Re-evaluating the Stanzaic Morte Arthur: Content and Contexts

Abstract

Re-evaluating the Stanzaic Morte Arthur:Content and Contexts Fiona Tolhurst (bio) and K.S. Whetter (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution the final folio of le morte arthur, showing the red coloring of opening initials in, and the explicit to, the poem: london, british library, ms harley 2252, fol. 133v. ©the british library board, harley 2252, fol. 133v. [End Page 3] The Middle English Arthurian poem Le Morte Arthur survives in a single manuscript—the commonplace book London, British Library, MS Harley 2252—where it occupies folios 86 recto to 133 verso. Although copied by two otherwise unknown scribes (A and B), the poem is clearly titled on its final folio as Le Morte Arthur. Neither the folios the poem occupies nor the manuscript as a whole is much decorated, although throughout the manuscript there is some slight red coloring of some letters: in the case of Le Morte Arthur, this red staining begins during Launcelot and Gaynour's final meeting, where, from folios 130 verso to 133 verso, the otherwise brownish-black initials of the opening word or two of each line get colored (at times almost highlighted) with red (see Figure 1, page 3). This paper miscellany, sometimes referred to as 'John Colyns' Boke' because of the ownership inscriptions by a London merchant on folios 1 verso, 133 verso (the final folio of the poem), and 166 recto, dates to the early sixteenth century; the booklets containing Le Morte Arthur and Ipomydon B, however, are older.1 Le Morte Arthur is in Midlands dialect, but its author and exact provenance are unknown. In order better to distinguish this poem from the Lincoln Thornton manuscript's (Alliterative) Morte Arthure and Sir Thomas Malory's Morte Darthur, most modern scholars use Le Morte Arthur's verse form as a convenient means of identifying it, hence its commonly known title 'Stanzaic (with or without capitals or italics) Morte Arthur.' One folio from roughly the middle of the plot, between extant folios 102 and 103 and amounting to perhaps ninety-odd lines but comprising lines 1182–1317 in the lineation of all modern editions, has been lost.2 Based on the poem's diction and dialect, the manuscript's watermarks, and the scribes' handwriting, modern scholars date the poem to the late fourteenth or early fifteenth century, generally circa 1400, though earlier dates are sometimes proposed.3 The Stanzaic Morte Arthur is a translation, abbreviation, and close adaptation of the thirteenth-century French prose romance La Mort le roi Artu, the final section of the large prose narrative known as the Vulgate Cycle or Lancelot-Graal Cycle (circa 1215–30).4 Because of the Stanzaic-poet's [End Page 4] choice of source, this poem is also the first English text to give any details of—or credence to—the love affair of Lancelot and Guenevere, although in it the queen is called 'Gaynour.' Helen Cooper argues that the Stanzaic Morte was not widely read in its day, and that the story of Launcelot and Gaynour's adultery would have been considered by the few English readers who did know it to be a French fable.5 Qualifying this claim is Elizabeth Archibald, who makes a convincing case for the Lancelot-Guenevere story being reasonably well accepted by at least some English readers.6 We agree with Archibald, for much of the effect of the Stanzaic Morte depends upon the audience's familiarity with at least some aspects of the love affair as it appears in the French tradition. As she rightly insists, the 'poem would surely have been incomprehensible to an audience who did not already know the story of their love'; moreover, the poem 'must have had some success, for the one extant copy was produced commercially in booklet form before it was bound into [the] larger collection (British Library, Harley 2252).'7 In addition, the English poet makes his own powerful and original contribution to the Lancelot-Guenevere story by creating the scene of the lovers' emotional final meeting, a scene Malory borrowed and expanded upon—thereby making it well known to English audiences from perhaps the 1470s, when Malory's Arthuriad could have...