e may se all day, for a lytyll blaste of wyntres rasure, anone we shall deface and lay aparte trew love, for lytyll or nowght, that coste muche thynge. Thys ys no wysedome nother no stabylité, but hit ys fyeblenes of nature and grete disworshyp, whosomever usyth thys.
Here, again, modem usage may mislead. We must be on our guard against writing down ‘stabylité’ as a commonplace virtue. Much more, it is the highly prized characteristic of steadfastness, continuance in well-doing. ‘Stability’ in this sense is the great virtue of constancy. Its larger implications are evident enough for Malory. When ‘the felyshyp of the Rounde Table ys brokyn’ the foundation of order is gone; there will be, the Knights perceive, ‘ever debate and stryff’ in place of ‘quyet and reste’. Lancelot is credited by them with ‘a grete parte’ in the achievement of order; and, in reply, Lancelot gives it its proper name: ‘I wote well that in me was nat all the stabilité of thys realme, but in that I myght I ded my dever’ (Caxton XX 17–18).
‘Stability’, then, is the great virtue, to be lamented in its passing. But in the present passage, Malory has a surprise in store. First, as on the earlier occasion, we must be told what true virtue consists in; ‘vertuouse love’ is therefore defined:
lyke as May moneth flowryth and floryshyth in every mannes gardyne, so in lyke wyse lat every man of worshyp florysh hys herte in thys worlde: firste unto God, and norte unto the joy of them that he promysed hys fey the unto; for there was never worshypfull man norworshypfullwoman but they loved one bettir than another; and worshyp in armys may never be foyled. But firste reserve the honoure to God, and secundely thy quarell muste com of thy lady. And such love I calle vertuouse love.
It is very different, Malory goes on, from experience of love ‘nowadayes’, when love is ‘sone hote sone colde. Thys ys no stabylyté’ –
But the olde love was nat so. For men and women coude love togydirs seven yerys, and no lycoures lustis was betwyxte them, and than was love trouthe and faythefulnes. And so in lyke wyse was used such love in kyngo Arthurs dayes.
So be it. Inconstancy appears as a national failing – ‘a greate defaughte of us Englysshemen, for ther may no thynge us please no terme’ (Caxton XXI 1). Malory’s readers must therefore be willing to receive upon report what they cannot, in their latter age, experience for themselves. Where Malory had glanced forward in the earlier episode, from Lancelot’s innocence to his later sufferings, here he makes his reader look back, to old times and the ‘old love’. But here, as there, he comes to rest in the admirable qualities of his characters. Lancelot’s ‘noble chevalry’, from which all was to spring, is now echoed in praise for Guinevere. Modern lovers will do well to recall the past:
And therefore all ye that be lovers, calle unto youre remanbraunce the monethe of May, lyke as ded quene Gwenyver, for whom I make here a lytyll mencion, that whyle she lyved she was a trew lover, and therefor she had a good ende.
Guinevere is commended as a ‘trew’ lover, and ‘truth’ of course means ‘stabylyté’, constancy. Once again, in the ‘bad’ instance Malory dwells upon the redeeming feature. But it marks an advance in skill that this time the author pays tribute in his own person, making ‘a lytyll mencion’ that, poised at the end of his prologue, looks forward not only to the action immediately following (‘So hit befelle in the moneth of May’) but to the longer run of the whole story, the ‘ende’ that already begins to darken the horizon.
In both instances, Malory has called into play knowledge of events to come; and since they are dire events, in each instance a bright present is overshadowed. The effect is, of course, to heighten the sense of inevitability: momentarily, present and future lie in one focus. But that is not all. We end each time with the admirable qualities of the protagonists; and this most powerfully expresses the writer’s sense that what is to come is a destiny from which no one, least of all the writer himself, can safeguard the persons of this story. Their lot is thus, in the ancient phrase, soth ond sārl–īc, true and tragic. The shadow that falls is the shadow of events impending in the real world, not a foreseeable downfall in terms of a supernaturally-approved system. A narrative method which is sequential rather than ‘polyphonic’ encourages the writer to reach backward and forward. Given this method, time becomes especially the writer’s medium – successive time, as contrasted with the continuum in which the interwoven method would place all persons and events, to make one grand design. This is an opportunity which Malory, moved especially by nostalgia, a reverence for that in the past which he would see revived in the present, is peculiarly fitted to take; and in the most successful parts of his work it sustains a sense of onward and irresistible force. Here we have two leading illustrations that in Malory’s handling the story liad to rely on its own resources and move by its own momentum’.1
What part is played in this by Malory’s style? Vinaver, writing in 1929, when Malory’s achievement seemed to him largely inexplicable in terms of content, concluded that the Morte Darthur rested securely on ‘the mysterious power of style – the only immortal merit in the world of books’.2 It is, in fact, a most insecure assumption that Malory has any one distinctive style. Like a good many fifteenth-century writers, he writes in one way when he is following his sources, another when he turns to address his ‘gentle’ readers. There is a further complication: as the source varies, so, too, does Malory. He can write in the ordinary, progressive manner of his French prose source; or, equally, in the strongly alliterative manner of the English poem which underlies the Roman War (Caxton V); or, again, he will echo the rhythms of the stanzaic English Morte (as in Caxton XX 19). A style?: it is really a question of styles. To illustrate, there is, firstly, the continuing manner of French prose:
And than the good man and sir Launcelot went into me chapell; and the good man toke a stole aboute hys neck and a booke, and than he conjoined on that booke. And with that they saw the fyende in an hydeous fygure, that there was no man so hardé-herted in the worlde but he sholde a bene aferde. Than seyde the fyende,
‘Thou hast travayle me gredy. Now telle me what thou wolte with me.’
‘I woll,’ seyde the good man, ‘that thou telle me how my felawe becam dede, and whether he be saved or dampned.’
Than he seyde with an horrible voice,
‘He ys nat lost, but he ys saved!’
‘How may that be?’ seyde the good man. ‘Hit semyth me that he levith nat well, for he brake hys order for to were a sherte where he ought to were none, and who that trespassith ayenst oure [ordre] doth nat well.’
‘Nat so,’ seyde the fyende. ‘Thys man that lyeth here was com of grete lynage…’
(The Quest of the Holy Grail’, Works, pp. 925–6; cf Caxton XV 1)
Lors entre li preudoms en sa chappelle et prent ung livre et met une estole entour son col, et puis vient hors et commence a conjurer l’ennemi. Et quant il a grant piece lut, il regarde et voit l’ennemy en si hideuse fourme qu’il n’a si hardi homme en tout le monde qui grand hide n’en eust et paour. ‘Tu me travailles trop,’ fait l’ennemi, ‘or me di que tu me veulz.’ – ‘Je veul,’ fait il, ‘que tu me dies comment cilz miens compains est mort, et [s]’il est perilz ou sauvez.’ Lors parle l’ennemi a voix orrible et espoventable et dist; ‘N’est mie perils, mais sauvés.’ – ‘Et comment puet ce estre?’ fait li preudhoms. ‘Il me semble que tu me mentes, car ce ne me commande nue nostre order, ains le vee tout plainement que nulx de nostre ordre ne veste chemise de lin; et qui la vest, il trespasse l’ordre. Et qui en trespassant ordre muert, ce n’est mie bien, ce m’est avis.’ – ‘A!’ fait l’ennemi, ‘je te diray comment il est alés de lui. Tu scés bien qu’il fu gentils homs et de grant lignage…’
(Text from Vinaver, Malory, pp. 159–60)
The structure of each passage is essentially the same; but I have italicized in the French those words and phrases which Malory does not render, and it will be seen that his passage gathers force, until with the final disclosure all is swept aside that does not serve the bleak contrast of life and death: ‘this man that lyeth here was com of grete lynage.’1 Malory’s style, in this type of passage, where he follows a French original, may certainly be said to make improvements in detail on his source – by compression and omission, as well as by telling addition. But in structure it is identical with the source – a prose which has the characteristic virtues and limitations of oral narration; clean, progressive, never worse than comfortably pedestrian and often strikingly laconic.
With other sources, the matter is very different, and then the effects can be strongly evident to every reader. Arthur’s dream (Caxton V 4) is itself a kind of half-strangled alliterative poem, where the clashing phrases make the menace actual and all but overpowering:
As the kynge was in his cog and lay in his caban, he felle in a slumberyng and dremed how a dredfull dragon dud drenche much of his peple and com fleyng one wynge oute of the weste partyes. And his hede, hym seined, was enamyled with asure, and his shuldyrs shone as the golde, and his wombe was lyke mayles of a merveylous hew, and his tayle was fulle of tatyrs, and his feete were florysshed as hit were fyne sable. And his clawys were lyke clene golde, and an hydeouse flame of fyre there flowe oute of his mowth, lyke as the londe and the watir had flawmed all on fyre.
There the alliterative rhythms are plain for all to hear. Less obvious are the phrases which slip in from the stanzaic Morte and blend with those alliterative turns which are inseparable from a truly native English speech; as, ‘ware and wyse’, ‘droupe and dare’, with the occasional stride into full rhythm (‘whyle we thus in holys us hyde’). Both kinds of alliterative effect are as different as could be from the quasi-ceremonious language in which Malory directly addresses his readers. The outstanding example of that is the passage already quoted, on ‘wynter rasure’ (Caxton XVIII 25). There the fifteenth-century disease of ‘augmentation’ is sadly evident both in the high-sounding latinate words (‘constrayne’, ‘dyverce’, ‘neclygence’, ‘rasure’, ‘stabylité’), and in the intendedly elegant clusterings of synonyms (‘to blossom and to burgyne’, ‘burgenyth and florysshyth’, and the full measure of ‘spryngith, burgenyth, buddyth, and florysshyth’). It is a manner that in its quieter manifestations survives in’ Cranmer’s Prayer book; the pattern ‘arace and deface’, ‘deface and lay aparte’, may recall ‘acknowledge and confess’, ‘assemble and meet together’, ‘erred and strayed’. In both secular and religious writings, later readers have vainly striven to establish significant distinction between terms that were meant to make their impact not by subtlety of difference but by cumulative force.
It is easy to ridicule augmentation full-blown. From ‘spryngith, burgenyth, buddyth, and florysshyth’ it is but a step to the portentous Lord Berners, assuring his readers that he has ‘volved, turned and read’ those writings which he judged ‘commodious, necessary and profitable’, to the end that his gentle readers (‘the noble gentlemen of England’) might ‘see, behold and read the high enterprises, famous acts and glorious deeds done and achieved by their valiant ancestors’.1 Clearly, what we are told three times is true. Yet Berners is but one more writer who, like Malory, feels he must compose ornately for his appearance in person, but who writes a prose of unostentatious simplicity when he is following his French source. This disease of ‘augmentation’ in the end yields a pearl of great price. Hunting for – perhaps we should say, being haunted by – the more refined equivalent, the English writer can never be wholly unaware that English is a language in which apparent synonyms most often convey subtle gradations of mood or attitude rather than of meaning. The adoptions from French and Latin do not so much oust the native words as move them imperceptibly down a scale; and whereas that scale is originally conceived in terms of a hierarchical ‘high’ and ‘low’, it comes in the long run to be an instrument of highly effective nuance. The end-product is in the seventeenth century, when Browne can revivify a commonplace by saying that a man may be ‘as content with six foot as the moles of Adrianus’.2 There, in the contrast of two phrases, are the mighty and the humble made one in the grave. For a more complex example, we may hear Jeremy Taylor leading to the assertion that the triumph of the Christian Faith is miraculous (because otherwise inexplicable), by characterizing the Apostles as ‘men of mean breeding and illiberal arts’. It is the exact tone of polite incredulity: and so the sceptical listener has no inner defence against the final assault of plain language expressing unalterable fact, in ‘the certainty of them that saw it, and the courage of them that died for it, and the multitude of them that believed it’.1
Malory’s attemptedly solemn address to the reader (Caxton XVIII 25) has its moments of near unbalance: but in the end it, too, comes home to truth and simplicity. As in the major structuring of his story, so, too, in this; Malory has his eye on the object. His piece of ‘high sentence’ is not designed to glorify himself, but only to lead to the ‘lytyll mencion’ of Queen Guinevere: ‘whyle she lyved she was a trew lover, and therefor she had a good ende.’ Here, as in the quiet omissions and pruning of incidental detail, and in the treatment of adulterous passion, Malory succeeds because he holds to one purpose: to tell the story as it appears to him. He has his own ‘stabylyté’ and the reward is in the strength of his telling. For once, it is wholly appropriate that ‘style’ least of all reveals the author. C. S. Lewis put the matter with characteristic verve: ‘If you were searching all literature for a man who might be described as “the opposite of Pater”, Malory would be a strong candidate.’2
There is of course one man whom the ‘augmented’ manner calls vividly to mind, and that is Caxton, Malory’s first publisher and, as we now know, his first editor. The discovery of the Winchester Manuscript brought clearly to light the fact of composition by distinct sections (as well as a difference in bulk between what Malory had written about Arthur versus the Emperor Lucius and Caxton’s Book V). Caxton, we now see, took eight romances and made them into one book, making certain minor editorial changes (including the omission of all but one of the explicits, the first of which is the most revealing, for in it the writer took leave of the reader and left his work for others to continue), and creating certain confusions, or ‘incongruities’,1 which arise from the effort to make a single book. In addition, he contributed a Preface which some readers may have taken too readily as a statement of Malory’s intent. The question, however, remains whether the unity Caxton aimed for is largely factitious, or whether he has seized upon the essential characteristic of Malory’s writings.
The debate has been joined and shows no sign of ending.2 This clearly, is not the place to attempt to resolve it. But every reader of Malory’s work may profit by the reminder that the last colophon of all speaks of two books ending together:
Here is the ende of the hoole book of king Arthur and of his noble knyghtes of the Rounde Table, that whan they were hole togyders there was ever an hondred and forty. And here is the ende of The Deth of Arthur.3
Here, clearly, the writer claims that ‘Two things are finished; this particular tale, and the whole book of which it is a part.’4 But granted that, it is another question whether we can press for a close degree of congruence in all the parts of the ‘hoole book’. What is certain is that the last two books display a high degree of – can we call it? – cogency; the sense, at the very least, of complex matter coming to a final resolution, and, at best (in the closing scenes of all) of an awful finality as inevitable destruction sets in – ‘a grete angur and unhapp[e] that stynted nat tylle the floure of chyvalry of [alle] the worlde was destroyed and slayne’. Caxton, it appears, did not feel the almost gravitational pull of the Morte itself, the death of Arthur and the overthrowing of the earthly chivalry, as he certainly did not succumb to the attraction of a militant Arthur, the victorious King of Britain who successfully challenges the Roman Empire. Malory, we may say, adapting Cassio, is to be relished more in the soldier than in the scholar. Caxton was mildly concerned, too, at what Ascham was to call ‘open manslaughter and bold bawdrye’. His counsel to the reader is plain: ‘Doo after the good and leve the evyl, and it shal brynge you to good fame and renommee.’ But for all that, Caxton grasped that the book he made was to be called the Morte Darthur, in spite of the obvious objection – ‘Notwythstondyng it treateth of the byrth, lyf, and actes of the sayd kyng Arthur…’ The Morte, Caxton sees, takes precedence, and the rest falls into shape –
… his noble knyghtes of the rounde table, theyr meruayllous enquestes and adventures, thachyeuyng of the sangreal, & in thende the dolorous deth & departyng out of thys world of them al.
This has the right proportions: we begin and end with the great event towards which all tends and in virtue of which all has significance. Here is another Englishman who has his eye on what is of final importance: though for Caxton the centre of attention is not Arthur the exemplar of the military virtues, but Arthur the undoubted king, ‘reputed and taken for one of the nine worthy, and the fyrst of the thre Crysten men’. So Caxton is entitled to his place as a maker of the English Arthuriad. The book he issues, ‘by me deuyded in to XXI bookes chapytred’, is the work that has been known to all those who, so far, have re-created ‘Malory’. C. S. Lewis suggests that the true state of our ‘English prose Morte’, as he calls it, is to be likened to ‘a great cathedral, where Saxon, Norman, Gothic, Renaissance, and Georgian elements all co-exist, and all grow together into something strange and admirable which none of its successive builders intended or foresaw’. In that tradition, Lewis argues, Caxton, too, was a builder: and ‘the greatest service that he did the old fabric was one of demolition’, in abridging ‘the whole dreary business’ of the Roman war.1 The modern reader who is wholly intent on Malory, on seeing what he in fact wrote, and tracing out, it may be, his errors and false paths as well as his admitted triumphs, can now turn to Vinaver’s irreproachable Works of Sir Thomas Malory. Those who wish to revisit the Morte Darthur, the book as Caxton shaped it, have their text in the present volume. Each party has its own pleasure and profit; and each can contribute to the common stock of perpetual interest in Arthurian story.
The Once and Future King and Camelot are one line of development. The Grail moves among men once more in Charles Williams’s War in Heaven (1930); and Merlin, risen from the dead, is drawn into yet another battle against the forces of evil in C. S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength (1945). Who is to say that the beguiling stones interwoven with the great name of Arthur – Arturi regis ambages pulcerrime – will have no appeal for succeeding generations? Even where the source is not Malory, there is recognition of his distinctive appeal. The Waste Land is a highly individual response to Jessie Weston and to Frazer: but Eliot had read enough Malory to see Tennyson as ‘Chaucer retold for children’.2 John Cowper Powys, casting an ancient spell on modern Glas-tonbury, deals in a great mystery – ‘that beautiful and terrible force by which the lies of great creative Nature give birth to truth mat is to be’. But the language in which it is realized is inseparable from a sense of England and the English past:
And John thought, ‘I’m English and she’s English and this is England.’… And without formulating the thought in words he got the impression of the old anonymous ballads writ in northern dialect and full of cold winds and cold sword-points and cold spades and cold rivers; an impression wherein the chilly green grass and the peewits’ cries made woman’s love into a wild, stoical, romantic thing; and yet a thing calling out for bread and bed and candlelight.
The width and variety of response to Arthurian story, in authors French and English, named and anonymous, reinforces one truth that applies equally to Malory and to the authors of the French cycle, as it applies to all, medieval or modern, who take up the old stories. Each draws from the common store according to the measure of his understanding: quicquid recipitur, recipitur ad modum recipientis. What each in his turn makes is to be judged in its own light. The source itself remains undiminished.
Archibald, Elizabeth, and A. S. G. Edwards, A Companion to Malory (Cambridge: Brewer, 1996)
Barron, W. R. J., The Arthur of the English (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1999)
Field, P. J. C., Romance and Chronicle: A Study of Malory’s Prose Style (London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1971)
Field, P. J. C., The Life and Times of Sir Thomas Malory (Cambridge: Brewer, 1993)
Knight, Stephen, Arthurian Literature and Society (London: Macmillan, 1983)
Lacy, Norris J., and Geoffrey Ashe, The New Arthurian Encyclopedia. rev. edn (New York: Garland, 1996)
Lambert, Mark, Malory: Style and Vision in Le Morte D’Arthur (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1975)
McCarthy, Terence, An Introduction to Malory (Cambridge: Brewer, 1991)
Pearsall, Derek, Arthurian Romance: A Short Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003)
Riddy, Felicity, Sir Thomas Malory (Leiden: Brill, 1987)
Takamiya, Toshiyuki, and Derek Brewer (eds.), Aspects of Malory (Cambridge: Brewer, 1981)
Whitaker, Muriel, Arthur’s Kingdom of Adventure (Cambridge: Brewer, 1984)
THE text is based on Caxton’s printed edition of 1485. The syntax of the original has been left unchanged, but the spelling has been modernized. Archaic forms have usually been kept, although some minor alterations have been made, as, e.g., in rendering hem (3rd person plural pronoun) as them, and in the past tenses of a few verbs. Obsolete words are explained in the Glossary and incorporate the same minor spelling changes as are made regularly elsewhere. Caxton’s spellings of proper names have been harmonized. Modern punctuation and paragraphing have been used.
In commenting in the Notes on difficult points, I have occasionally referred to the readings of the Winchester Manuscript, which has been edited by Professor E. Vinaver as The Works of Sir Thomas Malory, Oxford, 1967 (second edition). My thanks are due to the Clarendon Press for permission to quote from this edition, to which I am greatly indebted. My thanks are also due to the Pierpont Morgan Library and the John Rylands Library for supplying microfilms of the two extant copies of Caxton’s edition.
JANET COWEN
