Week 04, Malory, Everyman

Notes on Sir Thomas Malory and Everyman.

General Notes on Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte D’Arthur.

Central to the Arthurian romance cycles in France and England is the assertion of an impossibly high chivalric ideal even as that ideal is shown to be impossible by means of the various characters’ failures to live up to it. If we were reading the Pearl Poet’s Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, we would find an essentially upbeat estimation of the chivalric order, one markedly different from Malory’s bleak portrait of it. But even in the Gawain tale (in which a magical Green Knight bursts into Arthur’s Court on Christmas day and challenges the King’s knights to strike his head off, whereupon Gawain, having met the challenge, must go through a series of trials before he reaches a Chapel where the Knight feigns willingness to chop off his head in turn), the chivalric order is understood to be an imperfect mechanism that contains and channels fallen humanity’s tendencies towards violence, rapacity, and pride—tendencies that the King and his knights, too fond of their creature comforts and their security, must not be allowed to forget. The Christian chivalric code calls for readiness to offer sacrifice, readiness to serve Saint Mary in honor of her Son’s voluntary, redemptive self-sacrifice. As in so much medieval literature, the refrain is “life is loan,” and we must remember that we are travelers passing through an alien landscape here on earth. Ultimately, even Gawain suggests that the best ideal of the age—chivalric honor and faith-keeping—must acknowledge the limitations of those responsible for upholding it. Malory’s version of the Arthurian legend is much more bitter about the shortcomings of its main actors, even as the text pays tribute to the romance cycle’s potential as a source of early national pride. King Arthur is a doomed, glorious figure, Guinevere is his matchless queen, and Sir Lancelot the most valiant of knights.

What leavens the sometimes gloomy quality of the Arthurian tales is, of course, the Christian context of forgiveness and redemption that makes at least some of the failures bearable. This context is at work in the rather mystical and ambivalent ending of the Morte D’Arthur, where the narrator reports various legends about what really happened to Arthur, in effect turning him into a principle of English continuity and a Christ-figure whose Second Coming is always possible. We can say reasonably that the feudal code of chivalry is an attempt to acknowledge the force of strong passions and of violence while at the same time delineating a civilized place (the Court) where they can be restrained and rechanneled. The psychological operation here is similar to what we can find in Aeschylus’ The Oresteia, where the playwright displays his confidence in Athenian law by admitting that its precursor and perpetual guarantor is the other kind of law—cyclical vengeance—represented by the Furies who pursue Orestes after he avenges the death of his father Agamemnon at the hands of his mother Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus. One cannot establish peace and civility without acknowledging human propensities for passion and violence. A similar insight underlies such modern cultural analyses as Freud’s last book, Civilization and Its Discontents: that author insists that aggression is innate in human beings. We will never be able to eradicate our aggressive instincts, so we had better learn how to deal with them constructively, and not suppose that repression will do anything but set the conditions for the destructive return of what has been repressed.
The provenance or historical background of the Arthurian romance cycle points towards a native Briton protest against the onslaught of the Angles and Saxons in the 400’s-500’s CE (Christian Era). By Arthur’s time—if indeed he was an actual historical figure—the British Isles had already seen an invasion by the Romans, an ongoing event that had great cultural significance even if the Romans eventually decided that the occupation was too costly and distracting to maintain. The romance tales also, however, favor the Norman descendents of William I since Arthur is said to have fought the Saxon invaders, as did the “Frenchman” William of Normandy later on. The Arthurian legends cross over to France , too, so perhaps Geoffrey of Monmouth wasn’t the only source in medieval times, quite aside from the cycle’s Welsh origins. Here are a few interesting web articles on the subject of ancient English history: English prehistory and Briton. See also Wikipedia’s entry on King Arthur.

Page-by-Page Notes on Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte D’Arthur.

439-40. It’s clear that Agravain and Mordred hold a grudge against Guinevere; that’s why they are spying on her and Lancelot in the first place, and this spying is at least as responsible for the dissension that occurs as the liaison of the two lovers. Gawain opposes Agravain and Mordred for both personal and political reasons: Lancelot has done great service to Arthur and Guinevere, and since he’s the greatest knight in the kingdom, if he falls out with Arthur, many men will follow his party. Arthur agrees, and holds Lancelot in high esteem just as Gawain does.

442. Lancelot’s insistence on going to visit Guinevere stems from a sense that it would be cowardice and a betrayal not to obey the Queen’s bidding. In this Romano-British court, it seems that Lancelot holds most strongly to the notion of personal loyalty: as the Romans who once invaded Britain used to say, “strength and honor.”

444-45. The conspirator-knights show their ill will—they simply plan to kill Lancelot, to no avail. Gawain resists Arthur’s demand to burn Guinevere at the stake, and doesn’t want any trouble with Lancelot, at least until he hears about the death of Gaheris and Gareth. It’s evident that Arthur’s realm has for some time now been in turmoil, or at least that dissension was brewing: “many knights were glad, and many were sorry of their debate.”

446-47. Arthur regrets the loss of Lancelot even more than the unfaithfulness of Guinevere. But at least he has Gawain.

448. Arthur dreams of his fall from the top of Fortune’s Wheel and his death. Like all mortals, Arthur must die. In the interval between this section and the previous one, Lancelot crossed the Channel to rule part of France , while Arthur chased him over there and Mordred, traitor that he is, has grabbed England in Arthur’s absence, so the latter must return to win back his kingdom.

449. At the truce party between Mordred and Arthur, we see how frail are human attempts to stave off disaster. An adder stings one of the knights, who draws his sword and thereby accidentally brings on an all-out battle, at the cost of thousands of lives.

450. Both Arthur and Mordred give each other their death wounds.

451. Bedivere twice betrays Arthur by failing to cast the King’s magical sword Excalibur into the waters, so that the Lady of the Lake can take back this gift from Arthur. The Christ parallel here is probably meant to be drawn: Saint Peter denied three times that he knew Jesus after he was taken by the Romans.

452-53. Malory tells us that Arthur’s passing remains shrouded in mystery: the King disappeared, saying that Morgan le Fay, the Queen of North Wales, and the Queen of the Wastelands will take him to “Avilion.” Many, according to Malory, claim that someday King Arthur will return to wage a great crusade in the Holy Land. On Arthurian terminology, an interesting resource is Arthurian A to Z. See, for example, that site’s entry on Sovereignty.

453-55. Lancelot is told in a vision that Guinevere has died; she has never set eyes on him since their parting in France. Lancelot turns penitent, wastes away, and dies, unleashing an avalanche of Christian devotion on the part of his fellow knights. Lancelot’s brother Ector casts off his armor when at last he comes upon the man’s body. Many knights went off to their respective countries to live as holy men, and some fought the Turks in the Holy Land. Malory ends the book by asking us to pray for his soul and telling us that his work was completed in the ninth year of English King Edward IV’s reign: that would be 1470, just a year before the Battle of Tewkesbury in which the Yorkist Edward finally vanquished the deposed Lancastrian King Henry VI and the Earl of Warwick (i.e. “the Kingmaker” Richard Neville), ending one stage of the Wars of the Roses that rocked England from 1455-85. Malory’s text about England ‘s glorious and yet troubled past, therefore, is aptly written just as the chivalric order of feudal England is disintegrating and a newly consolidated monarchy is coming into being. In 1485, Henry Tudor will defeat the last Plantagenet and Yorkist King Richard III, thus initiating the Tudor line that stretches on to Henry VIII and ends with the magnificent reign of Elizabeth I from 1558-1603.

Page-by-Page Notes on Everyman.

Prologue and 1-63, 63-84. God seems sorrowful at how the people he has made in his image deteriorate year after year. He feels abandoned—as Ed Schell says, there’s some genuine emotional intensity in this play, and that’s the way actors would have to stage it: bringing psychological process to life. So in this “state of mind,” God decides it’s time, once again, to put Everyman (meaning us and the individual-seeming Character, of course) in mind of death: medieval theology stresses that one should live ever mindful of death, and emphasizes this point all the more strongly because people so obviously live it up in forgetfulness. It’s been said that because we go on from one day to the next, we become used to the pattern, grow fond of our creature comforts, in love with repetition and the pursuit of our own desires. (Even the Seven Deadly Sins comes to seem like good friends, nothing threatening or ugly.) Our life seems to us to go in comfortable circles, whereas the path of spiritual progress is figured by the Church and its art as severe, narrow, linear. So this morality play is about the intense period of spiritual reawakening when we confront, with a shock and that electric buzz that runs through the body under stress, the inevitability and nearness of death. This particular play, as the editors point out, foregoes much of the clownish humor in many morality plays in order to drive home the intensity and starkness of the confrontation, the “reckoning.”

85-183. Death and Everyman converse, and the latter thinks he “owns” his life and goods and that he can buy off Death with a thousand pounds. The meeting with Death can be figured in many ways—I recall Ingmar Bergman’s film The Seventh Seal, in which the main character plays a game of chess with Death and must go and set his affairs in order.

205-377. Fellowship shows how people form friendships more or less based on mutual utility and “the pleasure principle.” In the end, a Christian must make his reckoning on his or her own; everybody dies alone, abandoned—except, in this play’s scheme, by the history he or she has made through moral (or immoral) acts, the significance of which acts must be realized. Your acts will either speak for you or against you, but they’ll be with you right to the end. The second part of this section only reinforces the points made in the dialogue with friendship—even Kindred abandons Everyman; Kindred has his own reckoning to make, his own path to follow.

443-44. Goods admits that material things weigh down and finally deaden the soul; by living obsesses with objects, we become objects. At 448-49, Goods also alludes to the way repetition structures the life of a person addicted to material things: after you die, it says, what you own will begin deadening somebody else’s soul.

480-82. Good Deed/s is very feeble at this point; this kind of description implies that so far, Everyman has failed to reflect upon his own personal history. That’s why he needs Knowledge to enlighten him and lead him to Confession. Everyman has done a few good things now and then, but his actions must have been more or less occasional—”random acts of kindness,” to steal a phrase from that annoying bumper sticker.

554-57. Knowledge leads Everyman to Penance. To reflect on one’s life leads to full consciousness of a pattern of sin, of spiritual error. In the medieval language of spiritual process, which revolves around a reinterpretation of monetary words, such erroneousness must be “paid for.” (As in “our Savior bought us a chance for redemption.”) Knowledge divides a person from the flesh and its imperatives, as lines 604-05 suggest.

656-68. Good Deeds is healthy now, but at this point simply advances Everyman’s learning curve; he is led to believe that Discretion or Judgment, Strength, Five-Wits, and Beauty (health and youth, the soundness of the body) will be his true friends all the way to the grave.
706-48. Everyman must go to Priesthood because the priestly order holds the keys to the Seven Sacraments: baptism, confirmation, ordination, the Eucharist, marriage, extreme unction, and penance (reconciliation, penance, confession). Even during the medieval period, there were many complaints about corruption and profit-making seeping into the Church, but it’s easy to see how powerful the institution of the Catholic Church was in the lives of ordinary people: the priests held the keys to salvation.

750-920. Even Knowledge, which has accompanied Everyman faithfully, stops at the grave, and the only thing remaining to him is his own personal history of moral acts. These, along with Everyman’s faith, are enough, as the Angel and the learned Doctor let us know. This kind of medieval morality play is one way in which artists helped combat one of the most persistent tendencies in Christian history: while Christian symbolism and ritual forms are no doubt expressions of deep spiritual needs and impulses, over time they tend to become “hollowed out,” until they’re in danger of becoming mere shortcuts or shorthand for genuine spiritual aspiration and duty. To borrow a line from John Milton, what was once vital lapses into “shows, mere shows, of seeming pure.” Everyman, with its dramatic personification of one general or universal man’s spiritual journey through life, returned its late C14 audiences to the shock of full awareness in the presence of death. Most people have from time to time felt the power of stray moments when they suddenly become aware of the simple, brutal fact that their bodies, their thoughts, and everything connected with their lives is only temporary and could be cut off at any moment. Such moments are shocking, I suppose, because they momentarily demolish the security we derive from spending most of our lives projecting our physical existence and earthly hopes into indefinite futurity. Everyman, we might say, is an extended dramatization of just such a disturbing moment, but it ends on a comforting note thanks to its rootedness in Christian doctrine.