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for the Holy Grail. But unlike the superhuman Galahad, Bors is physically wearied of
his task. Whereas Tennyson’s Galahad is filled with the ‘strength o f ten’, because he
is entirely spiritually sustained,129 Bors is wearied; his horse ‘spavined and ribbed’;
his sword ‘rotten with rust’ and his rider longs to ‘win some quiet rest, and a little
ease.’130 And while Galahad ends with a declaration of spiritual indefatigability (‘All
armed I ride, whate’er betide, / Until I find the holy Grail’), Masefield’s Sir Bors can
only pray for death:
And the bright white birds o f God will carry my soul to Christ,
And the sight o f the rose, the Rose, will pay for all the years of Hell.131
Bors here appears as a weary soldier still following, if seemingly futilely, a righteous
dream, which proved to be symbolic of how the Victorian version of the Arthurian
story continued into a twentieth century that would prove to be radically unsuitable
for such noble, Christian quests. It was a tension which Masefield - who always
described himself as a late-Victorian - would explore throughout his work and
particularly in his Arthurian writing.*
Yet while A/y/A-influenced Arthurian poetry would continue to be written
until the Great War, the dominant form of Arthurian literary production in the years
following Tennyson’s death was theatrical - though it was as Tennysonian as the
poetry of Austin and Davidson. As mentioned above, Tennyson had planned several
dramatic renditions o f the Matter o f Britain before settling on his epic structure, and
the dialogic form of the Idylls, with their lengthy speeches in iambic pentameter, were
easily translated onto the stage. These plays were almost exclusively concerned with
the downfall o f the Arthurian kingdom, and borrowed heavily from the later Idylls,
* Masefield published Arthurian poems, novels and plays throughout his career. Particularly important
are his collection of ballads, Midsummer Night and Other Poems (1927) and Badon Parchments
(1947), one of the earliest historical-novel treatments of the Arthurian story. They are discussed in
chapters five and six.
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with ‘Guinevere’ and ‘The Passing of Arthur’ featuring most often, though ‘Merlin
and Vivian’ and ‘Lancelot and Elaine’ (as well as the non-Idylls ‘The Lady of
1 7 0
Shalott’) were prominent also.
While many plays borrowed lines, themes and
characterisation from the Idylls others explicitly stated their derivation from
Tennyson’s poems. When, for instance, the Court Theatre staged Vera Leslie’s
Guinevere in 1903, its subtitle made clear that it was ‘adapted from Tennyson’s
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poem’.
The vogue for directly rendering individual Idylls for the stage continued
into the twenties, with Sivori Levey, Ellden Mary Hill, Grace Calvert Holland and
Winifred F. Allen all publishing plays written for both London and local parish
audiences, often with a specifically Christian bias.134
The trend for staged versions of the Arthurian story began with the
transatlantic commercial success of J. Comyns Carr’s King Arthur (1895).
Contemporary audiences, according to one reviewer, were so ‘saturated with and
steeped in the Tennysonian version of the legend’ that they fully anticipated Carr’s
drama to be a staged production of the Idylls}35 They were not, on the whole,
disappointed. King Arthur is a well-constructed drama which rushes through many of
the key scenes of the legend as they appear in the Idylls. Apart from the prologue,
which is roughly analogous to ‘The Coming of Arthur’, the drama takes place in the
final days of the Arthurian reign. The early preliminaries show the developing affair
of Lancelot and Guinevere and the preparations for the quest of the Grail, which here
serves only to weaken Arthur’s strength of knights, while Mordred and Morgan, his
mother, plot his downfall. After this the play moves through a series of pageant-like
episodes from the later Idylls. The death of Elaine is narrated in sub-Tennysonian
blank verse, quite obviously derived from ‘Lancelot and Elaine’ and ‘The Lady of
Shalott’. There follows a similarly bowdlerised version of Arthur’s final speech to his
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queen as it appears in ‘Guinevere’, though Carr’s speech ends with denunciation of
her rather than forgiveness:
Go, tell the world thy heart hath slain a heart
That once had once been a King’s. Yet that’s not all,
Thou too hast been a Queen whose soul shone clear,
A star for all men’s worship, and a lamp
Set high in Heaven, whereby all frailer hearts
Should steer their cause towards God; then, ’tis not I
Whose life lies broken here, for at thy fall
A shattered kingdom bleeds.136
Throughout this speech, as in Tennyson, Guinevere lies prostrate at Arthur’s feet. And
at the very end o f the play, after Arthur has been mortally wounded, as the stage
darkens and Arthur is taken from the stage, Merlin, rather than Bedivere, speaks the
final lines:
The King that was, the King that yet shall be [...]
Look where the dawn
Sweeps through a wider heaven, and on its wings
By those three Queens of night his barge is bome
To that sweet Isle of Avalon whose sleep
Can heal all earthly wounds.137
To make the Tennysonian associations even more pronounced, the sets had been
designed by Edward Burne-Jones, Tennyson’s most ardent and talented artistic
follower.*
Patriarchal, statist and with dramatic sympathy firmly located.with Arthur as
both the head of government and the focus of this family tragedy, J. Comyns Carr’s
King Arthur was the most successful and most influential of the Arthurian dramas. It
replicated and simplified the Idylls, harnessing its dialogue and symbols to the great
* Bume-Jones, incidentally, did not like the play and designed the sets only as a favour for Henry
Irving, who staged Carr’s King Arthur. Bume-Jones remembered the play for ‘jingo bits about the sea
and England which Carr should be ashamed o f (Jerome V. Reel, Jnr, ‘Sing a Song o f Arthur’, in King
Arthur in Popular Culture, 124).
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