Content area
Abstract
A critical discussion of Malory's works must, in light of recent Malory scholarship, come to grips with the problem of whether or not the eight books of Le Morte d'Arthur make up one or eight works. Until the discovery in 1934 by Mr. W. F. Oakeshott and subsequent publication in 1947 by Professor Eugene Vinaver of the Malory Ms. found in the Winchester College Library, the only manuscript copies of Malory's works were two versions of Caxton's 1485 edition, and these had, of course, been the source of all editions before Vinaver's. Caxton's habit of revising the manuscripts given him was well known, but until the discovery of the Winchester Ms. there had been no way of knowing what, if anything, he had done to Malory's work.
The Winchester Ms. is not Malory's own, but Vinaver suggests — and no one has contradicted him — that it is closer to Malory's than is Caxton's edition, and it gives us some reliable indications of what alterations Caxton made. Aside from some minor revisions which need not concern us here, Caxton's major changes were the suppression of a series of "explicits" or colophons which separate the work into eight sections, the abridgement of The Tale of King Arthur and the Emperor Lucius to about half its length, the division of the work into books and chapters which do not correspond to anything in the Winchester Ms., and the addition of a Preface and the title Le Morte d'Arthur which have since Caxton been assumed to belong to the whole work. The total, effect of these changes has been to make a single work out of what appears to be in the Winchester Ms. a series of eight separate romances. The Winchester Ms. unfortunately raises more questions than it solves. Until 19A7 it had been assumed by all commentators that Le Morte d'Arthur was indeed a single work, and they spent a good deal of their time justifying the inconsistencies and explaining the unities. The Winchester Ms. and Vinaver's introduction to his edition of it seemed to have exploded the notion of a unified Le Morte d'Arthur once and for all. The work of all previous critics seemed to have been based on faulty evidence. As D. S. Brewer put it, "We may now smile at those critics of the past who have been barking up one tree when they should have been barking up eight. But, unfortunately, the evidence of the Winchester Ms., suggestive as it is, is not conclusive. A gathering of eight leaves at the beginning and end had been lost --this explains why it remained undiscovered for so long — and as a result we lack certain basic evidence which would enable us to resolve the problem finally. We lack, for example, any indication of what title, if any, Malory gave the work; any table of contents which might have indicated how Malory had set up the divisions; a possible introduction which would have explained what he was doing. And so, after the critical shock wore off, critics returned to the search for essential unity in the work. Professor R, M. Lumiansky, for example, divides the problem of unity into two parts, historical unity and critical unity. Historical unity would be the problem of the composition of Le Morte d'Arthur, of whether it was in fact written as one or eight works. Critical unity would be the problem of whether the work is indeed unified, regardless of how it was written. Lumiansky himself takes the extreme position that the work has both historical and critical unity, a rather difficult case to establish; most other critics in the unity camp have been content to argue only for critical unity, trying, as Lumiansky puts it, "to have things both ways."
