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Source: http://www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/images/bkaexc.htm
The Morte Darthur was finished,
as the epilogue tells us, in the ninth year of Edward IV., i.e. between
March 4, 1469 and the same date in 1470. It is thus, fitly enough, the
last important English book written before the introduction of printing
into this country, and since no manuscript of it has come down to us it
is also the first English classic for our knowledge of which we are
entirely dependent on a printed text. Caxton's story of how the book
was brought to him and he was induced to print it may be read farther
on in his own preface. From this we learn also that he was not only the
printer of the book, but to some extent its editor also, dividing
Malory's work into twenty-one books, splitting up the books into
chapters, by no means skilfully, and supplying the "Rubrish'' or
chapter-headings. It may be added that Caxton's preface contains,
moreover, a brief criticism which, on the points on which it touches,
is still the soundest and most sympathetic that has been
written.
Caxton
finished his edition the last day of July 1485, some fifteen or sixteen
years after Malory wrote his epilogue. It is clear that the author was
then dead, or the printer would not have acted as a clumsy editor to
the book, and recent discoveries (if bibliography may, for the moment,
enlarge its bounds to mention such matters) have revealed with
tolerable certainty when Malory died and who he was. In letters to The
Athenaeum in July 1896 Mr. T. Williams pointed out that the name of a
Sir Thomas Malorie occurred among those of a number of other
Lancastrians excluded from a general pardon granted by Edward IV. in
1468, and that a William Mallerye was mentioned in the same year as
taking part in a Lancastrian rising. In September 1897, again, in
another letter to the same paper, Mr. A. T. Martin reported the finding
of the will of a Thomas Malory of Papworth, a hundred partly in
Cambridgeshire, partly in Hunts. This will was made on September 16,
1469, and as it was proved the 27th of the next month the testator must
have been in immediate expectation of death.
It
contains the most careful provision for the education and starting in
life of a family of three daughters and seven sons, of whom the
youngest seems to have been still an infant. We cannot say with
certainty that this Thomas Malory, whose last thoughts were so busy for
his children, was our author, or that the Lancastrian knight discovered
by Mr. Williams was identical with either or both, but such evidence as
the Morte Darthur offers favours such a belief. There is not only the
epilogue with its petition, "pray for me while I am alive that God send
me good deliverance and when I am dead pray you all for my soul," but
this very request is foreshadowed at the end of chap. 37 of Book ix. in
the touching passage, surely inspired by personal experience, as to the
sickness "that is the greatest pain a prisoner may have"; and the
reflections on English fickleness in the first chapter of Book xxi.,
though the Wars of the Roses might have inspired them in any one, come
most naturally from an author who was a Lancastrian knight.
If
the Morte Darthur was really written in
prison and by a prisoner distressed by ill-health as well as by lack of
liberty, surely no task was ever better devised to while away weary
hours. Leaving abundant scope for originality in selection,
modification, and arrangement, as a compilation and translation it had
in it that mechanical element which adds the touch of restfulness to
literary work. No original, it is said, has yet been found for Book
vii., and it is possible that none will ever be forthcoming for chap.
20 of Book xviii., which describes the arrival of the body of the Fair
Maiden of Astolat at Arthur's court, or for chap. 25 of the same book,
with its discourse on true love; but the great bulk of the work has
been traced chapter by chapter to the "Merlin" of Robert de Borron and
his successors (Bks. i.-iv.), the English metrical romance La Morte
Arthur of the Thornton manuscript (Bk. v.), the French romances of
Tristan (Bks. viii.-x.) and of Launcelot (Bks. vi., xi.-xix.), and
lastly to the English prose Morte Arthur of Harley MS. 2252 (Bks.
xviii., xx., xxi.). As to Malory's choice of his authorities critics
have not failed to point out that now and again he gives a worse
version where a better has come down to us, and if he had been able to
order a complete set of Arthurian manuscripts from his bookseller, no
doubt he would have done even better than he did! But of the skill,
approaching to original genius, with which he used the books from which
he worked there is little dispute.
Malory
died leaving his work obviously unrevised, and in this condition it was
brought to Caxton, who prepared it for the press with his usual
enthusiasm in the cause of good literature, and also, it must be added,
with his usual carelessness. New chapters are sometimes made to begin
in the middle of a sentence, and in addition to simple misprints there
are numerous passages in which it is impossible to believe that we have
the text as Malory intended it to stand. After Caxton's edition
Malory's manuscript must have disappeared, and subsequent editions are
differentiated only by the degree of closeness with which they follow
the first. Editions appeared printed by Wynkyn de Worde in 1498 and
1529, by William Copland in 1559, by Thomas East about 1585, and by
Thomas Stansby in 1634, each printer apparently taking the text of his
immediate predecessor and reproducing it with modifications. Stansby's
edition served for reprints in 1816 and 1856 (the latter edited by
Thomas Wright); but in 1817 an edition supervised by Robert Southey
went back to Caxton's text, though to a copy (only two are extant, and
only one perfect!) in which eleven leaves were supplied from Wynkyn de
Worde's reprint. In 1868 Sir Edward Strachey produced for the present
publishers a reprint of Southey's text in modern spelling, with the
substitution of current words for those now obsolete, and the softening
of a handful of passages likely, he thought, to prevent the book being
placed in the hands of boys. In 1889 a boon was conferred on scholars
by the publication of Dr. H. Oskar Sommer's page-for-page reprint of
Caxton's text, with an elaborate discussion of Malory's
sources.
Dr.
Sommer's edition was used by Sir E. Strachey to revise his Globe text,
and in 1897 Mr. Israel Gollancz produced for the "Temple Classics'' a
very pretty edition in which Sir Edward Strachey's principles of
modernisation in spelling and punctuation were adopted, but with the
restoration of obsolete words and omitted phrases. As to the present
edition, Sir Edward Strachey altered with so sparing a hand that on
many pages differences between his version and that here printed will
be looked for in vain; but the most anxious care has been taken to
produce a text modernised as to its spelling, but in other respects in
accurate accordance with Caxton's text, as represented by Dr Sommer's
reprint. Obvious misprints have been silently corrected, but in a few
cases notes show where emendations have been introduced from Wynkyn de
Worde -- not that Wynkyn had any more right to emend Caxton than we,
but because even a printer's conjecture gains a little sanctity after
four centuries. The restoration of obsolete words has necessitated a
much fuller glossary, and the index of names has therefore been
separated from it and enlarged. In its present form the index is the
work of Mr. Henry Littlehales.
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Source:
http://www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/images/hjfsword.htm
John Spiers, 'Malory's "Morte
D'Arthur"', in The New Pelican Guide to English Literature 1. Medieval
Literature, 1997. John Spiers was Reader in English at Exeter
University. Malory's prose Morte D'Arthur
(printed by Caxton 1485) is best approached after a reading of the
English Arthurian verse romances which preceded it, rather than from
the poetry of Tennyson and other poets who have since used it as a
source. As Professor Vinaver has shown in his edition of the works of
Malory, what is really a succession of separate prose romances has been
given an appearance of unity, of being one 'book', by the way they were
edited and printed by Caxton (under the misleading title of Morte
D'Arthur). There could be no greater contrast than that between
Malory's exceedingly 'literary' fifteenth-century prose romances and
the English verse romantics or lays of the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries. Malory's prose, with all its seeming simplicity - it is a
stylisation of earlier medieval prose - is in some respects the nearest
thing in medieval English to the prose of Walter Pater. There is a tone
of fin de siecle about Malory's book.
At the end of the Middle Ages and the end of a long efflorescence of
medieval romance in many languages, Malory endeavoured to digest the
Arthurian romances into English prose, using as his source chiefly an
assortment of French Arthurian prose romances. But this traditional
material has not been organised so as to convey any coherent
significance either as a whole or, for the most part, even locally.
Malory persistently misses the point of his wonderful material. (This
may be partly because he had no access to the earlier and better
sources - if we except the fourteenth-century English alliterative
Morte Arthur- and was dependent, or chose to be dependent, on his
French prose romances.) The comparison with Sir Gawain and the Green
Knight is in this respect -as, indeed, in nearly all respects - fatally
damaging to Mallory's Morte D'Arthur. . . What is it, then, that
constitutes the charm of the book, that draws readers back to parts of
it again? Partly, it is the 'magic' of its style - those lovely elegiac
cadences of the prose, that diffused tone of wistful regret for a past
age of chivalry, that vague sense of the vanity of earthly things. Yet
the charm of the prose is a remote charm; the imagery is without
immediacy; there is a lifelessness, listlessness, and fadedness about
this prose for all its (in a limited sense) loveliness. There is also
the fascination of the traditional Arthurian material itself, even
though we feel it is not profoundly understood. The material fascinates
the reader in spite of Malory's 'magical' style which seems to shadow
and obscure rather than illuminate it. Malory's Grail books, for
example, include some of the most fascinating of his original material.
We find here once again the Waste Land, the Grail Castle, the Chaple
Perilous, the Wounded King, and so on but reduced to little more than a
succession of sensations and thrills. The recurrent appearance of the
corpse or corpse-like figure on a barge and the weeping women -
fragments of an ancient mythology though they are - become in Malory
merely tedious after a number of repetitions, and the final effect is
one of a somewhat morbid sensationalism.
Some qualifications of these structures should be made on behalf of the
last four books of Caxton's Malory, which may be felt to have an
impressive kind of unity of their own. The lawless loves of Lancelot
and Guinevere, the break-up of the fellowship of the Round Table
through treachery and disloyalty, the self destruction of Arthur's
knights and kingdom in a great civil war, the last battle and death of
Arthur, and the deaths of Lancelot and Guinevere have, as they are
described, a gloomy power, and are all felt as in some degree related
events. This set of events appears to have been deeply felt by Malory,
partly as a reflection of the anarchy and confusion of the contemporary
England of the War of the Roses.
(Source: Penguin
Classic)
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