Sir Thomas Malory - Le Morte d'Arthur (j.angielski).pdf

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Le Morte d'Arthur
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Le
Morte D`Arthur
Sir Thomas Malory's Book of
King Arthur and of his Noble
Knights of the Round Table
IN TWO VOLS.--VOL. I
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
THE Morte Darthur was finished, as the epilogue tells us, in the
ninth year of Edward IV., i.e. between March , and the same
date in . 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 , 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
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 ,
and that a William Mallerye was mentioned in the same year as
taking part in a Lancastrian rising. In September , 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 , , and as it was proved the th 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.
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. of Book xviii., which describes the
arrival of the body of the Fair Maiden of Astolat at Arthur's
court, or for chap. 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.
(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 and , by William Copland in , by Thomas East
about , and by Thomas Stansby in , each printer
apparently taking the text of his immediate predecessor and
reproducing it with modifications. Stansby's edition served for
reprints in and (the latter edited by Thomas Wright);
but in 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 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 a boon was conferred on scholars by the publication of

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