Suche Werkes

Do we need a new edition of Malory’s Morte Darthur? In addition to the three editions of Eugène Vinaver’s standard scholarly text, the third revised by Peter Field himself, Amazon has pages upon pages of further versions of more or less academic probity, modernisations, ebooks, adaptations, illustrated books, and retellings for children. At first glance, too, the work would not seem to have a particularly awkward textual history. For over four centuries it was known only in the edition printed by Caxton in 1485 and in reprints of that by his successors, notably Wynkyn de Worde. The discovery of a manuscript in Winchester College in 1934 complicated matters, but compared with the situation of the Canterbury Tales or Piers Plowman, each with over fifty manuscripts surviving, the business of establishing a text would seem straightforward. In the event, the study of Malory’s text has become a research industry in itself. Peter Field has made it his lifetime’s work, Japanese researchers have contributed large numbers of theses and articles, and American and English academics all add to the accumulating pile of material.

The problems are sometimes evident, sometimes quite subtle. The Winchester manuscript was at one point in Caxton’s printing shop, as we know from the analysis of some smudges of printers’ ink on the pages; but he did not use it as his copy for setting, as the numerous divergences between the manuscript and the print make clear. There are no ‘casting off ’ marks on the manuscript, that is, tiny marks put in to estimate the amount of text the forme for setting each page would hold, so that different typesetters could work on different pages at once. Some of these divergences are simply the consequence of this process, as the setters would add or drop a title or similarly disposable word or phrase as they got towards the end of the page if it looked as if their portion of text were going to be too long or too short: ‘Lancelot’ or ‘Sir Lancelot’, ‘Arthur’ or ‘the most noble king Arthur’. Other divergences show that Caxton had a significantly different reading in his principal copy-text, so that he can fill in places where an omission in Winchester leaves the text not quite making sense – and that he is not just inventing something to restore the meaning is shown by the fact that these extra passages stay close to the original French romances from which Malory was making his adaptation. A comparison with the French can also help to explain what has gone wrong, here or in places where neither text quite makes sense – but to speak of ‘the French’ makes light of an immensely complicated issue in itself. Malory largely worked from what he could access of the multivolume, multi-author set of Arthurian romances known collectively as the Vulgate Cycle or the Lancelot-Grail; but those exist in variant versions, and he included in his reading one substantially different text known as the Post-Vulgate Suite de Merlin. In addition, he borrowed from two English poems known by confusingly similar titles to his own, the stanzaic Morte Arthur and the alliterative Morte Arthure. He used the second of these principally for the account of Arthur’s war against the Roman emperor early in his work, but Winchester’s closeness to the alliterative poem, retaining as it does much of the original’s northerly dialect and heavy alliteration, led somebody – probably Caxton, but not impossibly Malory himself – to cut it drastically for print.

Editing may look like the scientific end of arts research, but if one works with the definition of an art as a science with more than five variables, Malory’s text is usually on the arts side – or to put it another way, however much an editor tries to be scientific in his or her methods, there comes a point where subjective choice is going to intervene. The choices are not just between the known or...