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Masaryk University Faculty of Arts Department of English and American Studies English Language and Literature Zdeňka Dvořáková Arthurian Characters and Their Representation in Film Master’s Diploma Thesis Supervisor: Mgr. Filip Krajník, Ph. D. 2018 I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography. …………………………………………….. Author’s signature I would like to thank my family and friends for their patience and encouragement. Table of Contents Introduction ....................................................................................................................... 5 1. The Films in Question ................................................................................................. 10 1.1. Knights of the Round Table (1953) ...................................................................... 10 1.2. Excalibur (1981) .................................................................................................. 14 1.3. First Knight (1995) .............................................................................................. 16 1.4. King Arthur (2004) .............................................................................................. 18 1.5. Arthur & Merlin (2015) ....................................................................................... 20 1.6. King Arthur: Legend of the Sword (2017) ........................................................... 23 1.7. King Arthur and Knights of the Round Table (2017) .......................................... 24 2. The Arthurian Men ..................................................................................................... 26 2.1. The King – Arthur, Artorius Castus, and Arthfael .............................................. 27 2.2. The Warrior and the Lover – Mordred and Sir Lancelot ..................................... 37 2.3. The Magician, the Old Wise Man - Merlin ......................................................... 41 3. The Arthurian Women ................................................................................................ 45 3.1. Guinevere ............................................................................................................. 46 3.2. Morgan Le Fay and the Mage .............................................................................. 54 Conclusion ...................................................................................................................... 58 Works Cited .................................................................................................................... 63 Resumé (English) ............................................................................................................ 66 Resumé (Czech) .............................................................................................................. 67 Introduction There are not Perhaps, Bedivere could be considered a magical negro, a term coined by Stan Lee in the theory of recent stereotypes of African Americans in films, since he is the helper of the main white protagonist.many historical, mythical, or legendary figures that would fascinate people as much as the character of King Arthur and his knights of the round table. Such a fascination can be tracked in the amount of adaptations of the Arthurian legend. Since the first mentions of these figures in stories such as the Welsh tale Culhwch and Olwen, many variations of the legend have been produced. However, there are certain roots of the legendary material in which modern authors have sought inspiration, the base for the plotline, or the plotline itself. Usually, they are to be found in Historia Regum Britanniae, written by Geoffrey of Monmouth in the twelfth century, Chrétien de Troyes’ Lancelot, le Chavalier de la Charrette (Lancelot, the Knight of the Cart, 12th century), together with Sir Thomas Malory and his Le Morte d’Arthur, which enlarged the Arthurian canon in the fifteenth century. Together, these literary works form the traditional legend known worldwide. With the popularity of the novel, writers have made use of the whole Arthurian plotline for their own works, as for example Terence Hanbury White. Some, on the other hand, took just some details and concepts, well known among their audiences, like Clive Staples Lewis. Despite these numerous literary representations, the form of art which has proven to be most popular for modern audiences is the film. One of the advantages of the popularity of this medium, in comparison with formerly favoured drama, is that it provides the same aesthetic experience for the audience throughout the whole world, since such an experience can be potentially distorted just by technical issues, not alternations on the part of the actors as in a theatre performance (Cardullo 5 185). Therefore, the focus of this thesis is the Arthurian legend in motion pictures, produced in the United States of America and the United Kingdom. There have been many writers that have engaged in working with the Arthurian legend and a similar number of screenwriters got inspired by the legendary material and the have created various versions and interpretations of the original story. As Kevin J. Harty, Associate Professor of English at La Salle University, has noted already in 1987, “the film transpositions of Arthurian materials are as varied in their interpretations of the legend of the once and future king as the written and oral traditions on which they are often based” (“Cinema Arthuriana: A Filmography” 5). It could be said that there are several types of representing the legendary material in film, including those working with traditional retellings of the legend or its parts set in the Middle Ages (Knights of the Round Table 1953, Excalibur 1981, First Knight 1995), films adapting recent literary versions of the legend (The Sword in the Stone 1963, A Connecticut Yankee 1931, Guinevere 1994), films that introduce a different version of the legend, while claiming that their version has the true roots to the historical characters (King Arthur 2004, Arthur & Merlin 2015), or films that take just specific features of the legend and transform the legend into a new story (King Arthur was a Gentleman 1942, King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table 2017). This thesis focuses mainly on the recreations of the medieval romances and films which introduce different, perhaps historically correct, versions of the legend. Nonetheless, the majority of the films that portray the legend set in the Middle Ages are based on Le Morte d’Arthur or Lancelot, le Cavallier de la Carte; therefore, it might be said that they are adaptations of literary works. A distinction between such adaptations and adaptations of later literary works had to be made for the purposes of the present thesis, leading to the decision to omit films based on recent or contemporary novels, 6 among which the most significant happens to be Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court (1889), since there are many film adaptations of this novel, for example, A Connecticut Yankee 1931, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court first film 1921, second film of the same name produced in 1949, or A Kid in King Arthur's Court 1995. Films covered for their clear link with medieval literary versions of the Arthurian legend are: Excalibur (John Boorman, 1981), First Knight (Jerry Zucker, 1995), and Knights of the Round Table (Richard Thorpe, 1953), as well as Arthur & Merlin (Marco van Belle, 2015). Considering the second group, that is, films with their own plotlines, it consists of the titles King Arthur (Antoine Fuqua, 2004), King Arthur: The Legend of the Sword (Guy Ritchie, 2017), and King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table (Jared Cohn, 2017). With the roots in far history, the legend has provided various archetypes in almost all its characters. These archetypes are rooted in the unconscious of contemporary audiences and there are certain expectations connected with them. This thesis shall explore these archetypes and ask which forms the archetypes have taken, and how they have been developed recently in comparison with the older cinematic representations. Even though it is sometimes argued that archetypal analysis is a dominance of the literary criticism (McLuhan and Watson 18), it could be argued that it is even more connected with films. There is a direct link between the concept of archetypes and films, since films give us “a view of dramatic events which was completely shaped by the inner movements of the mind. […] We do not see objective reality but a product of our own mind” (Cardullo 26-27). This idea is linked to one of the first explanations of the concept of the archetypes by Carl Gustav Jung, described in his Psyche and Symbol 7 (1968): “the archetype is an element of our psychic structure and thus a vital and necessary component in our psychic economy. It represents or personifies certain instinctive data of the dark primitive psyche; the real, the invisible roots of consciousness” (qtd. in McLuhan and Watson 22, original emphasis). In other words, “the archetype is a tendency to form such representations of a motif—representations that can vary a great deal in detail without losing their basic pattern” (Jung 67). The question arising from these definitions is whether the films working with the Arthurian legend keep the basic patterns of the archetypes that the legend invokes or how they change these patterns of behaviour. It could be suggested that the