MALORY'S OWN MARGINALIA

Abstract

Northrop Frye has memorably characterized the modern view of literature as 'a secular scripture'.1 One of the consequences of the possession of a scripture is that the priests and Levites who are its custodians will take an interest in even the most unpromising parts of the sacred object, conscious that the most uninviting passage may preserve some important truth that might be made manifest by their special skills. The most unpromising part of Malory's Morte Darthur might well be thought to be the marginalia in the Winchester Manuscript, which have had very little attention since the manuscript was discovered in 1934. Most of them were recorded in the apparatus criticus of Eugene Vinaver's remarkable editions,2 but without comment. A generation after Vinaver's first edition, Neil Ker described them briefly in the introduction to his facsimile edition of the Winchester manuscript,3 and Hilton Kelliher added some supplementary notes in an essay on the early history of the manuscript.4 More recently, a subtle and observant essay on the manucript by Helen Cooper included a section on the marginalia, pointing out that they are the earliest evidence we have for reader response to the Morte Darthur, pre-dating even Caxton's famous preface.5 There may, however, still be more to be said. The marginalia fall into two principal groups, those that were written by the scribes who copied the main text, and those that were not. The non-scribal marginalia need not detain us long. There is a good deal that is enigmatic about them, but those that can be said with certainty to postdate the copying process are evidence for the provenance of the manuscript rather than its text.6 A few of the non-scribal marginalia, however, may not postdate the copying process, if that is understood in its fullest sense. These include three words written in the same clearly non-scribal hand, two as clarifications ('strene' on fol. 22v and 'strange' on 61v), and one as a correction ('shame' on fol. 215v ). The hand that wrote them is strikingly neat, professional, and characterful, and contemporary with the text.7 It could be that of a supervisor who chose occasionally to act as a corrector. We must consider another marginalium in this category later. It is notable how few corrections there are among the marginalia written by the original scribes. In the 473 surviving folios, there are only two such corrections. Both are single words marked for insertion in the text ('thus' on fol. 139 and 'prayde' on fol. 279) , both by Scribe B. Neil Ker faintly praised Scribe B as being, unlike his partner Scribe A, `not entirely oblivious to what he had written'.8 My experience of editing this manuscript, however, suggests that neither scribe was oblivious to what he had written, but that both wanted above all to produce a handsome page and had no qualms about sacrificing meaning to achieve that.9 Allowing themselves only two words of marginal correction in 473 folios is a measure of the importance they gave to clean margins. It is surprising, therefore, to find them copying out a large number of seemingly non-essential marginalia. There are eighty of these, forty by each scribe, scattered from fol. 11t to fol. 477r. They all refer to events related in the accompanying text, but the aspects of the narrative to which they refer are very various, as can be seen from the appendix below (pp. 23 5-7). Their forms of expression are various too. They come in four distinct styles. The first style is found only in the first marginalium: a single word in Latin. The rest are all in English and longer, but they mix three styles, some beginning `Here (is)', some beginning 'How', and some consisting of a bald phrase with no verb. The order in which the different styles recur seems to be random, and certainly does not correlate with the identity of the scribe who wrote them. The physical presentation of these marginalia is very varied too. As Helen Cooper pointed out, Scribe A liked his marginalia set out in lines of decreasing length, and he enclosed about half of them in shield-like shapes. …