'Inowghe is as good as a feste': Which Malorys for Teaching and Reading?

Abstract

Ipresent my comments as a coda to Helen Cooper's very useful (and, one might note, entirely too self-deprecating) survey of 'Malorys' currently available for teaching and reading. I have used all the Malory editions and translations that she cites in teaching my undergraduate and graduate classes, from Eugene Vinaver's Works of Sir Thomas Malory in all its various appearances and editions (including the regrettably out-of-print third edition revised by P.J.C. Field) to the most recent (2009) Sir Thomas Malory's Morte Darthur translated by Dorsey Armstrong. I have also used Helen Cooper's own Oxford World's Classics Le Morte Darthur: The Winchester Manuscript (1998) and frequently use Stephen Shepherd's 2004 Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte Darthur: A Norton Critical Edition. I've rarely used the various cheap Caxtons that flood the market except for comparative analysis of variants, though I did once, quite profitably but at greater expense than most students can manage, use James W. Spisak's 1983 Caxton's Malory: A New Edition of Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte Darthur based on the Pierpont Morgan Copy of William Caxton's edition of 1485. Until Shepherd's edition became available, I almost always defaulted to Vinaver's one-volume Malory: Works. One happy summer, irate undergraduates in my Oxford study-abroad program marched themselves collectively over to the OUP offices to complain of the shoddy binding and were each given replacement copies. In undergraduate academic courses in which only a brief period-a few hours, if that- are allotted to Malory, some assign one of the exellent abridged editions like Brewer's or Field's. Most, I suspect, still select bits from either Janet Cowen's 1969 Penguin or from one of he many cheap Caxton paperbacks edition, or they use Vinaver's 1975 King Arthur and His Knights: Selected Tales. I was a peer reviewer for Oxford for this book in the early 1970s, I argued (as Cooper does above) that this totally commercial venture constituted an actual 'act of vandalism' on Malory. It is a weird, out-of-joint book, seemingly Vinaver's vengeance on the presumably functionally illiterate author with whom he spent most of his life and career. Cooper's un-translated edition has many strengths (including pointers to 'Lancelot's account of his knighting,' to which she teasingly refers) and I especially like her unobtrusive but striking editorial and contextual guidance, but her edition has the deficit shared by all abridgements-to wit, it leaves stuff out. Thus the editor/translator/publisher decides what really matters and what is subordinate or expendable. In Cooper's case, I suspect that editors with profit in mind were concerned with limiting the number of pages rather than with 'commune profit,' but the edition suffers from truncation. When I teach, I want all of Malory, even missing bits from the manuscript that have to be adduced from Caxton. Until recently, many Chaucerians didn't cope with the Parson's Tale except to note its prologue and length, and until recently, many Malorians (like Cooper) suppressed bits of the early sections and some or all of the Tale of Sir Tristram. This past term, I used Dorsey Armstrong's fresh-off-the-press modern English translation, Sir Thomas Malory's Morte Darthur: A New Modern English Translation based on the Winchester Manuscript (Parlor Press Renaissance and Medieval Studies Series). Unlike Cooper, I don't think that Armstrong has presented her translation as a novel: here we still have Malory's romance(s). …