ENDLESS ARTHURS

Interview with Dr Christiania Whitehead, Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies

The Royal Shakespeare Company's summer season has recently come to an end, after featuring an epic production of Thomas Malory's Mort D'Arthur. Warwick students provided a devised performance on 'other' Arthurs to accompany the play, while Dr Christiania Whitehead, Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies, gave a post-show talk on Arthur in the 19th and 20th centuries. So why do the legends of Arthur and his knights continue to fascinate us? Dr Whitehead argues that love of Arthurian myth comes from the vast potential for adaptation.

The highlight of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s summer season was not Othello, or King Lear, or even Hamlet. In fact, it was not even by Shakespeare. Unusually, Greg Doran, Chief Associate Director of the RSC, reached back even further in time - to the legends of King Arthur and his knights of the Round Table. To be specific, he chose Thomas Malory’s version, Mort D’Arthur, from the 15^th century.

The University of Warwick has been involved in two events supporting the production. Students at the CAPITAL Centre rehearsed an outdoor performance entitled Other Arthurs, and Warwick academic Dr Christiania Whitehead, an expert on Arthurian literature, gave a post-show talk on 'Endless Knights' - why the legends of Arthur endure and are retold.

Dr Christiania Whitehead is a reader in medieval literature with the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies; she runs a module entitled Arthurian Literature and its Legacy, which is very popular with second and third year students. “I think the students are fascinated by myth,” says Dr Whitehead. “It’s been engaging writers and poets and dramatists from the Renaissance onwards.”

So why is Arthur ‘endless’? “It’s a myth that has stood the test of time extremely well,” states Dr Whitehead. “Our fascination is very much alive, and it’s interesting to ask why it satisfies us.” For Dr Whitehead, it is the malleability of Arthurian legend that enables the tales to endure. The legends are susceptible to a wide range of genres; historical fiction, romance, sci-fi, fantasy, and feminism have all been used to channel the legends since the 1960s. Authors and directors who explore Arthurian subject matter also have a vast cast from which to choose. “Arthurian legends have been appropriated because people can make them say what they want.”

Yet interest in Arthur began much earlier, continuing right through the Middle Ages and into the 16^th century: “It was very useful for the Tudor dynasty because the Tudors were Welsh and wanted to claim continuity from this Welsh heroic figure.” Henry VII even named his first-born son after the legendary king, and Elizabeth I went on to present herself using Arthurian propaganda.

However, fascination in Camelot and the knights has not been unswerving. “With the Enlightenment, the Middle Ages were seen as time of primitivism, and the Arthurian myth was scorned,” Dr Whitehead says. “It became reduced to nursery rhymes”. Interest remerged with the Romantic movement, beginning in the 1780s. Around thirty years later, Malory’s Mort D’Arthur was republished for the first time since the 1630s: “Malory became the bible of Arthurian legend for the 19^th century.” Arthur was key to conservative Victorian poets such as Tennyson who used the legends to comment on the Victorian empire, but also to much more controversial figures, such as the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, whose art often centred on the amoral, sensual female characters, such as Vivien (or Nimue) and Morgan le Fay.

The character of Arthur himself can be depicted in different ways. “During the war Arthur was used by the government as pro-British propaganda. Arthurian chivalry functioned as a kind of role model for RAF pilots,” Dr Whitehead states. “But he can also be used to support a very pacifistic model.” The most famous example of this is T.H. White’s Once and Future King, which formed the basis for Disney’s animated film The Sword in the Stone: “White was a conscientious objector and pacifist”.

In our modern society composed of multiple religions, the religious aspects of the legends are instantly recognizable. “The post-war trend has been to place Arthur in post Roman Britain, in the Dark Ages, rather than a high-medieval setting. At this time Britain was a country of contending religions: Roman Mithraism, insipient Christianity, druidism. That maps very well onto our own society”.

“One way of reading this resurgence is as very conservative,” muses Dr Whitehead. It is an assertion of nationalism, but also mystifies the notion of monarchy in an age that is very skeptical of the idea. “The divinely ordained and rightful king, who will have a second coming, is also a very Messianic idea.”

There is no other British legend that comes close to the pervasiveness of Arthur and his knights. But what will the future of the legends be? Will they continue to survive? “I think it’s likely to keep going because it’s survived a thousand years,” says Dr Whitehead, “But the only way it will continue to have vitality is if it continues to shape itself to the ways in which culture changes, and to deal with current concerns.”