Malory and His Audience

Summary

Malory’s Morte Darthur is a recognised classic of world literature. World classic status, however, seems not to have been on Malory’s mind: if his book is any guide, the audience he envisaged was almost parochial.

The Morte Darthur suggests that Malory’s attention was almost always on the story he was telling rather than on his audience. He ends the book, however, with an authorial explicit, in which, like an actor with a curtain-call, he for once speaks directly to the audience. What he says at that point implies that his audience is a very narrow one. It is the “jentylmen and jentylwymmen that redeth this book … from the begynnyng to the endynge” (Malory 1260.20-1). We may notice in the first place that this is an audience of people of Malory’s own social class. It is, moreover, not an audience (even potentially) of all the members of that class: only, as his words show, of those who have read the whole of his book. The audience he is thinking of, in other words, is that part of the English gentry who are enthusiasts for Arthurian romance.

What he wants of the members of that audience is that they should, presumably in return for the pleasure that his book has given them, pray for his freedomfromprison now and for the well-being of his soul when he is dead. The second part of that request shows that Malory was thinking of the future, not in the way found in the “Address to Posterity” in some periods, in which an author evokes a future characterised by its difference from the present - different perhaps in recognising the author’s presently neglected genius, perhaps in other ways. From our present point of view, the important thing about what Malory says is his assumption that the future will be like the present in the relevant respect - that in his readers’ world death will be followed by the rituals that he himself knew. He was of course wrong. Modern readers, with the advantage of hindsight, will know that within seventy years of Malory’s writing those words, England adopted an official religion that, among other things, was to proscribe those rituals and proclaim prayers for the dead to be impious and futile.