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Spoiling the Sport, Upping the Ante, and Calling His Bluff: Why St. Winifred Appears in David Lowery's 2021 Film The Green Knight
- Edited by Karl Fugelso
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- Book:
- Studies in Medievalism XXXII
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 12 January 2024
- Print publication:
- 07 March 2023, pp 11-20
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Summary
Play is a thing by itself. The play-concept as such is of a higher order than is seriousness. For seriousness seeks to exclude play, whereas play can very well include seriousness.
– Johan HuizingaThe anonymous fourteenth-century Middle English romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight begins with a game, an element of play – though deadly serious, if not just plain deadly, play. A mysterious Green Visitor (“a monstruous apparition […] / one of the tallest creatures in the whole earth” [136–37]) calls at Arthur's court on New Year's Day and proposes an exchange of blows between himself and Arthur, or between himself and Arthur's stand-in:
All I ask in this court is one Christmas game, at this New Year holiday with young people all round.
If any in this company thinks himself brave, so hot in his blood and so wild in his head that he dare give a stroke in exchange for another. (283–87; italics added)
Such an exchange of blows, playful and not, occurs in earlier Celtic literature in tales related to Cuchulainn, and some scholars have traced Gawain’s distant origins back to the Irish hero and demi-god. Later in the poem, when Gawain arrives at the castle of an overly generous host en route to his potentially fatal second encounter with the Green Knight, his host seeks to ease his worries by offering him comfort and hospitality, and a three-fold game of exchanges that leads in turn to a three-fold temptation of Gawain by the host's wife. Versions of such temptations also have analogues elsewhere in medieval literature. The anonymous author of the poem thus proves himself just as well read as well skilled in writing a romance whose oft- and rightly praised narrative progresses both linearly and with an abundance of asides. In the end, it is revealed that the entire poem has been built around a magical game, a test, devised by Morgan Le Fay:
She put me on that errand to your noble hall to put its pride to the test, whether it's true, the great repute that the Round Table holds.
Peter Gill and the Queering of the York Realist
- Edited by Karl Fugelso
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- Book:
- Studies in Medievalism XXXI
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 20 December 2023
- Print publication:
- 06 May 2022, pp 29-36
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In a recent study of medieval drama, Tison Pugh argues that the interplay between the Old and the New Testaments in the York Mystery Cycle “unleash[es] the queer potential of a theological production.” But The York Realist, a 2001 drama by the Welsh playwright and director Peter Gill, presents a more nuanced queering of the York Cycle. Among the cycles of English mystery plays, that from York (sometimes called the Corpus Christi Play) is the longest and may be the earliest. Forty-seven of what were once fifty individual plays, or pageants, survive and recount the whole of salvation history from the Fall of the Angels to Doomsday. The plays themselves were produced and performed annually by the city’s guilds for nearly two centuries on Corpus Christi Day. The earliest record of the York plays dates from 1376; the last performance until the twentieth century was in 1569, an attempt to revive them in 1580 having failed.
No one knows who wrote any of the individual York plays, though many seem to have been revised multiple times, some perhaps by a single author whom scholars have called the “York Realist.” The plays were written in the same long alliterative lines found in other literature from the north and west of England at the time. The eight plays attributed to the York Realist contain an overabundance of realistic detail and underscore the psychological motivations of characters, especially villains.
Besides an interest in the York Realist, recent scholarship has grounded the York Plays in the culture and history of medieval England’s second city. The centrality of the guilds and their conflicts with local civic and ecclesiastical authorities informs the dialogue and individual scenes in many of the plays. Similar plays from other cycles lack such sustained emphasis. As Clifford Davidson and Sheila White have shown, there is an ongoing concern within the York Plays with bullying, as individual characters, especially Christ, suffer at the hands of those who abuse their power. That abuse is often notable for its realistic cruelty. Such abuse may further reflect tensions between the guilds and local authorities when the York Cycle was produced. Furthermore, the York Plays are unique among the surviving English Corpus Christi cycles in their concern with homosocial male bonding to create a hypermasculine backdrop against which salvation history plays out.
3 - The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and America since the Second World War: Some Cinematic Parallels
- from Part I - Epics and Ancient History
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- By Kevin J. Harty, La Salle University
- Edited by Andrew Elliot, Lincoln School of Media, University of Lincoln, UK
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- Book:
- The Return of the Epic Film
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 05 September 2014
- Print publication:
- 11 March 2014, pp 36-56
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I am going to tell you what you need to hear if we want to be the world's leaders, not the new Romans.
– Thomas L. FriedmanThe Founding Fathers clearly looked to ancient Rome as a model for their new American republic. A 2009 exhibition at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia traced the classical Roman influence that shaped the American nation from its founding through its growth and expansion to the present day, noting that the lessons which the rise and fall of Rome offered fuelled both ‘the hopes for national greatness and fears for the fate of the American republic’. Those same Founding Fathers consciously rejected Greek models in favour of Roman ones, and the lasting influence of Rome continues to be felt in both political and everyday life in the United States. Let some random examples suggest how.
For lessons in oratory, the Founding Fathers looked to Cicero's De oratore. America borrowed the idea of the decadal census from the Romans, enshrining the requirement for the census in the Constitution in Article 1, section 1, clause 3, and using that requirement as the basis for determining the system of representational apportionment in the House of Representatives. The style consistently used for the neo-classical architecture of the seats of power and of the national monuments in Washington, DC, is Roman not Grecian.
14 - Roll the Final Credits: Some Notes on Cinematic Depictions of the Death of Arthur
- from Part III - Medieval Influence and Modern Arthuriana
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- By Kevin J. Harty, La Salle University
- Edited by Karen Cherewatuk, K. S. Whetter
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- Book:
- The Arthurian Way of Death
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 12 September 2012
- Print publication:
- 19 November 2009, pp 241-248
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– For Alan and Barbara Tepa Lupack, with thanks
‘Comforte thyselff,’ seyde the kynge, ‘and do as well as thou mayste, for in me ys no truste for to truste in. For I [wyll] into the vale of Avylyon to hele me of my grevous wounde. And if thou here nevermore of me, pray for my soule!’ … Thus of Arthur I fynde no more wrytten in bokis that bene auctorysed, nothir more of the verry sertaynté of hys dethe harde I never rede, but thus was he lad away in a shyp wherein were three quenys. … [Y]et som men say in many p[art]ys of Inglonde that kynge Arthure ys nat dede, but h[ad] by the wyll of oure Lorde Jesu into another place; and men say that he shall com agayne, and he shall wynne the Holy Crosse. Yet I woll nat say that hit shall be so, but rather I wolde sey: here in thys worlde he chaunged hys lyff. And many men say that there ys wrytten upon the tumbe thys [vers]: Hic iacet Arthurus, Rex quondam Rexque futurus.
Sir Thomas Malory's account of the life and death of Arthur stands as the pivotal text between the medieval and the post-medieval receptions of the Arthuriad. Malory himself synthesizes previous Celtic, English, and French traditions of the life and legend of the once and future king, and Malory is often named as putative source for modern and post-modern, especially cinematic, retellings of that life and legend.
Appendix: The Grail on Film
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- By Kevin J. Harty, La Salle University
- Edited by Norris J. Lacy
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- Book:
- The Grail, the Quest, and the World of Arthur
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 05 February 2013
- Print publication:
- 20 November 2008, pp 185-206
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The history of cinema arthuriana begins with a search for the Holy Grail. In 1904, Thomas Edison attempted to capitalize on the popularity of a 1903 Christmas production of Wagner' Parsifal at New York' Metropolitan Opera. The resulting film under the direction of Edwin J. Porter proved an artistic failure and eventually had to be withdrawn from circulation because of issues related to copyright infringement. Nonetheless, the Porter–Edison Parsifal inaugurated a rich tradition of cinematic searches for the Holy Grail.
The following filmography lists only narrative films about the Holy Grail. Details about documentaries, films of staged opera productions and individual episodes of television series that present versions of the Grail story can be found in Olton' Arthurian Legends on Film and Television, which is listed below under general studies.
General Studies
The following studies offer more general discussions either of cinema arthuriana or of cinema medievalia that also include discussions of film versions of the legend of the Holy Grail.
Aronstein, Susan. Hollywood Knights: Arthurian Cinema and the Politics of Nostalgia. New York, 2005.
Attolini, Vito. Immagini del medioevo nel cinema. Bari, 1993.
de la Bretèque, François Amy. L'Imaginaire médiéval dans le cinéma occidental. Paris, 2004.
Dover, Carol. ‘Towards a Modern Reception of the Lancelot-Grail Cycle’. In Carol Dover, ed. A Companion to the Lancelot-Grail Cycle. Cambridge, 2003, pp. 237–53.
Harty, Kevin J. ed. King Arthur on Film, New Essays on Arthurian Cinema. Jefferson, NC, 1999.
—.The Reel Middle Ages: American, Western European, Middle Eastern and Asian Films About Medieval Europe. Jefferson, NC, 1999.
Cinema Arthuriana
- Edited by Norris J. Lacy, Pennsylvania State University
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- Book:
- A History of Arthurian Scholarship
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 18 March 2023
- Print publication:
- 16 February 2006, pp 252-260
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Cinema's love affair with the medieval begins early, at least as early as 1895, when Thomas Edison produced what is probably the first film about Joan of Arc, [The Burning of] Joan of Arc. I say at least as early and probably because early films share a common feature with manuscripts of medieval texts. Because of the vicissitudes surrounding their care, storage and preservation, both often survive more by accident than by design. Other films about Joan would follow in 1898 and 1900. Medieval-themed films begin to appear with some regularity in the first two decades of the twentieth century as filmmakers in America and Europe produced a series of costume dramas set in what they perceived as the Middle Ages. The earliest Robin Hood film we have dates from 1908; cinema arthuriana was born at least as early as 1904 when Edison's film company produced a film version of Wagner's opera Parsifal.
While we can point to at least a century of films inspired by, based upon or indebted to the Arthuriad in some form, the serious study of such films is a relatively recent phenomenon for at least two reasons. First, while several medieval-themed films have earned a special place in cinematic history, none of these films has been Arthurian. It is hard to find in the canon of cinema arthuriana, no matter how that canon may be constructed, films that have contributed as much to the history of cinema as an artistic medium as such medieval-themed films as Fritz Lang's The Nibelungenlied, Carl-Theodor Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc, Sergei Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky, Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal and The Virgin Spring or Andrei Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev. Many Arthurian scholars and devotees have their favorite cinematic retellings of the legend of the once and future king, perhaps the most often cited being Robert Bresson's Lancelot du Lac, Eric Rohmer's Perceval le Gallois and John Boorman's Excalibur. But none of these films has the same critical stature, artistic brilliance or level of cinematic innovation found in those by Lang, Dreyer, Eisenstein, Bergman or Tarkovsky just mentioned.
“Arthur? Arthur? Arthur?” - Where Exactly Is the Cinematic Arthur to Be Found?
- Edited by Alan Lupack
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- Book:
- New Directions in Arthurian Studies
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 03 May 2023
- Print publication:
- 01 July 2002, pp 135-148
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For Norris J. Lacy, with thanks.
In the closing scene of John Boorman’s Excalibur, Perceval, at Arthur’s com- mand, rides forth from the apocalyptic battlefield to cast the eponymous sword upon the waters. When he returns to that battlefield, he frantically calls out, “Arthur? Arthur? Arthur?” Anyone who has studied what I have elsewhere termed “cinema Arthuriana” may also wonder what has become of Arthur. While there have been more than one hundred films more or less indebted to the Arthurian tradition, there is a great difference between the quantity and the quality of these films. It could be said that the cinematic tradition of Arthur has produced few noteworthy films, and arguably no films that are truly important in the history of cinema.
To be sure, there have been any number of important classic films set in the Middle Ages: Fritz Lang’s epic two-part Nibelungenlied, Carl-Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc, Sergei Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky, Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal and The Virgin Spring, and Andrei Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev. Students of the Arthurian tradition clearly have their favorite films, but, even allowing for Eric Rohmer’s Perceval le gallois, Robert Bresson’s Lancelot du lac, Boorman’s Excalibur, and Hans-Ju rgen Syberberg’s Parsifal, it is hard to find Arthurian films of the caliber of those directed by Lang, Dreyer, and the others I previouslymentioned.
The most popular source for screen adaptations of the Arthuriad remains Twain’s Connecticut Yankee, although here quantity and quality again do not go hand in hand. As Elizabeth S. Sklar (97-108) and Barbara Tepa Lupack (167-9) point out in separate publications, filmmakers have repeatedly turned Twain’s satiric response to his own age into juvenilia at best or pabulum at worst. As a result, any relationship between the putative source and the film is at times little more than titular or incidental. For instance, in the latest screen version of Twain, Roger Young’s 1998 A Knight in Camelot made for television by Disney, the screenwriters transform Hank Morgan into Dr. Vivien Morgan, a fast-talking physicist from West Cornwall, Connecticut - played by Whoopi Goldberg complete with dreadlocks, no less.
Given the great literary influence, the length, the scope, and, most importantly, the rich tapestry of incidents and abundant dramatis personae of Le Morte Darthur, Sir Thomas Malory’s great work would seem a natural source for film adaptations of the Arthurian legend.