Fortune and the Sinner: Chaucer, Gower, Lydgate and Malory's Morte Darthur

Abstract

Criticism has debated the causes of the fall of the Round Table in Malory's Morte Darthur. While Malory's protagonists have been blamed for some of the disasters that befall them, other factors have been implicated as well. Arthur's dream of Fortune's Wheel on the eve of his climactic battle with Mordred has been thought to show that metaphysical forces over which human beings have no control bear some blame in the king's destruction. This interpretation makes the Morte discrepant with other canonical late-medieval English texts that contemplate Fortune's role in men's suffering. As is well known, in Troilus and Criseyde and The Knight's Tale, Chaucer undermines the tendency of his pagan characters to blame what happens to them on Fortune. Both texts suggest that their protagonists determine their own fates, an idea that was impressed on Chaucer when he translated Boethius's De consolatione philosophiae. In Chaucer's Monk's Tale, Fortune is often (if not always) the agent of a fate that her victim has determined through sinfulness. In the prologue of the roughly contemporary Confessio Amantis, John Gower also claims that Fortune serves the fate that people have earned through the moral qualities of their deeds. The same idea is propounded in John Lydgate's Fall of Princes, although recent criticism has argued that certain narratives in this text contradict the claims that Lydgate makes for them. The article argues that we might, in fact, see a continuity between Fortune's role in the Morte and the role that is ascribed to her in the writings of Chaucer, Gower and Lydgate. Malory's work is usually said to have little in common with these writings, but future research might probe ways in which it does share their concerns and ideas.