22 - Lucius's Exhortation in Winchester and The Caxton

Summary

The exhortation that Emperor Lucius gives to his troops in the Roman War section of Sir Thomas Malory's Morte Darthur is preserved in two very different versions in the Winchester Manuscript and the Caxton edition. This paper argues that both are abbreviations of Malory's original version, which may be partially reconstructed.

The Roman War section of Sir Thomas Malory's Morte Darthur survives in two substantially different versions: the Winchester manuscript and William Caxton's edition. When Eugène Vinaver's edition based on the Winchester manuscript first appeared, the academic world generally accepted his conclusion that William Caxton had edited and abridged Malory's Roman War to make Book Five of the printed edition. This theory was later challenged by William Matthews, who observed that some passages unique to Caxton's edition appear to be based on Malory's sources. He therefore concluded that the version preserved in the Caxton edition was Malory's own revision. Although detailed argument seems to have shown this theory to be untenable, the debate prompted a new look at the relationship between the two texts. This new look lead to the discovery of new evidence that the Winchester scribe who copied the Roman War also abbreviated the text in places and that unique readings in the Caxton edition may sometimes represent Malory's original.

This realization provides a way to solve many of the problems concerning the two versions of the Roman War.