Томас Мэлори: Автор «Смерти Артура» и загадка его личности.

15th century English writer

Sir Thomas Malory was an English writer, the author of Le Morte d'Arthur, the classic English language chronicle of the Arthurian legend, compiled and in most cases translated from French sources. The most popular version of Le Morte d'Arthur was published by the famed London printer William Caxton in 1485. Much of Malory's life history is obscure, but he identified himself as a "knight prisoner", apparently reflecting that he was either a criminal, a prisoner of war, or suffering some other type of confinement. Malory's identity has never been confirmed. Since modern scholars began researching his identity the most widely accepted candidate has been Sir Thomas Malory of Newbold Revel in Warwickshire, who was imprisoned at various times for criminal acts and possibly also for political reasons during the Wars of the Roses. Recent work by Cecelia Lampp Linton, however, presents new evidence in support of Thomas Malory of Hutton Conyers, Yorkshire.

Shortly after Kittredge's original article on Malory of Newbold Revel, a second candidate was presented in an 1897 article in Athenaeum by A. T. Martin, who proposed that the author was Thomas Malory of Papworth St Agnes on the Huntingdonshire Cambridgeshire border. Martin's argument was based on a will made at Papworth on 16 September 1469 and proved at Lambeth Palace on 27 October the same year. This identification was taken seriously for some time by editors of Malory, including Alfred W. Pollard, the noted bibliographer, who included it in his edition of Malory published in 1903. This Thomas Malory was born on 6 December 1425 at Moreton Corbet Castle, Shropshire, the eldest son of Sir William Mallory, member of Parliament for Cambridgeshire, who had married Margaret, the widow of Robert Corbet of Moreton Corbet. Thomas inherited his father's estates in 1425 and was placed in the wardship of the King, initially as a minor, but later (for reasons unknown) remaining there until within four months of his death in 1469. Richard R. Griffin later provided further support for this candidate in The Authorship Question Reconsidered. Published after Matthews's book promoting the Hutton Conyers candidate (as described below), Griffin makes several arguments; most notably that the Papworth candidate's dialect would match that of Le Morte more closely than either of the other candidates. As detailed below, a leading dialect expert identified the language of Le Morte as being most characteristic of Lincolnshire. Griffith points out that while the current candidate lived in Shropshire as a child and on the Cambridgeshire Huntingdonshire border in adulthood, both his father and grandfather were from Lincolnshire; and that neither of the other two major candidates had any known connection to Lincolnshire. Little else is known of this Malory, apart from one peculiar incident discovered by William Matthews. A collection of Chancery proceedings includes a petition brought against Malory by Richard Kyd, parson of Papworth, claiming that Malory ambushed him on a November evening and took him from Papworth to Huntingdon, and then to Bedford and on to Northampton, all the while threatening his life and demanding that he either forfeit his church to Malory or give him 100 pounds. The outcome of this case is unknown, but it seems to indicate that this Malory was something other than an ordinary country gentleman.

The third contender emerged in the mid 20th century: Thomas Malory of Hutton Conyers and Studley Royal in Yorkshire. This claim was put forward in 1966 in The Ill Framed Knight: A Skeptical Inquiry into the Identity of Sir Thomas Malory by William Matthews, a British professor who taught at UCLA (and also transcribed the diary of Samuel Pepys). This contender is also championed by Linton. Besides this analysis, she dismisses some of McIntosh's arguments as trivial, noting quibbles between what dialect is northern and what is northerly, for example. McIntosh’s dialectal analysis states that: “To put the matter simply, the original Le Morte Darthur contained various forms which are too northerly for the everyday language of Newbold Revel”. While McIntosh does not specifically support Matthews' claim of an origin in the Hutton Conyers area of Yorkshire, he ultimately concludes that the language would have been "most at home" in Lincolnshire but is characteristic of roughly anywhere north of a line from Chester to the Wash (see inset map). He suggests that Malory “simply had access to, and was deeply steeped in, far more northerly romance material" than the specific texts which he is thought to have used. While Field's conclusion is widely accepted, Linton suggests he has attributed it to the wrong Malory, arguing that Malory of Hutton Conyers, a close associate of Neville, is the likely knight exempted from that pardon. The pardon applied to a group of Lancastrians in a military campaign in the winter of 1462 in the Northern county of Northumberland near the Scottish border. Matthews shows that Thomas Malory of Hutton Conyers was closely related to the Humphrey Neville, knight listed just before him in the short list of those excluded. Matthews also points out that this Northern campaign was geographically much closer to Hutton Conyers in Yorkshire than to Newbold Revel, and concludes that the document referred to the Thomas Malory of Hutton Conyers not to Malory of Newbold Revel, who was a Yorkist and would have been something in excess of 70 years old; far too old to have taken part in this Northern military campaign. Matthews therefore promotes this document as strong evidence that Malory of Hutton Conyers was indeed a knight after all and the author of the Morte. Linton offers additional evidence to illustrate the close connection between Humphrey Neville and Thomas Malory of Hutton Conyers. Matthews's interpretation was not universally accepted, primarily because he could not find evidence that the Yorkshireman was a knight. Linton, however, has removed that principal objection, providing extensive detail about the Malorys of Yorkshire and offering evidence that Thomas of Yorkshire was a Knight Hospitaller, a knight of the church. She also examines the provenance of some of the known sources of the Morte and demonstrates that this Malory would have had ready access to these documents. In spite of Matthews's strong evidence of the Newbold Revel knight's advanced age, Field has long argued that the 1468 exclusion from pardon refers to Malory of Newbold Revel and instead shows that that candidate changed his lifelong Yorkist loyalty to become a Lancastrian. It seems equally plausible, however, to realize that the Knight Hospitaller from Hutton Conyers, who was close to Neville, was excluded from pardon, rather than to think the Newbold Revel knight changed political stripes. Outside of the contested pardon exclusion, Thomas Malory of Hutton Conyers was not recorded as having been a knight in the generally accepted secular sense, though his elder brother John and most of his recent forefathers were knights.

Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur (The Death of Arthur) is the source of the modern form of most Arthurian mythology, and is the only major work of English literature between Geoffrey Chaucer, around a century earlier, and Shakespeare, around a century later. It has been called the first English novel. Malory's main sources for his work included Arthurian French prose romances, mainly the Vulgate (Lancelot Grail) and Post Vulgate cycles, Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae (History of the Kings of Britain), and two anonymous English works called the Alliterative Morte Arthure and the Stanzaic Morte Arthur. The entire work is eight romances that span twenty one books with 507 chapters, which was said to be considerably shorter than the original French sources, despite its vast size. Malory was responsible for organizing these diverse sources and consolidating them into a cohesive whole. The work was originally titled The Whole Book of King Arthur and of His Noble Knights of the Round Table, but printer William Caxton changed it to Le Morte d'Arthur (originally Le Morte Darthur) before he printed it in 1485, as well as making several other editorial changes. According to one theory, the eight romances were originally intended to be separate, but Caxton altered them to be more unified. There has been some argument among critics that Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur was primarily intended as a political commentary of Malory's own era. Malory portrays an initially idyllic past under the strong leadership of King Arthur and his knights, but as intrigue and infighting develop, the utopic kingdom collapses, which may have been intended as a parallel and a warning against the infighting taking place during the Wars of the Roses. The seemingly contradictory changes in King Arthur's character throughout the work have been argued to support the theory that Arthur represents different eras and reigns throughout the tales. This argument has also been used to attempt to reconcile Malory's doubtful reputation as a person who continually changed sides with the unexpected idealism of Le Morte d'Arthur. It remains a matter of some debate whether this was a deliberate commentary or an imaginative fiction influenced by the political climate. All these arguments, it should be noted, depend upon acceptance of the Newbold Revel Malory as the author. The sources of the romances that make up Le Morte d'Arthur, and Malory's treatment of those sources, correspond to some degree with those of a poem called The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle; they also both end with a similarly worded prayer to be released from imprisonment. This has led some scholars in recent years to believe that Malory may have been the author of the poem.

A young Malory appears as a character at the end of T. H. White's book The Once and Future King (1958), which was based on Le Morte d'Arthur. This cameo is included in the Broadway musical Camelot (1960), and in its film adaptation (1967), where his name is given as "Tom of Warwick"; reflecting the general acceptance of Malory of Newbold Revel (in Warwickshire) as the author through most of the 20th century, despite the criminal history of that candidate in his later life. In addition to White's treatment, many other modern versions of the Arthurian legend have their roots in Malory, including John Boorman's film Excalibur (1981). The discovery of Malory's book and its acquisition by William Caxton form key elements in The Load of Unicorn (1959), a children's novel by Cynthia Harnett.