MEDIEVAL ENGLISH LITERATURE: MORTE D'ARTHUR (SIR THOMAS MALORY)

LATE MIDDLE AGES IN BRITAIN & ARTHURIANA

-The period between the death of Chaucer (1400) and the Battle at Bosworth (1485)
-The bloodiest period in English history.
-A period marked with wars, political intrigues and murders, instability and general decay of social
and moral values.
-Attempting to flee from the bitter reality & political chaos of the decades, the authors of this period
and the audience of the day looked back to the English national past (the myth of King Arthur & the
Knights of Round Table).
-The late flowering of Arthuriana stories further promoted by Henry Tudor, using it to fortify his
position as a legitimate heir to the throne.

SIR THOMAS MALLORY

-Thomas Malory belongs to the restless period of transition from Middle Ages to Renaissance
-Morte D'Arthur represents the late successful flowering of the Arthurian romance in English
literature.
-Malory not only the writer who composed the most complete record of the adventures of King Arthur
and his Knights, but also the promoter of prose to a respectable literary genre & the author who
established standard language for English prose (the East midland dialect of London).
-Not much known about the author
-Appears that Malory was a knight writing in prison, during the reign of the "9th King Edward IV"
-No one could connect the details of this Malory to Sir Thomas Malory (author of The Death of King
Arthur) with certainty.
-The author of Morte D'Arthur a man of substantial means, who had property in Warwickshire, was a
member of parliament ament for the county for a time, and after 1450 he ended up in prison, or on the
run for various charges (from cattle raiding to rape & to breaking and entering).
-A man of an adventurous spirit & no moral scruples, a criminal who could have been a product of the
unstable times he lived in.

SIR THOMAS MALLORY: MORTE D'ARTHUR

Two existing versions:
1. by William Caxton's printed edition from 1485 (the copies of it in Manchester and New York;
edited by Caxton into 21 chapters, adding chapter headings, a preface and an inscription at the
end),
 2. Winchester Manuscript (an unedited version with the original division into 8 parts/ books with
its subsections)
-Additional information: Caxton is credited with fostering general increase of literacy and education
and consequently with the influence of literature and written word in general.
-Legends about King Arthur well-spread in England and Europe by Malory's time (e.g. Chretien de
Troyes, France; Wolfram von Eschenbach, Germany; Vulgate: diverse romances about King Arthur
himself or about Arthur's knights, and the quest for the Holy Grail compiled together & treated as a
set of loosely connected stories)
-Mallory's sources: variety of both English and French verse and prose sources, yet mainly the
a. 13th century French Vulgate, combined with
b. 14th century alliterative English poem "Morte Arthur" and
c. another English poem, Morte Arthur, written in stanzas (along with minor sources).

-End result: Malory's creative handling of various sources through a narrative going beyond mere
translation; a unique work of art characterised both by a formal and appealing prose style and by
selective treatment of key themes and episodes. Title: French, given by Caxton (Death of King
Arthur)
-Content: full Arthur's story, from his conception, birth, early years, rise to power, marriage,
coronation, through hís military years and the establishment of the Round Table band, to the decline
of his court, dissolution of the fellowship and finally to Arthur's death
-Structure: Arthur dominates the beginning & the ending of the book, thus providing a framework for
the stories embedded in central parts & dealing with the adventures and trials of individual knights;
*Books 1 & 2: the story of Arthur from his birth to his victory over Rome;
*Books 3 to 5: adventures of Sir Lancelot, Gareth and Tristram;
*Book 6: the Grail story;
*Book 7: liaison between Lancelot and Guinevere;
*Book 8: downfall of the friendship and decline of Arthur's kingdom.

MALLORY: MORTE D'ARTHUR (STRUCTURE)

•Malory seems to have intended his narrative to revolve around the rise and fall of king Arthur
paralleled and entwined with the rise and fall of Lancelot thus echoing a striving of human being to an
ideal that cannot be upheld due to imperfection of human nature
•The least coherent section: Books 3 through 6 (the chronological sequence is abandoned for the
central part of the work; yet the stories are thematically connected with the dominant story as they all
serve to show knights in action (their courage, chivalry and magnificence) and the splendour of
Arthur's court at its peak)
•Book 8/Structure: unites various threads of previous stories, episodes and hints, establishing a
network of connections allowing earlier sections to emerge in full blow and meaning;
•Book 8/Content: opens with Aggravaine's and Mordred's malicious plan to disclose Lancelot and
Guinevere, motivated by personal hatred; consequent events lead to persecution of Lancelot by Arthur
& killing of Gawain; then to war between Arthur and Mordred's forces in which Arthur is (mortally)
wounded.
☆None of the knights is guiltless (except Galahad of the Grail), quite contrary to the chivalric ideals
they were supposed to follow and embody
-On one hand Malory's Morte D'Arthur a nostalgic looking back to the age of chivalry and courtesy in
the vein of elegiac odes to the old times that at
-Malory's day was dying out (the work idealising the past in the chaotic political movement). On the
other hand, the work is a lament over Malory's own time & the condition of the nation sunk in
inconceivable hostility and destruction, or maybe even an expression of a hope that society would
somehow survive in a modified form.
-Whatever the case, Malory portrays the discrepancy between the ideal and the real that foregrounds
both the necessity of the ideal and the complexity of a human being.
☆The very ending poses an ambiguity in regards to whether Arthur died and was interred in a tomb at
Glastonbury or was taken to Avalon and healed and is awaiting the time for him to return (in the
manner of the second coming of Christ)
☆This leaves a politically misused probability that Arthur will rise again and lead the nation to its
peace and unification.
☆Morte D'Arthur resonated at its own time but also at the time of Spenser in Elizabethan era, Lord
Alfred Tennyson in Victorian period & popular culture, film and other modern media and the works of
the Monty Pythons in the 20th century.
The dangers of prejudice and stereotypes through history
DEFINING OUR IDENTITIES
☆The word prejudice comes from the word pre-judge. We pre-judge when we have an opinion about
a person because of a group to which that individual belongs. A prejudice has the following
characteristics:
☆It is based on real or imagined differences between groups.
☆It attaches values to those differences in ways that benefit the dominant group at the expense of
minorities.
☆It is generalized to all members of a target group.
„A stereotype is a fixed general image or set of characteristics that a lot of people believe represent a
particular type of person or thing.“

The Great Irish Famine - facts

°Catholics and Protestants (ethnic prejudice)
°Dispossession of Irish Catholics, settling of English and Scottish Protestants
°Dependence on potato
°1845 the fungus invades potato plant
°Mild reaction of the British Government (importing Indian corn, soup kitchens)
°Exporting food from Ireland during the famine
°1 million of people died, 1.5 million emigrated

Prejudice and stereotypes

▪︎Potato as a lazy man‘s crop
▪︎God‘s curse on Catholic Ireland
▪︎A lesson to the Irish poor against overbreeding
▪︎Irish women as uninventive cooks
☆What did the landlords do?
▪︎Landlords responsible for their poor tenants (paying for the emigration or paying for their
maintenance in workhouses)
▪︎Enclosing land for grazing and oat farming and eviction

Emigration
▪︎1815-1845 1.5 million emigrated
▪︎1845-1850 another 1.5 million
„Emigration had been seen as a solution to Ireland‘s chief social problem – too many poor. Some
members of Parliament proposed transplanting the population of certain areas to Canada and
recolonising the land with Protestant tenants. It was believed that Protestants would be more
industrious and more cooperative with their landlord. Yet there was little government intervention,
even after the scandals of 1847 reached Parliamentary debate.“
~Coffin ships
~Horrible travelling conditions
~Incomplete medical examination before travel

Media and stereotypes

„Images of evicted people in the Kilrush Union were published in Illustrated London News in 1848.
They sought to raise public sympathy by showing the homeless as passive, dazed and helpless. This
may, however, have had the negative effect or reinforcing the existing stereotypes of the Irish poor as
complacent in their misery and incapable of improvement, a note sounded in the following account of
an eviction from December 1849: „Nothing could exceed the heartlessness of the levellers, if it were
not the patient submission of the sufferers. They wept, indeed, and the children screamed with agony
at seeing their houses destroyed and their parents in tears: but the latter allowed themselves
unresistingly to be deprived of what is to most people the dearest thing on earth next to their lives –
their only homes"

The Danger of a Single Story

Single story vs. multiperspectivity
„All of these stories make me who I am. But to insist on only these negative stories is to flatten my
experience and overlook the many other stories that formed me. The single story creates stereotypes,
and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make
one story become the only story.“

John Agard, „Listen Mr. Oxford Don“

-Born in British Guiana in 1949
-Moved to England in 1977
-Mixing ‘straight’ English with the Caribbean Creole of Agard’s own cultural background.
-Power of language
-Language and identity
British Film
-Two different approaches: Secrets & Lies (Mike Leigh) and Elizabeth (Shekhar Kapur)
Defining British film
-"artistically, as well as geographically and economically, Britain's cinema belongs somewhere
between America and Europe" (Houston, cited in Leach 2004)
-"British film-making is caught between Hollywood and Europe, unconfident of its own identity,
unable to commit or develop strongly in either direction" (Williams, cited in Leach 2004)

Reducing the complexities of national cinema to stereotypes

-the futility of British cinema is the result of "national characteristics - among them, the English
countryside, the subdued way of life, the stolid routine - that are anti-dramatic in a sense." He even
added that "the weather itself is anti-cinematic“ (Truffaut, cited in Leach 2004)
-Cinematic vs. dramatic
-The conflation of Britishness and Englishness is encouraged by the fact that the national language is
English, and myths of the national character are inextricably bound up with English literary traditions.
(Leach 2004)

Britain in Hollywood films

-The image of Britain in Hollywood films was primarily English, upper-class, and situated in the past,
making heavy use of traditional stereotypes.
-British filmmakers had to negotiate the class and regional differences that their Hollywood
counterparts could afford to ignore.

Realism in British cinema: Mike Leigh

-The realist tradition reemerged on the big screen in the late 1980s and early 1990s
„ politics of accents“ and class background of his characters
-Realism and „heightened comic quality“ in Leigh‘s film
-Leigh: "for me, tragicomic is how life is“
„Mike Leigh has spent his career peeling away the surface of ordinary British lives and teasing out the
extraordinary dramas within“ (The Guardian 2009)

Secrets & Lies (1996)

-Hortense (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), an optometrist
-Cynthia (Brenda Blethyn), factory worker
-Cynthia‘s daughter Roxanne (Claire Rushbrook), road sweeper
-Cynthia‘s brother Maurice (Timothy Spall), a photographer
-his wife Monica (Phyllis Logan), obsessed with home decoration

Awards
-nominated for five Oscars and won the 1996 Palme d'Or at Cannes (Brenda Blethyn's wonderful
performance as Cynthia won her Best Actress at Cannes)
"The character I played, Cynthia, is the sort of woman you might not give a second glance to," says
Brenda Blethyn, when told of the film's third place. "Watching the film you suddenly understand why
she is the way she is and hopefully you become more tolerant. At the same time, you see Cynthia
making judgments about her sister-in-law but then discover that she too has reasons for being the way
she is and they're totally sympathetic. I think Mike is a master of the craft.“
Mike Leigh: „ I really wanted to win Supporting Actress for Marianne Jean-Baptiste that night - it
would have been great for her, and great for black kids here. Frances McDormand, who won for
Fargo, and Juliette Binoche, who won for The English Patient, went up to Brenda and Marianne
respectively and told them: 'You should have won this.' Which is rather lovely.“

Dominant themes in the film

☆Searching for mother/family; trying to hold the family and your life together
☆Film about film-making
☆Clash between social classes
☆Family vs. social class and the sense of identity (1996 and the arrival of the New Left and their
tendency to reconcile Labour and Conservative ideology); class is not an insurmountable social
barrier – it is secrets and lies.
What about race? How is this issue explored in the film?

Powerful metaphors in the film

•Maurice as a photographer capturing and moulding moments of life as a metaphor for holding the
family together and managing crisis
•Cynthia‘s house full of junk as a metaphor of a persistent past and the need to sort out family
relations

HISTORY ON FILM History vs. Heritage

•History as an attempt to tell the story of the past as it was
•Heritage as an attempt to tell the story of the past in a way that suits the needs of the present

Historical and heritage film

„Higson viewed the emergence of this particular movement in heritage cinema as linked to the
transformation of British society in the 1980s. The heritage industry surfaced as part of a broader
movement towards tourism and the services industry in general, and the spectacle of the past offered
by these films provided an escape from the realities of the social turmoil facing many in Thatcherite
Britain. Thus, against a reality of ‘political and economic measures, often sharply contested, that
tended to encourage high unemployment, marked inequalities of income and standards of living, and a
more general social malaise among the dispossessed that drifted periodically into social unrest’,2 in
the heritage film cycle, ‘the past is displayed as visually spectacular pastiche, inviting a nostalgic gaze
that resists the ironies and social critiques so often suggested narratively by these films’.3 In short,
Higson argued that, their progressive narratives notwithstanding, heritage cinema offered the
‘imperialist and upper class’4 British past as a place into which audiences could travel to escape the
unpleasant realities of the present. This imagined past was being sold internationally by British
cinema as a narrowly defined image of national identity, as though as part of the heritage industry.
(Martin-Jones 2009, 136-137)

Royal Family and film industry

•Popularity of the Royal Family from the 1981 wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana
•Breakdown of royal marriage and Diane‘s death in 1997 made highly visible the pressures of public
life (and media publicity) on the members of the Royal Family

Elizabeth (1998)
•deals with the beginning of her reign and depicts "her change from a young political innocent - and a
highly sexual woman - to a machiavellian and deliberately sexless stateswoman“
•No restraint associated with British heritage and history films

Dominant themes
•Suppression of physical bodies and personal desires, i.e. public vs. private self
•Woman ruler in a man‘s world
•Forging of a nation

History on film
•Kapur: 'I had to make a choice,' ... 'whether I wanted the details of history or the emotions and
essence of history to prevail.'
•Elizabeth shown as a real person (vulnerable, indecisive)
Sacrificing historical details: „Elizabeth is a skilfully made, brilliantly acted, smartly structured and
intelligently written movie which could hardly be more beautiful to look at. Historically, it's a hot
mess. Nonetheless, a thoroughly entertaining one.“ (The Guardian 2011)
Popular culture in the second half of the 20th century
Socio-Political Context

Consumer society and youth culture (1950s-1960s)

-Labour government after the WW II and the age of austerity
-Conservative characteristics of all Western societies- rigid social codes and class distinctions; the
subordination of women to men and children to parents; racism; repression, guilt and furtiveness in
sexual attitudes and behavior, constantly overshadowed by the fear of pregnancy; a strict formalism in
language, etiquette, and dress codes, strongly marked among young people and the prescribed and
separate roles of young males and young females; dull and cliché-ridden popular culture; few people
owning amenities of modern society
-1950s Conservative government and a shift from state control to increased individual freedom
-the relaxation of economic controls and the rise of the increasingly attractive market of the
working-class consumer

Consumerism
-a condition in which relatively high levels of income throughout society make possible a high level
of consumption of goods of all types, which go beyond basic necessities and include “modern
conveniences,” “consumer goods” and “domestic luxuries,” and where, indeed, preoccupation with
such consumption becomes a characteristic feature of society.”
-Influence of American films and popular music; Affluence
-Teenagers became a recognised social group
-the generation gap was seen as displacing the class war as Britain‘s crucial social division
-Social mobility and blurring of the old class-based distinctions between High Culture and Mass
Culture.
-Rock‘n‘roll imported from the USA
-American influence in the 1950s
-Dissatisfaction with the cold war
-Marlon Brando, James Dean (Rebel Without a Cause 1955)
-Blackboard Jungle, Bill Haley and the Comets (Rock Around the Clock 1953)

Politicising young people

-1968 – a year of student protest all over Europe and the USA; right to vote for all people at the age of
18 in Britain
-It was a common statement among young people that it was not possible to trust anyone over the age
of thirty
-new movements, new ideas, new social concerns and new forms of social participation, the passion
for experimentation, for pushing matters to extremes, and for, of course, challenging established ways
of doing things, exemplified by experimental drama, art, poetry and music groups, New Left, civil
rights, anti war and environmental-protection movements
-Closely associated with all of this were outbursts of entrepreneurialism, individualism, hedonism,
doing you own thing, as seen in the founding of clubs, boutiques, pornographic magazines, etc., the
development of uninhibited fashions (short skirts, long hair, for example) which defied convention
and gloried in the natural attributes of the (youthful) human body
-The recollection of a woman who was a teenager in Liverpool during the 1960s:
„… did all that upheaval in the living standards, in attitudes and fashion have a lasting effect on the
lives of the adults who were teenagers in Liverpool in the sixties? I believe it did. It gave us tolerance
for new ideas, and brought us a step nearer to equality of rights, removing many prejudices of sexual,
racial and moral origin. It gave us the freedom to accept or reject things on their own merits and
according to our own individual preferences. I believe that the sixties were a mini-renaissance in
which the right of individual expression was encouraged, applauded, and nurtured by a generation
whose naïve belief was that all we needed was love.“
-For young people in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s popular music was the most significant cultural
form that entertained, informed and influenced them.
-weekly music papers – Melody Maker, New Musical Express, Sounds (3,000,000 people per week)
-Paul Rambali, a music journalist during the 1970s and 1980s, explained that popular music had
‘suggested a range of possibilities in life that nobody ever told me at school nor my parents’.

Social change and youth culture

☆Abortion Act (1967), Sexual Offences Act (1967), Theatres Act (1968) and Divorce Act
(1969)
☆The contraceptive pill has been called the greatest scientific invention of the 20th century by some
commentators.
☆introduced in the UK on the NHS in 1961 for married women only
☆In 1974 family planning clinics were allowed to prescribe single women with the pill - a
controversial decision at the time.
☆The new economic power of youth and the publicization of youth countercultures brought new
fashions and music to the country along with lived sexual freedoms and drug use.
1970s – a musical third way
•Theatrical performances, glitter, make-up, sexually androgynous look
•David Bowie (1947-2016)
„The original aim of Rock and Roll when it first came out was to establish an alternative media speak
voice for people who had neither the power nor advantage to infiltrate any other media or carry any
weight and cornily enough, people really needed Rock and Roll.
And what we said was that we were only using Rock and Roll to express our vehement arguments
against the conditions we find ourselves in, and we promise that we will do something to change the
world from how it was. We will use Rock and Roll as our springboard.“
•David Bowie was the first male, British queer pop star to come out in a music paper after 1967
(declared himself „bisexual“ in a Melody Maker)
constantly appropriated and acted out different dramatic personae
•His capacity for mixing brilliant changes of sound and image underpinned by a genuine intellectual
curiosity is rivalled by few in pop history.