Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Sir Thomas Malory's Morte Darthur occupies a pivotal position in English literary history, as the latest and greatest of medieval romances. Its massive, comprehensive character gives it the appearance of incorporating every Arthurian story Malory could lay hands on. It is fundamentally coherent and continuous, telling the entire story of Arthur and his knights, from Uther Pendragon's begetting of Arthur to the death of the king and the dissolution of the Round Table. It tells its stories in prose, anticipating the premier medium for English fiction through to the present day. Its language and idiom bridge the gap of medieval and modern, making it accessible to the common reader, and so it has been continuously in print from its first edition (1485) to the present time. Finally, it neatly marks the final moment of medieval romance, surviving both in a single medieval manuscript and in a near-contemporary mass-produced print. In all these ways, then, the Morte Darthur would seem to give us a snapshot — perhaps, given its bulk, better to say a feature film — of the nature of English romance at the end of the Middle Ages.In fact, the overall picture of medieval romance formed through a reading of the Morte Darthur seriously distorts several centuries of writing, reading and performance. Among the most striking features of the Morte is Malory's systematic refusal to have anything to ... log in or subscribe to read full text