Re-Viewing Le Morte Darthur edited by K. S. Whetter and Raluca L. Radulescu (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS119 it delivered. As the sun sets on the wotld of the Round Table at the end of Camelot, so the sun sets on yet another comer ofrhe Empire at the end ofthe film. Futther Wah-Wah ends on a note ofhope—there has been a once, and there will be a future. In the film's final scene, sporting his father's pith hat, Ralph stands atop a hill overlooking the breath-taking Swazi landscape where Wah-Wah was entirely shot. Like Tom ofWarwick, Ralph has a message to deliver about the importance of the past and about independence for rhe future—joining Ralph is his own Guinevere, his girl friend Monica. While Wah-Wah's screenplay is populated with stock types, the actors are uniformly excellent, and Grant is able to coax sympathy out of us for everyone in the film except Lauren—and Princess Margaret, who snubs her majesty's subjects by leaving the musical at the interval. The location shots are again breath taking—and the costumes ate just fab! KEVIN J. HARTY La Salle University ?. s. WHETTER and raluca l. radulescu, eds., Re-Viewing Le Morte Darthur. Arthurian Studies Ix. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2005. Pp. x, 165. 158^1-84384-035-9.£4o/$75. The International Arrhurian Congress held at Bangor, Wales in the summer of2002 was dominated by papets on Malory's Morte Darthur. The omnipresence ofMalory was not surprising given that the congress was hosted at the home univetsity of P.J.C. Field, the distinguished Malorian and currenr president of the International Arthurian Society. The essays in Re-Viewing Le Morte Darthur were first presented ar Bangor, and appropriately, the volume is edited by one ofField's students, K. S. Whetter, and by Raluca L. Radulescu who replaced Field upon his recent retirement. Re-Viewingopens with a succinct introduction by Field, which excitedly reminds us of Oakeshott's discovety of the Winchestet Manuscript and the birth ofVinaver's magisterial and controversial edition. Field claims that the ten essays in the volume stem from Vinaverean controversy, bur each contributor's foornotes testify to Field's subsequent shaping ofMaloty studies. In terms ofquestions reviewed, the volume is tripartite, trearing textual issues, the context ofpolitics and geography, and themes and gentes. The section on textual issues opens with Takako Kato's essay on 'Cotrecred Mistakes in the Winchester Manuscript,' in which she describes both scribes A and B correcring an error made by predecessors and thus 'playing editor' Through her painsraking argument, Kato cotrects Vinaver's claim rhar the scribes were only able to introduce error by showing them in the process ofcorrection, proves the necessity of an archetype between Winchestet and Malory's holograph, and gestures towatd the kind of editorial principles we will all need to observe when the digital Malory becomes available. In his 'Textual Harassment,' D. Thomas Hanks, Jr. works in an opposite manner comparing only two sites ofdifference, the opening page and the May passage, while arguing 'that all Middle English texts misrepresent theit authots' 120ARTHURIANA works' (p. 28). To be sure, Hanks overstates the case, but he successfully highlights the cavaliet attitude with which Malory s first two editots, Caxton and de Wotde, introduced changes to the 'lexical' and 'bibliographic' text (the latet meaning 'page lay-out'). Many Malorians, myselfamong them, would welcome from Hanks a more nuanced and detailed, pethaps book-length, study on editorial change. The final essay in this section, Thomas H. Croft's on 'Historia and arguementum in Caxton's Preface' locates the editot's prologue within fifteenth-century views of history (the historia of the title being 'what happened') and moral exemplum (the argumentum being' what might have'), while examining the editor's cagy rhetorical effects. Crofts corrects a too mercantile view ofCaxton but occludes his sharp insights by a Detridean indefiniteness and unnecessarily negative phrasing. Essays treating the second topic, politics and space, are the strongest in the volume. Meg Roland elegantly explains changes that Caxton brings to Winchester's version of the Roman war in terms of East—West relations after the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1482. Robert L. Kelly analyzes political geography in rhe 'Tale of King...