Malory I: The Knight-Prisoner and the Hoole Book

The author of the English Arthuriad tells us little: that he is "Syr Thomas Maleorré, knyght," that he writes as a prisoner, and that he finished "the ix yere of the reygne of Kyng Edward the Fourth" (1469–70), praying his readers pray for his "good delyveraunce." The man behind the colophons — P. J. C. Field's biography makes the case for Sir Thomas Malory of Newbold Revel, Warwickshire — has a record including charges of ambush, rape, extortion, and cattle-raiding, accumulated across the factional chaos of the Wars of the Roses; whatever the truth of the charges (many look politically manufactured, some perhaps not), the great book of English chivalry was written by a man who knew imprisonment from inside and civil war from horseback. That biographical irony — indignus scriptor, the unworthy scribe, in the tradition's own idiom — has shadowed Malory criticism for a century, and this path declines to resolve it cheaply.

The textual story is as dramatic. For 449 years Malory existed only as William Caxton printed him in 1485 — divided by Caxton into twenty-one books, prefaced by Caxton's own shrewd apologia (printing "noble actes of chyvalrye" while washing his hands of Arthur's historicity). Then in 1934 W. F. Oakeshott opened a safe in Winchester College and found a manuscript of the whole work, independent of Caxton's print — differently divided, differently worded in places (notably the Roman war tale), with the colophons intact. Eugène Vinaver's great 1947 edition of it bore a polemical title: The Works of Sir Thomas Malory — plural — arguing the manuscript revealed not one book but eight separate romances, "the whole book" being Caxton's marketing. The counterattack (C. S. Lewis, D. S. Brewer, and most criticism since) holds that the work's cross-references, cumulative characters, and architectural ending make it one thing, loosely joined as medieval things are joined — the hoole book Malory himself names. The quarrel is really about what unity is, and you should form your view by reading. Begin this unit with the opening tales (the Merlin material, Balin, the wedding of Arthur) and Caxton's preface.