The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Thomas Malory · a prose romance in twenty-one books divided into chapters · Caxton’s text, printed at Westminster and finished on 31 July 1485 · ended by Malory, by his own explicit, in the ninth year of the reign of Edward IV, 1469 to 1470 · read from knowledge; no text in hand, the late Middle English quoted only where its words are certain, in the spelling the editions of Caxton commonly give
Mode
Chronicle romance as tragedy of a fellowship; the matter of Britain compiled from the French prose cycles and two English poems into one English prose book
Mythos
The sword drawn from the stone and returned to the water; the son begotten in incest who kills the father; the dolorous stroke and the wasted land; the Grail as the measure no earthly knight can meet; the king carried away who may return
Phase
From Arthur’s begetting and crowning, through the founding of the Round Table, the war with Rome, the tales of Lancelot, Gareth and Tristram and the quest of the Grail, to the love of Lancelot and the queen, the war it brings and the last battle
Presentation
Late Middle English prose in twenty-one books divided by Caxton into chapters with his rubrics and prologue; paratactic report, clauses joined by and, formulas of combat, spare dialogue; Malory’s explicit kept at the end
Register
Level chronicle through tournament and quest, rising to grave speech and lament in the last books
Scale
A realm and its king, a fellowship of knights and their houses, two great loves, a quest for the holy, and a war that ends the order which fought it
Governing Proposition
A king begotten by deceit draws a sword from a stone, founds a fellowship of knights at a round table, sees it at its height and sends it after the Grail, which judges it and finds it wanting, and then watches it destroyed by the loves that made it. The wager of the book is that an order built on loyalty can be brought down by its loyalties alone, each acting rightly by its own measure, and that a plain English prose of deeds, which seldom enters a mind, can carry that fall across a whole realm’s life to an ending that English literature has not stopped retelling.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The book begins with a deceit and a sword. Arthur is begotten by deceit; the sword stands in the stone for the one “rightwys kynge borne” (I) to draw, and he draws it. In the same first book Mordred is begotten in incest, and Arthur orders the children born in May to be set adrift, to destroy the son. The beginning holds the end already: a sword that will be given back to the water, a son who will kill the father.
The unit is Caxton’s text, the Le Morte d’Arthur that William Caxton printed at Westminster and finished on 31 July 1485, in twenty-one books divided into chapters, with his rubrics and his prologue. Malory’s own explicit, which Caxton keeps, dates the ending of the work to the ninth year of the reign of Edward IV, between March 1469 and March 1470. The division into books and chapters, the rubrics and Caxton’s abridgement of the Roman war in Book V belong to the unit and are credited or charged with it. The title is Caxton’s.
The Winchester manuscript, found by Walter Oakeshott at Winchester College in 1934 and edited by Eugène Vinaver in 1947 as The Works of Sir Thomas Malory, stands beside it as context. It is closer to Malory in places, lacks its first and last gatherings, and carries a fuller Roman war and explicits that Caxton dropped. Caxton is the text that carried the work for four hundred and fifty years: every edition, imitation and adaptation before 1947 descends from it. The author is usually taken to be Sir Thomas Malory of Newbold Revel in Warwickshire, a knight imprisoned more than once; the identification is the strongest on offer and is not certain.
Movement II
In the second book Balin strikes the dolorous stroke, the first wound that the whole book carries, and the land is wasted by it. His tale ends with Balin and his brother Balan killing each other, each not knowing the other: the first time in the book that knights who love each other destroy each other, and not the last. The fellowship is founded at the Round Table, and the realm takes its shape round it.
The book is compiled. Behind it stand the French prose cycles, the Merlin and its continuation, the prose Lancelot, the prose Tristan, the Queste del Saint Graal and the Mort Artu, and two English poems, the alliterative Morte Arthure behind the Roman war and the stanzaic Morte Arthur behind the last books. Vinaver’s eight tales map onto Caxton’s books: Arthur (I to IV), the war with the Emperor Lucius (V), Lancelot (VI), Gareth (VII), Tristram (VIII to XII), the Grail (XIII to XVII), Lancelot and Guinevere (XVIII to XIX) and the death of Arthur (XX to XXI). Malory cut the French interlace into tales that run more nearly straight and drew the matter towards earthly worship, fellowship and kinship.
The fellowship rises to its height in Lancelot and in Gareth, whose tale has no known source: the kitchen knight, mocked on the road by Lynet, who proves by his deeds what he is. That is the law of the book, worship, in which a knight is what his deeds show. Then the Tristram books, a third of the whole, run as a book within the book, with jousts and tournaments of one pattern and a world of chance encounter. They feed the end through Mark’s treachery and through Tristram’s death, told later in retrospect; much of them could go, and the register there is level.
Movement III
The Grail books set a second measure over the first. The knights go out on the quest, and the hermits they meet interpret what they see, and the law of worship is tested by a holier one that earthly chivalry cannot meet. Malory reduced the doctrine of the French Queste, but he kept the judgment.
The Grail is seen at Corbenic, and Galahad passes with it at Sarras. Lancelot, the best of the earthly knights, fails it, through the love that makes him best. The book does not explain the failure in his mind; it gives the deed and the outcome, and lets them stand.
So the two most distant parts of the book, Gareth’s comedy and Galahad’s passing, are held by one law and its higher judge, and the end will join them in one life. What the Grail books are doing in a work that then turns back to the court, and away from them, is one of the questions five centuries of reading have left open.
Movement IV
The last two tales are built as a construction of the first rank. The poisoned apple; Elaine of Astolat, who dies for love of Lancelot; the healing of Sir Urry, after which Lancelot weeps; the trap in the queen’s chamber; and then the war. Each step closes on the next, and every loyalty the book has built returns as a cause of ruin.
Guinevere is sentenced to the fire under Arthur’s own law. Lancelot rescues her and, in the rescue, kills the unarmed Gareth. Gawain’s love for his brothers makes his vengeance a duty, Lancelot’s love for the queen has made the killing, and Arthur’s love for his law has lit the fire. Each acts rightly by its own measure, and together they end the Round Table. Arthur says what he has lost, and it is not the queen: “such a felyship of good knyghtes shall never be togydirs in no company” (XX.9).
The prose holds this without commentary. Its sentences are joined by and; it gives the deed and withholds the inner life, so that no one in the book can step outside the tragedy to judge it, and the reader is left with acts and their consequences. The speeches of Lancelot, Gawain and Arthur turn the war in a few lines. Mordred usurps the realm, and the commons desert their king; Malory turns aside to reproach the English for their inconstancy (XXI.1).
Movement V
Gawain, dying, writes to Lancelot and forgives him. On the plain near Salisbury a knight draws his sword on an adder, and the battle begins by accident (XXI.4). The son who was set adrift at the start kills the father. Bedivere casts the sword into the water and reports that he saw nothing but “the waters wap and the waves wan” (XXI.5). A barge of queens bears the king away. The tomb reads: “Hic iacet Arthurus, rex quondam rexque futurus”
“Here lies Arthur, king once and king to be” (XXI.7).
Lancelot ends as a hermit, in penance, and dies. Over his body Ector speaks the lament: “the curtest knyght that ever bare shelde” and “the trewest lover of a synful man that ever loved woman” (XXI.13). The best of the earthly knights, failed at the Grail, dies under the higher measure, and the book’s two laws meet in one life. Whether the penance answers that life or only ends it is not settled by the text.
Caxton’s prologue offered the book as “noble chyvalrye, curtosye, humanyte, frendlynesse, hardynesse, love, frendshyp, cowardyse, murdre, hate, vertue, and synne”, and told the reader to “doo after the good and leve the evyl”. It was printed again through 1634, by Wynkyn de Worde, William Copland and William Stansby among others; Ascham condemned it; then it went unprinted for 182 years until 1816. Since then it has not been out of print, and through Tennyson, Morris, Swinburne, Twain, Beardsley, White, Steinbeck and Boorman its Arthur has become the English Arthur.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test bites harder here than on any other axis. The spine is required: the begetting and the sword, the dolorous stroke that wounds the land, the fellowship founded, its height in Lancelot and Gareth, its judgment in the Grail and its fall, where every earlier loyalty returns as a cause of ruin. The fellowship must be built at length if its breaking is to cost what it costs. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is the middle. The Tristram books run as a book within the book, a third of the whole, with jousts of one pattern, and they feed the end only through Mark’s treachery and Tristram’s death told in retrospect. The abridged Roman war stands as an episode the later books scarcely remember.
Score: 7.6 / 10
The disclosure can be stated and it holds: an order built on loyalty is destroyed by its loyalties, and the virtues that make the fellowship are the forces that end it. Lancelot’s love for the queen, Gawain’s love for his brothers and Arthur’s love for his law each act rightly by its own measure, and together they bring down the Round Table. When Lancelot kills the unarmed Gareth at the fire, Gawain’s vengeance becomes a duty, and Arthur names what he has lost, the queen least: “such a felyship of good knyghtes shall never be togydirs in no company” (XX.9). The Grail books add a second disclosure. Held below the top because the book shows these conditions through act and outcome and seldom examines them in a mind.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The height is great and comes late. The ceiling is the last books: the battle begun when a knight draws his sword on an adder (XXI.4); Bedivere casting the sword away and reporting that he saw nothing but “the waters wap and the waves wan” (XXI.5); the barge of queens; the tomb; and Ector’s lament over Lancelot dead, “the curtest knyght that ever bare shelde” and “the trewest lover of a synful man that ever loved woman” (XXI.13). Earlier peaks stand along the way: Balin and Balan killing each other unknowing, the Grail at Corbenic and Galahad’s passing, Lancelot weeping after he heals Sir Urry. Held below the top on frequency, since for long stretches of the middle the register is level and the jousts do not rise.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Myth built, and built across the whole span. The book runs from a king begotten by deceit to a king carried off by water who may return, and the archetype carries the structure: the sword drawn from the stone by the one “rightwys kynge borne” (I), the sword given back to the lake at the end; the incest that begets Mordred at the start and the son who kills the father at the close; the dolorous stroke and the wasted land; the Grail as the measure no earthly knight can meet. Each element of the beginning returns at the end as cause. The particular survives the archetype in Lancelot, divided and self-accusing, and in Gawain, whose dying letter forgives. Held off the top because the myth is largely inherited, and many of the knights stay types.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The inheritance is the French prose cycle: vast, interlaced, theological, with courtly love at its centre. The turn is Malory’s. He cut the interlace into tales that run more nearly straight, reduced the doctrine of the Grail quest, drew the matter towards earthly worship, fellowship and kinship, and made of a library of romances one book from Arthur’s begetting to Lancelot’s death, in an English prose with almost no precedent at this length for narrative. No direct source is known for the tale of Gareth or for the healing of Sir Urry. The stake was real, since no English prose fiction of this scale stood behind him. Held below the gate because most of the matter, and much of the order of events, is translated and compiled: a large turn made on an inherited path.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Change the form and much of the knowledge goes. The chronicle form, the life of a realm told from its founding to its fall in a line of tales, is the instrument of the argument: only a book that has shown the fellowship whole across hundreds of chapters can make its ending the loss of that whole, and the long middle is the weight the end lets fall. The prose carries the rest. Its flat, paratactic report, which gives the deed and withholds the inner life, makes the tragedy one of acts and consequences that no character can step outside to judge. Told as a lyric romance or a novel of feeling, the book would know the lovers better and the fellowship less. Held lower because the episodic middle is more container than instrument.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Evidence, not promise: five centuries of return and a lively modern scholarship that has not exhausted it. The questions stay open. Is it eight separate works, as Vinaver held, or one whole book, as Lumiansky and Brewer read it? Caxton or Winchester? What does a violent, imprisoned knight, if he is the author, mean for a book of chivalry? What are the Grail books doing in a work that turns away from them, and does Lancelot’s last penance answer his life or only end it? Is the book an elegy for chivalry or its handbook? Caxton set the reading open himself, telling the reader to “doo after the good and leve the evyl”. Held a step below the deepest works because its open questions lie in transmission and design more than in the minds of its people.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The field is English literature of the fifteenth century, and with it European Arthurian romance at its end. The force is high: the first English prose narrative of the first rank, the book that turned the French cycle into the English Arthur and showed that English prose could carry a tragedy of state at epic length. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: through Caxton’s printing it became the English matter of Britain, read in the sixteenth century, when Ascham attacked it in The Scholemaster (1570) as “open mans slaughter and bold bawdrye”, and after its revival in 1816 and 1817 the main source of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, Morris, Swinburne, Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee, Beardsley’s drawings, T. H. White, Steinbeck and Boorman’s Excalibur. Held off the top because the matter’s force was French before it was Malory’s.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Weighed on form, presence and fabric over five and a half centuries. The form is whole: Caxton’s text survives in one complete copy and one imperfect one and in a line of editions, nothing that made the work is lost, and Malory’s own text was recovered in 1934 besides. Presence ran from 1485 to 1634 in a run of printings, then stopped: no edition for 182 years, then two in 1816 and Southey’s in 1817, and unbroken presence since, in schools, universities, modernised versions and abridgements. The charges are that long neglect, and that the book is now read whole mainly by students and devotees, while most readers meet the matter in White, Tennyson or film. That places it at the top of the band for a text of centuries long neglected.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Command of English prose narrative, at its best load-bearing. The plain sentence holds a calamity in a clause; the dialogue of the last books is spare and exact, and the speeches of Lancelot, Gawain and Arthur turn the war in a few lines; Ector’s lament builds a cadence of parallel clauses that English prose would not easily match for a century. The ordering of the last two tales, from the poisoned apple and Elaine of Astolat through the trap in the queen’s chamber to the war, is a construction of the first rank. The charges are real and are charged to the work: the combat formulas repeat for hundreds of pages, the Roman war sits awkwardly in time, and the book seldom renders a mind from inside.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: Gareth’s comic tale of the kitchen knight mocked by Lynet, and Galahad’s passing at Sarras with the Grail. One law reaches both, the law of worship, in which a knight is what his deeds prove him, and the Grail books test that law by a higher one. The end joins the two measures in one life: Lancelot, best of the earthly knights and failed at the Grail, dies a hermit. But the law does not govern the whole. The Arthur who orders the May children set adrift to destroy Mordred and the Arthur of the last books are hard to make one man; the chronology of the Tristram books and the Roman war does not square with the rest; and the middle’s world of chance encounter obeys a looser rule than the end’s tight causation.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Many orders, held in one realm’s life. The state: kingship, succession, rebellion, the war with Rome, Mordred’s usurpation, and the commons who desert their king, whom Malory turns aside to reproach for their inconstancy (XXI.1). Law: judicial combat, and the queen sentenced to the fire under Arthur’s own law. Kinship: the feud of the houses of Lot and Pellinore, and the Orkney brothers whose loyalty ends the realm. Love: Lancelot and Guinevere, Tristram and Isode, Elaine of Astolat dying for Lancelot. The sacred: the Grail, its hermits, the penance of the end. The marvellous: Merlin, Nimue, the Lady of the Lake. They are integrated, since each is a cause of the fall. Labour and the common life are almost absent, and consciousness is held in act.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.5 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 9.1, then The Archetypal Deep and Pressure on Tradition at 9.0. Five and a half centuries of a text that was never lost, charged for its long neglect; a myth built so that each element of the beginning returns at the end as cause; and the first English prose narrative of the first rank, the book that made the French cycle the English Arthur. Behind them The Unconcealment, The Sublime, The Bottomless Well and The Encompassed at 8.6.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 7.6, lowest of the twelve, held there by the Tristram books, a third of the whole that feeds the end only thinly, and by an abridged Roman war the later books scarcely remember. The Inner Law at 7.8, for a first Arthur and a last who are hard to make one man and a chronology that does not square. Among the gated axes, The Swerve at 8.2: a real turn in emphasis, compression and voice, made on matter mostly translated and compiled.
The Necessity Cap clears, narrowly, at 7.6 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 8.2, The Made at 8.5, The Inner Law at 7.8, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Unconcealment at 8.6, The Archetypal Deep at 9.0, Pressure on Tradition at 9.0 and The Imperishable at 9.1 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Swerve at 8.2 falls short. The Universal Minimum is met (the lowest of the eleven axes it covers is The Inevitable at 7.6, against 7.5), and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.6. The aggregate, at 8.5, stands in any case below the summit’s 9.0.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Le Morte d’Arthur in Caxton’s text, printed at Westminster and finished on 31 July 1485, in twenty-one books divided into chapters with Caxton’s rubrics and prologue; Malory’s explicit dates the ending of the work to the ninth year of Edward IV, March 1469 to March 1470. Caxton’s divisions, rubrics and abridgement of the Roman war are scored as part of the unit. Caxton’s edition survives in one complete copy (Pierpont Morgan Library) and one imperfect (John Rylands Library). The Winchester manuscript, found by Walter Oakeshott in 1934 and edited by Eugène Vinaver as The Works of Sir Thomas Malory (1947), is context, not the unit. The work is in English, so no translation is in question. No text was in hand, nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file; late Middle English is quoted only where its words are certain, briefly, in the spelling the editions of Caxton commonly give, and cited by book and chapter where the place is certain. The Tristram books are known less closely than the rest, and the axes that turn on the middle are judged with that allowed for. The identification of the author with Sir Thomas Malory of Newbold Revel is the usual one and is not certain; nothing on this page depends on it. Matters that could not be verified are not given, among them the number of chapters in Caxton’s table, the length of the work in words, the date of the edition of Thomas East, the evidence that the Winchester manuscript was in Caxton’s shop, whether the healing of Sir Urry is Malory’s own invention, and the knights said to ride again after they are slain.