THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

commanders notably deficient in their respect for knightly codes of behaviour. Though the account of Arthur’s
European military triumphs and his imperial coronation by the Pope in section 2 of the Morte Darthur seems
deliberately to shadow the famous victories of Henry V, there must have seemed scant parallels between the courteous
actions of Arthur’s knights and the conduct of those responsible for the military and civil disasters of the reign of
Henry VI. Malory looked back to the first establishment and the glorious realization of the ideals of knighthood while
the England of his own age was witnessing the bloody decline of the authority of a military aristocracy. Finally,
though Malory’s text was transmitted to posterity by Caxton, it is perhaps ironic that this same Caxton should be a
merchant alert to the profits to be made from courtly literature, rather than a soldier and a courtier.
Despite his benign tampering with the text, Caxton recognized the extent to which Malory had managed to centre
his narrative on ‘the byrth, lyf, and actes of the sayd kyng Arthur [and] of his noble knyghtes of the Round Table’. He
also acknowledged that the book gave its readers an encompassing view of a range of moral experience: ‘Herein may
be seen noble chivalrye, curtosye, humanyte, frendlynesse, hardynesse, love, frendshyp, cowardyse, murdre, hate,
vertue, and synne.’ Malory worked from a considerable variety of English and French sources in both verse and prose.
He translated them all into a prose epic written in a vigorous, alliterative, formal, supple and often hauntingly
rhythmical English (he also possessed an extraordinary gift for vivid verbal exchange and for ceremonious dialogue).
His Arthur rules a kingdom which is at once a never-never land and a palpable Christian England of Winchester,
Salisbury, Canterbury, and Carlisle, of medieval counties, castles, and chantries. Malory traces the Arthurian story
from the King’s begetting, birth, education, and assumption of power to his and his court’s tragic decay. Between
these determining poles he gives over long sections to the careers of Lancelot, Gareth, and Tristram, to the pursuit of
the Holy Grail, and to the adulterous love of Lancelot and Guinevere. We begin with the optimism associated with the
unknown prince who ‘lightly and fiersly’ pulls the sword out of the stone; we end with the fearful decline of Arthur’s
greatness and his
[p. 82]
terrible dream of falling into ‘an hydeous depe blak watir’ which contains ‘all maner of serpentis and wormes and
wilde bestis fowle and orryble’. The end of the narrative is haunted by the recurring phrase ‘the noble felyshyp of the
Rounde Table is brokyn for ever’ and by a sense of the mutability of all human affairs. Knowingly reflecting the
anomalies in his sources, Malory’s defeated king is both carried off in a barge ‘into the vale of Avylyon to hele [him]
of [his] grevous wounds’ and buried in a tomb at Glastonbury inscribed: ‘HIC IACET ARTHURUS, REX QUONDAM REXQUE
FUTURUS’. The ambiguity of a once and future king, a deliverer who would rise from his tomb to save endangered
England, may well have offered political comfort to a prisoner in the perilous days of King Edward IV. The idea was
certainly to prove of political use to the fanciful mythologizers of the Tudors and the early Stuarts.
Malory’s Morte Darthur exercised a profound influence over English writers from the age of Spenser (a poet who
saw himself as the heir to the last chivalrous enchantments of the Middle Ages) to that of Tennyson (a poet much
inclined to echo Malory’s melancholy cadences). With historical hindsight it could be said that Malory, the greatest
prose writer of the fifteenth century, was composing a prose elegy to the dying age of aristocratic chivalry. It was,
however, Caxton, the middle-class entrepreneur who first brought his work to public attention, who emerges, with the
benefit of the same hindsight, as the real harbinger of a new age in which the printed word was to play an
indispensable and revolutionary role.
[end of Chapter 2]
[Andrew SANDERS: The Short Oxford History of English Literature, Clarendon Press, Oxford 1994]
[p. 83]
3
Renaissance and Reformation: Literature 1510-1620
ALTHOUGH not one of them spoke Welsh, the five English monarchs of the Tudor dynasty were inclined to insist on
the significance of their Welsh origins. For propaganda purposes they were pronounced to be princes of ancient
British descent who had returned to claim King Arthur’s throne and to restore the promised dignity and prestige of
Camelot. It was, however, under the Tudor dynasty (1485-1603) that the modern English language emerged and with