The Arthurian tradition: essays in convergence (review)

122 Reviews all theatre is engaged, forms part of Berger's 'imaginary audition' of Richard II, which seems odd when one considers Shakespeare's own obsession with the interaction of history and the theatre. Penny Gay Department of English University of Sydney Braswell, M. F. and J. Bugge, eds, The Arthurian tradition: essays in convergence, Tuscaloosa and London, University of Alabama Press, 1988; cloth; pp. xi, 258; 4 illustrations; R. R. P. US$23.95. 'Convergence' is the sort of word that an experienced reader of essay collections wiU regard with some suspicion, especially on an Arthurian topic. If it is meant seriously as a coherent direction of the essays, it might well imply some new form of hocus pocus, yet more mantic activism in a subject area already reeling with grailery, myth-taking and other fanciful quasischolarship . But if 'convergence' is just an editorial sleight-of-hand to focus a set of incoherent papers, then we are in for nothing worse than any other anthology possibly worth keeping for one or two pieces. In this case, it is more the latter than the former; although, Geoffrey Ashe does start with one of his usual pan-historical pot-pourris of faith without the work of footnotes, giving Glastonbury as usual an umbilical role as the lost chord in Arthurian harmony. But after this initiatory unearthly music, the essays deharmonise as usual, fulfilling in this case the worst extremes of variegation. What the editors actually mean by convergence is that the extreme disparity in period and mode of the essays is itself a form of the convergent because they are, simply, all about Arthur. This is worthy of Merlin on a bad day. That pattern of divergence has its own kind of innovative form, the editors tricksily say, in that former Arthurian essay-collections all concentrate on one period or on one author. Well, we can't have that, can we, not if we want a truly mystic convergence? So this gathering of uncertainty emerges. It is by a set of scholars who are, it seems, mostly Southern and mostly youngish, apart from Ashe and the charming as usual Charles Moorman, who finishes off with an amiable and not unthoughtful piece, suggesting that constant reworking is the key to the vitality of the legend. In between come the young confederate Turks of Arthurian scholarship. A crusade against them seems unnecessary as they are mosdy not very effective. In fact the main value of this coUection is that it exemplifies some of the things that can go wrong with publications by young scholars and, fortunately, a few of the things that can goright,even if by accident. Reviews 123 One of the truly dead giveaways of lifeless criticism is the habit of cottoning on to a methodological thread, a wheeze or an ism and using it perforce in your own chosen backyard. So w e have here a piece on Malory's Quest which deploys the now rather dated reader-response routine, and argues that Malory is training his readers for the two important tales to come. Stephen C. B. Atkinson has nothing to say other than that, which is evidendy wrong unless the author of the Queste Del Saint Graal (Malory's fairly closely followed source) was proleptically training readers in the early thirteenth century for what Malory was going to set out two centuries later as his Grail-following Tale of Lancelot and Guinevere. Equally poindess is a more earth-bound piece of essay fabrication in which Maureen Fries argues that Geoffrey of Monmouth employed a conscious Boethian scheme in his Historia Regum Britanniae. A n author with two characters whose Latin names translate as Puppy Face and Undershirt is capable of much, but I doubt if Geoffrey really needed to steal the idea of Fortune from Boethius and then, to cover his tracks, carefully delete all traces of philosophy, allegory and a dreamer. Geoffrey receives a second barrel from Mary L. H. Thompson. She goes back further in the classics, having read Caesar on war in Gaul, and thinks Geoffrey did the same. Noting that he has the Britons defeat the Romans, she opines that Geoffrey may have encountered...