II. Prose Romance Since English prose romance exceeds the chronological parameters my book - from the twelfth century to c. 1420 - this chapter be brief. Caxton and Malory are, however, of great importance to theme: Malory’s Morte Darthur is a supreme aesthetic accomplishm« and the French connection of both men represents one more, and no means the least significant, literary current from the Conti transmitted to England. The mode of transmission shows remar} affinities with the phenomenon of courtly adaptation in verse rom: and with the adaptation of the French court poem by Chaucer his school. The late medieval Burgundian vogue repeats the e: French vogues; it constitutes the final impact of French literature medieval England. Prose romance in English came two centuries after verse rom: and two centuries after the flowering of secular literary prose in Fi such as the historical writings of Villehardouin and Robert de C! and the various books of the Perlesvaus, Prose Lancelot, and Prose Tris One reason for the belatedness lies in the fact that, from 1066 1417, all official writing was in Latin or French. Fisher (1977, 1 proposes that the rise of an English prose standard coincides with follows upon the coming into existence, in the fifteenth century, the new Chancery English. Prior to Caxton we know of eight extant romances in prose, dating from the fifteenth century, the earliest a Life of Alexander, c. 14: These texts, directly or indirectly dependent on the French, flect continental trends. In the form of family chronicle or pser history, they claim greater authenticity and historicity than what to be found in verse. Prose romance clarifies incident, tightensProse Romance 499 tivation, and aims at concrete representation of reality through doc- ‘umentation and detail. Chivalry, religion, and the didactic are stressed, well as the marvellous and the sensational. The phenomenon of narrative fiction in prose, from the 14608 on, incides with the vogue of things Burgundian. Commercial, diplo- tic, and cultural relations between the Kingdom of England and ie Grand Duchy were close. Edward IV assembled a collection of ate, lavish manuscripts in French, on the Burgundian model, largely a result of his exile in Bruges as the guest of Louis de Gruthuyse; nteen items in Edward’s library prove to be identical with books ned by Gruthuyse. King Edward and the English aristocracy in gen- | were eager to assimilate all aspects of Burgundian culture: pag- ntry, luxury, and romantic, chivalrous books including prose rework- gs of epic, romance, history, and sacred biography. Caxton ‘illiam Caxton, successful cloth merchant and Governor of the Eng- Nation in Bruges, bought and sold manuscripts and then diver- ied his business by printing and selling books. He became a trans- or as one link in the process of becoming a printer and of exploiting e English market. His translation of Raoul Lefévre’s History of Troy s the first printed book in English (published in Bruges in 1473 1474). In Bruges Caxton published six items in all: four in French ad two of his own translations into English. He then settled in West- ster, published the first book in England in 1476, and pursued active commercial and scholarly existence until his death in 1497. With an interest in Burgundian-style books and a commitment to lacticism and to perpetuating the ideals of chivalry, Caxton was to- lly ‘modern’ in taste. He chose to translate and to disseminate books reciated by the high European nobility and written in fashionable ate high style. This was the appeal to his readers - the prestige Burgundian culture, as sanctioned first by the continental and then the English highest circles, who delighted in the new courtly fashion. e only caveat to the above, made by Veyrin-Forrer (1976-7) and ke (1982), is that Caxton chose to translate and print books that e read in the Low Countries and in France generally (not limited the Burgundian ducal library); in addition to the Burgundian con- ion, he also had commercial relations with France and imported, eed translated, a number of texts printed in France. We can retain notion of a Burgundian period and style, however, recognizing500 Middle English Romane that the mode was cultivated in Paris and Lyon as well as in Dijo and Bruges. The question of Caxton’s patronage has been debated. Did he wri specifically for and was he subsidized by the exalted personages who he mentions in his prologues and epilogues - Edward IV, Richard II Margaret of York, Henry VII’s mother and wife, two princes of Wales etc.? Or (Belyea 1981-2, Rutter 1987), did he allude to the exali personages in order to manipulate his real public, the urban merch: class, a relatively broad public subject to and determined by Caxtor expertise in marketing, merchandising, and distribution? In either cas: whether Caxton translated and published under patronage or on own initiative, whether he sought to please a court circle or to attra an outside market, it is clear that he did adhere to the taste of th age. Caxton was at the same time a scholar-translator and a very sue cessful businessman. However, a number of scholars, including Sand (1957), Markland (1960), Montgomery (1972-3), and Yeager (198. have also insisted that because the former Governor of the Engli Nation chose the books that constituted his business, translated many himself, and composed his own prologues and epilogues, should recognize and celebrate his achievements as a writer, edito critic, and translator. Leaving aside the recent emphasis on Caxton’s ties to France in strictly commercial sense, what is of particular concern to me in chapter is Caxton the translator and transmitter of French prose, pecially prose romance. Of the one hundred and seven books publis! by Caxton, four are in French and thirty are English translations fro the French. Of the thirty translations, twenty-two were Englished b Caxton himself; we know of two additional translations by him, published by Wynkyn de Worde after the master’s death, the othe an Ovide moralisé left in manuscript. Of the twenty-four volumes take from the French, seven can be considered books of romance in th broad Anglicist use of the term: Blanchardin and Eglantine, Charles the Gree Four Sons of Aymon, History of Troy, Jason, Paris and Vienne, and Siege Jerusalem. Just as Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate broke away from an earlie native tradition in verse, Caxton does the same in prose. Among achievements as critic and creator is to have turned to translatio - trans lation and transmission - as his way of appealing to a new En; public, and to have illustrated a new English prose style grounded a the French-Burgundian model, enriching and illustrating it much Chaucer did English verse. As a translator, Caxton was reasonab accurate and faithful to his sources. However, he probably acted fronRomance 501 and convenience, not conviction; therefore, as he worked phrase phrase and in haste, errors inevitably slipped through. In this he typical of his age. No less typically, Caxton’s English is shaped French syntax, and he does not hesitate to drink deeply from the of the French-Latin lexicon. xton’s most important romance is his version of Malory’s Morte thur, printed in 1485. The famous Winchester manuscript of the Ks of Sir Thomas Malory, now B.L. Additional 59678, was in Cax- vs shop from perhaps as early as 1480 until 1489. According to e (1982), the generally accepted view nowadays states that the Win- SSS WIAA WS THA Me uMeleahe source Yor Laxton! s Morte, id certainly not the printer's copytext; Caxton may well have had manuscripts to work from. In any event, Blake (1969) has em- sized that Caxton did not respect Malory as he did an English ssic’ such as Chaucer. He acted quickly, and the Morte was treated same as any book in need of editing prior to publication. Caxton dernized and regularized Malory’s Book 2 (Caxton 5), the most haic in style, both in word order and vocabulary. The rest of the rte he treated more casually, subjecting Malory’s text to routine, n-systematic emendation. On the one hand, he directed Malory to- Is what was to become modern English linguistic consistency and rity, while at the same time retaining numerous Middle English fea- res of the text. He also continued Malory’s work, so to speak, fol- ing his example vis-a-vis the French sources, by reducing or de- ‘ing some battle scenes, minor characters, and speeches. Above all, treated the Morte as a single Arthurian summa, which he proceeded divide into twenty-two books and five hundred and seven chapters, iphasizing, in his divisions, the moral and the didactic. Tt has been said that Caxton’s introduction of the printing press s the most important single historical event of the century. It has iso been said that his greatest contribution to English literature, by , was to have published Le Morte Darthur. Prior to Vinaver’s edition f the Winchester manuscript, for centuries everyone — the scholar d the average reader ~ read Malory through Caxton. Many still do. r this reason, because the first great writer of English prose was and is ‘Caxton’s Malory,’ we ought not to neglect Caxton’s achieve- ent as a writer, one who, along with Malory, contributed powerfully to the elaboration of English prose and the elaboration of an English standard. The translation of French texts and the elaboration of romance in prose continued well into the following century. The ideals of chivalry, nobility, and Christian conduct endured, along with a literature that502 Middle English Romance upheld the ideals. Wynkyn de Worde followed Caxton’s precedent by publishing nine new prose romances. He commissioned translations of Valentine and Orson, Olyver of Castille, and King Ponthus. Robert Copland translated Helyas’ Knight of the Swan. Above all, Lord Berners translated Arthur of Lytell Brytayne, Huon of Burdeux, and Froissart. These are the last books of medieval England. Malory In 1929 Vinaver observed that, in the popular mind (that is, among non-specialists), Sir Thomas Malory is given credit for old Arthurian romance. What was true in 1929 is only a little less true today, six decades later. Medievalists, on the contrary, know that Malory, more than any other major English writer of the Middle Ages, is a translator, and Le Morte Darthur is first and foremost a translation and reduction from what he consistently refers to as the ‘Frensshe booke.’ Vinaver himself, an Anglicist of French background, is chiefly re- sponsible for calling attention to the French sources and to their im- plications for the study of Malory. Vinaver edited the Winchester man- uscript, offering scholars for the first time a text close to the original Malory before he was regularized and modernized by Caxton. Ac- cording to Vinaver’s thesis, exposed in the Introduction, Vol. 1, and the Commentary, Vol. 3, of his edition, whereas Caxton wanted Le Morte Darthur to be a unified, coherent story of King Arthur and his knights, and consistently modified the text with this in mind, such was not Malory’s intent. Because of perceived chronological and struc- tural contradictions within the Malory corpus as well as a number of explicit which separate the various sections, Vinaver posits that Ma- lory composed eight distinct Arthurian romances. Instead of assuming that Malory granted unity to incoherent, disunified French sources, Vinaver all but proclaims the contrary - that Malory unravelled the careful interlace pattern of the French romance cycles, suppressing and condensing, telescoping and deleting, both material within a sec- tion and strands connecting one section to other sections. The result was a series of continuous but non-integrated individual nouvelles. In some ways the result was to be unfortunate because of the loss of interlace and structural unity and because, according to Vinaver, Ma- lory did not understand the spiritual message of La Queste del saint Graal; in addition he also devoted one half of the corpus to extraneous, di- gressive insertions: the Tale of Sir Gareth of Orkney and the Book of Sir Tristram de Lyones. The one mark of excellence Vinaver (1925, 1929) doesProse Romance 503 grant Malory unconditionally is stylistic; Vinaver claims that, in style, the French is inferior to the English text he calls The Works of Sir Thomas Malory (1947). For a good twenty years after the publication of Vinaver’s edition, scholars argued the merits and demerits of the Vinaver thesis. The argument was passionate because a number of the contestants may have felt that something akin to the honour of English literature was at stake. Only with the 1970s did critics proclaim that they had done with sources and the ‘unity question’ and that they would now engage in more immediate, intrinsic criticism. In a very real sense the critics are right. Yet, as with Chaucer and with verse romance, I am convinced that the issue of the French literary heritage may occasionally have been looked at in a distorted way from a distorted perspective, and therefore that light can still be shed on the Middle English Arthuriad considered alongside the French. One view, expressed by a number of critics, and quite convincing in my opinion, responds to Vinaver in general terms. According to Brewer (Essays 1963), Moorman (1965), and others, we can distinguish between ‘historical’ unity in a work of art (when the writer consciously intended it) and ‘critical’ or ‘organic’ unity (when it is unconscious or unintentional). Whatever Thomas Malory’s intentions, and as a me- dieval writer he may not have given the matter much thought, it can be maintained that Le Morte Darthur achieves an organic structure and a cohesiveness that would be the medieval equivalent of unity because it does recount a single story or sequence of stories - the rise and fall of the Arthurian world. In the process, it displays continuity of atmosphere, tone, characterization, and style. Such unity does not cease to function when and if we find discrepancies - in a medieval book that was read aloud to a listening audience - and when and if the cohesion exists first of all and to a greater extent in Malory’s sources. According to Brewer and his colleagues, questions such as originality and imitativeness are not relevant to the study of traditional stories, told in many versions by many writers, where the story exists in something like archetypal form and where the specific contributions of specific creators cannot be determined with precision. Equally convincing, in my opinion, is Benson’s (1976) argument that Malory adheres to fifteenth-century practice on the Continent. A mass of prose epics, romances, and chronicles, including some of the books translated and printed by Caxton, came into being, responding to their sources, in the same way as the Morte. A number of authors, including presumably Thomas Malory, wished to create a compendium volume504 Middle English Roman of some great historical or pseudo-historical subject matter: the history of Jason or Troy or Alexander or Charlemagne or Guillaume d’Orange or Lancelot. They all did the same thing, choosing, combining, con- densing, telescoping, and smoothening a French prose cycle from the earlier centuries. Thus, Malory was in no way unique in his century nor was he unique in relation to his sources for all the sources of the various compendia were cycles with their idea of history and their sense of totality and unity. Within England alone, and with reference to earlier texts, at least two of Malory’s presumed English models ~ Of Arthour and Merlin and the stanzaic Morte Arthur - themselves reduced and simplified sections of the Prose Lancelot as Malory was to do with the Prose Lancelot and the Prose Tristan on a larger scale. A third approach, launched by Lumiansky (Malory’s Originality 1964), Moorman (1965), and their colleagues, consists in the careful scrutiny of the entire Malory corpus compared to the sources, looking for what Malory retained, altered, omitted, or added, and why. This work leads to quite interesting and, I believe, valid conclusions concerning the linkage, foreshadowing, and retrospection between Vinaver’s eight tales. Ultimately it refutes Vinaver’s argument that each of the eight tales was written independently from the others. What concerns me is the methodology of the source study and the other conclusions drawn from it, i.e., that in all cases and for all the tales, and on almost every page, Malory improves on his sources, for he is a superb, con- scious artist, and their authors are not. Thus is ‘proved’ not only the unity of the Morte but also its author’s greatness and originality as a writer. This current of Malory scholarship did for its author what Chau- cerians had been doing for theirs for half a century. The methodology was roughly the same and so were the results; only the Malory people did it with total concentration and all at once. I find the method subject to reservation because, however apt and sensitive the readings of in- dividual passages, it can lead, in my opinion, to a distorted picture overall. The approach takes those parts of the French prose cycles used by Malory and then, isolating them from their context and dis- regarding their literary value and their standing in French and Eu- ropean literature, judges them against Malory’s intentions, what Ma- lory did to them, or, to put it more accurately, against a modern-critical, ‘great books’ reading of Malory, stressing his strengths and ignoring his failings. The method combines positivist scholarship, critical in- terpretation, and national pride - both for good and, as I believe, for ill. Although the approach has been abandoned by recent scholars,