This thesis examines the post-medieval reception of Thomas Malory’s late fifteenth-century Arthuriad Le Morte Darthur, asking two questions: first, how did the Morte Darthur attain canonical status? and second, how does the editor shape how the text is received? I approach these questions by investigating how critical and editorial influence have been a deciding factor in how the text has been presented to contemporary readers from the early sixteenth century to the present. My analysis looks at the influence of four editors of the Morte, Wynkyn de Worde, Edward Strachey, Eugène Vinaver, and P.J.C. Field, questioning how their respective presentation and editorial approach has shaped the physical appearance of the text, which in turn influences reader expectation. A particular interest of this thesis is how editors and critics have shaped, and been shaped by, the idea of authorship and authorial identity. I contend that the figure of the author is a determining factor to the canonisation of the Morte at the beginning of the twentieth century. By examining critical engagement of the Morte during the nineteenth century, a crucial period when the text was revived in print after a near two-hundred year absence, I adopt a tripartite system of retrieval, revival and consolidation, which extends from the mid-eighteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century. This approach allows me to examine the transformation of the Morte during the nineteenth century from the peripheries of critical acceptance to attaining canonical status, which I argue is largely dependent on growing interest, both philological and biographical, in the figure of the author. In contrast to other studies, which have focused on the nineteenth-century revival of the Morte in print, I am more interested in the revival and critical acceptance of the author.

In chapter two, I take my examination of the author further by ascertaining how Malory’s two most important twentieth-century editors, Vinaver and Field, conjure the figure of the author through the presentation of their respective editions. In particular, I examine paratextual features of their respective editions and argue that from these is the idea of the author presented in wholly different circumstances, which in turn shapes how the reader perceives the nature of authorship in the Morte Darthur.

Finally, in order to examine the role the editor has played in shaping the text for successive generations, I look back to a much earlier edition of the Morte, printed by de Worde in 1529. This edition, which has received only scant critical attention, is important for a number of reasons, not least because it provided the blueprint for every successive edition printed prior to Vinaver’s, published in 1947. Before Vinaver, de Worde’s influence on the presentation of the text was arguably the most important of any editor for over three hundred years. Specifically, I examine a unique and hitherto critically unacknowledged feature of this edition, the inclusion of parentheses. I argue that parentheses, or round brackets, were used as interpretative pointers intended to signpost to the reader passages of thematic importance, especially the relationship between Lancelot and Guinevere and the idea, original to Malory, of the three best knights, Lancelot, Tristram, and Lamorak. In the conclusion to this thesis, I draw comparisons between the editions of de Worde and Vinaver, arguing that the implementation of parentheses in the 1529 edition draws attention to the thematic unity of the Morte, something Vinaver consistently refused to acknowledge as true, believing the Morte instead to be a collection of individual tales. Moreover, in my assessment of parentheses in the 1529 edition, I analyse an important but overlooked variant reading. In this edition, the passage commonly referred to Ector’s threnody, which is widely regarded to be the most famous passage in the Morte, is given not by Lancelot’s half-brother, Sir Ector de Maris, but by Sir Bors. This variant reading would thereafter feature in every edition of the Morte before 1817, and would be discussed at length by nineteenth-century critics. To date, the variant reading has gone unnoticed by critics.