From Malory to Hollywood the Devolution of Le Morte D’Arthur

Joerg O. Fichte From Malory to Hollywood The Devolution of Le Morte d’Arthur

The term “devolution” employed here denotes a certain approach to the adaptation of Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur (compl. c. 1469/70; first print 1485). It encompasses a wide range of meanings: It may be an abridgement, a reduction or simplification of Malory’s text, or an adaptation to other genres. Such a procedure involves either streamlining the narrative, effecting thematic concentration, simplifying the complexity of characterization, the removal of ambiguity, or any combination of these approaches. It could denote the more or less faithful retelling of the original to make Malory’s late medieval text more palatable to modern readers, as do the modernizations by John Stein- beck and Peter Ackroyd. It could also mean the reworking and paraphrasing or rephrasing of the original to make it suitable for a certain age group (chil- dren and young adults), a process that involves modernizing, censoring, and abridgement (Lynch 2). And it could imply partial adherence to the story of Le Morte d’Arthur while augmenting it with other medieval narratives, as do Alfred Tennyson (The Idylls of the King) and Thomas Berger (Arthur Rex), or adding substantial parts to it, as does T. H. White (The Once and Future King).

The process of devolution, as defined above, will be illustrated by three twen- tieth-century adaptations of Malory: T. H. White’s novel The Once and Future King (1958), Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe’s musical Camelot (1960), and the film Camelot (1967) directed by Joshua Logan. These works not only represent different genres but are responses to one another. White’s tetralogy is an imaginative reworking of Le Morte d’Arthur, the musical Camelot is de- rived from White’s novel, and the film Camelot is based on the musical. Aside from treating major episodes from Arthur’s “life,” all three works have a utopian disposition and are thus reductions because the narrative is controlled by one overriding idea. This approach makes them markedly different from Le Morte d’Arthur. Whether the utopian place envisioned is located nowhere (ουτοπος) or in a good place (ευτοπος), it is the locus of an ideal society shaped by the idea of the perfectibility of man. We find nothing of this kind in Malory,

© Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh, 2019 | doi:10.30965/9783657701728_014 Joerg O. Fichte 174 whereas White and Lerner, as well as the film Camelot, employ the Arthurian legend—especially the legendary Camelot—to create a vision of such a utopian place, a world without war, and its demise. In White’s novel the utopian vision is juxtaposed to a tragic one: Arthur’s fall is brought about by “three tragic themes: 1) The Cornwell Feud … 2) The Nemesis of Incest … and 3) The Guenever-Lancelot romance” (White, Letters to a Friend 98). The Cornwell feud between Utherpendragon and the Duke of Cornwell is extended to include the Orkneys, when Morgause, Igraine’s daughter and Arthur’s half-sister, marries King Lot. The first two themes are linked when Arthur commits accidental incest with his half-sister Morgause, from which Mordred issues. For White, the incest has all the makings of an Aristotelian tragedy: It is not only a story of doomed relationships, but also one in which a good and noble man falls from a high position because of a fatal error committed by him unknowingly, whereas for Malory it is just a sinful deed. As Merlin tells the king: “but ye have done a thynge late that God ys displesed with you, for ye have lyene by youre syster and on hir ye have gotyn a childe that shall destroy you and all the knyghtes of youre realme” (Vinaver 1: 44). Although God will punish the king’s body for his sinful deeds, Arthur will die “a worshipfull dethe” (44). Malory’s assessment is based on the idea that death in battle is honorable, an idea alien to White, who is opposed to warfare. He even omits the final battle. By attributing Arthur’s fall in part to the violation of family bonds—the son inherits the father’s guilt and compounds it—White unravels the complex net of contributing factors leading to Arthur’s fall. White’s Arthuriad is conceived as a polyphonic set of tales. It starts as a chil- dren’s story that turns into a Bildungsroman, changes into a romance, and ends as a tragedy (Lupack 111). An appendix is added: The Book of Merlyn, published posthumously in 1978. It is a philosophical treatise in which Arthur is taken back to the very beginning of his education. As a pentalogy, White’s adaptation of Malory has a circular structure; Arthur returns once more to the animal world that he explored in the first book, The Sword in the Stone. By changing him into a perch, a merlin, an ant, and a goose, Merlyn exposes him to various types of animal behavior, which span the dictated communal life of the ants and the free solitary life of the geese. As the badger—Arthur’s final interlocu- tor, who is working on his doctorate of why man became the master of the animals—recommends: “Study birds and fish and animals: then finish off with Man” (White, The Once and Future King 193). Arthur follows his advice. From these transformations he learns that the primary reasons for warfare are possessiveness, greed, and the rule of Might over Right. Although he gains valuable insights from his exposure to animal behavior, the laws governing these various communities are not really applicable to human society. The