Fighting King Arthur's Battles

...The 1947 edition was thus the fullest, most scholarly, and most authentic reconstruction of Malory's work ever published, and it was certainly closer to Malory's original text than the Caxton version...

...Vinaver's new edition tends to aggravate this situation rather than diminish it...

...An entire squadron of American scholars, led by R. M. Lumian-sky (formerly of Tulane and now at the University of Pennsylvania), rose to the challenge...

...The impact of the 1947 edition was enhanced by dramatic developments in Arthurian scholarship on both sides of the Atlantic...

...Obviously the 1947 edition was a fruitful and stimulating enterprise, and all students of Malory acknowledge a debt to Vinaver's meticulous reconstruction of the text...

...He also supplied emendations derived from parallel passages found in the French and Middle English Arthurian romances that served as Malory's sources...

...Out went Caxton's rubrics and chapter divisions, to be replaced by eight tales of varying lengths with titles supplied from the Winchester manuscript...

...During the same period English critics, among them the late C. S. Lewis, published a number of studies that re-examined Le Morte d Arthur in the light of the Vinaver edition (their work is assembled in the volume Essays on Malory, Oxford, 1963...

...For a fascinating excursion into the world of Malory biography there is William Matthews' The Ill-Framed Knight (Berkeley, 1966), which reopens the question of who the knight-prisoner really was...

...Even the controversies it provoked have been extremely productive: We know more today about Le Morte a"Arthur, its texture and fabric, its history and background, than ever before...

...The critical response to this edition was probably more emphatic than Vinaver had anticipated...

...But the overall impression, for me, is marred by the Introduction and Commentary...

...The English critics were less disputatious than the Tulane group...

...In format and appearance, then, Vinaver's 1947 edition was quite a different horse from the old familiar animal...

...In 1934, textual and biographical research took a giant step forward with the discovery (in the Winchester College Library) of a previously unnoticed manuscript version of the Morte d'Arthur that was obviously independent of, and more authentic than, Caxton's work...

...Indeed, Vinaver claimed that Caxton...

...1964) the Tulane group argued that Vinaver, by his extreme editorial liberties, if not in his text, had misrepresented Le Morte d'Arthur far more than Caxton...

...These and many other similar comments add up to a tone of personal and one-sided insistence which seems intrusive and inappropriate in a volume whose ostensible purpose is to display the glories of Sir Thomas Malory...

...These included the publication in the 1890s of George Lyman Kittredge's biographical discoveries concerning Sir Thomas Malory, about whom almost nothing had been known beyond a few hints provided by the author himself in the version of the Morte a"Arthur published by William Caxton in 1485...

...out went the title, Le Morte d'Arthur, to be replaced by the more accurate designation, according to Vinaver, The Works of Sir Thomas Malory...

...Malory has never been so decked out...

...I would also recommend, as a satisfactory critical supplement, Edmund Reiss' sensible and well-balanced book, Sir Thomas Malory (Twayne, 1966...

...Vinaver included a lengthy Introduction and a line-by-line Commentary on the text...

...Vinaver has published a revised edition of his Malory (Oxford, 3 volumes, $42.50) which not only takes account of the controversy but seems likely to prolong it...

...rather than disagreeing with Vinaver, they subjected the idea of fictional "unity" to redefinitions from several new perspectives...

...Follow-up studies in the 1920s brought to light further details of the Warwickshire knight's spectacular career...

...But there is also the danger that the text itself may have suffered a curious sort of neglect in the midst of all the contention...

...Furthermore, they claimed that Vinaver's edition presented an exaggerated view of Malory's dependence upon French sources...

...Eugene Vinaver brought out his edition of Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte a"Arthur, stimulating a spirited controversy and an interest in Malory studies unparalleled in previous centuries...

...One can hardly resist the impulse to paraphrase from Whitman: There is that lot of it and all so luscious...

...that, in fact, the book was a continuous and unified work of fiction and not a series of "eight separate romances...

...Vinaver adopted the Winchester manuscript as his basic text, offering variant readings from the two extant copies published by Caxton...

...6.00...

...by a process of skillful deletion and rearrangement, had misrepresented Malory's true intention...

...Le Morte d'Arthur, the division into 21 chapters, as well as the rubrics or chapter-headings were all Caxton's work, not Malory's, and it was high time to restore the author's original conception...

...Now a Professor of English and French at the University of Wisconsin...

...He went on to say that the title...

...Oxford also publishes an inexpensive one-volume edition of Vinaver's excellent Malory text, with a glossary, a very brief introduction, and no commentary whatever (937 pp...

...In addition to all this...

...Meanwhile, for the general reader the baby has flown the coop...

...The text is handsomely produced with new emendations, new paragraphing and punctuation, and enlarged sections of Introduction and Commentary...

...This, Vinaver said, had not been to create a single, unified book about King Arthur and his knights, but rather to present the story in a series of eight separate romances, each dealing with an in-di\idual episode in the Round Table cycle...

...Without question this is the definitive edition...

...This is a good bet for anyone who would like to read or re-read Le Morte a"Arthur and at the same time avoid Ex-cedrin headaches...

...No doubt the specialists and scholars will find in the present Vinaver edition myriad points for discussion, though one can only pray that they light upon some new issues...

...Like angry parents fighting to the death over their children's custody, while the youngsters are ignored, the critics in this controversy appear to have been devoting too much of their energies to justifying their own positions and proving their opponents wrong...

...There can be no objection to a review of recent Malory scholarship, but Vinaver sets forth the issues in a partisan manner: "This 'single book' that the critics are convinced Malory wrote," he says, "how fortunate it is for us that he never wrote it...

...In these Vinaver rehashes the details of the controversy with the Tulane group, and his voice has grown dogmatic and defensive...

...In essay after essay (now collected in the volume Malory's Originality, Johns Hopkins...