Does any1 know about 'La Morte D'arthur' by Thomas Malory and William Caxton? Pleeaase help!!?

Question

It's for a Uni assignment and I'm not getting anywhere. I need to write about Caxton's choice of vocab in comparison to Malory's. Although there are disputes about this, I'm assuming for this assignment that Malory's was the original version - called the Winchester text - and that Caxton based his version on Malory's one. The actual focus is on why Caxton makes certain changes to Malory's version. Why does C change M's vocab (e.g. malory writes 'sate sorrowing', caxton writes 'made suche lamentations',etc)? What effect does this have on the general text? Why is C's version shorter?, etc. Any help would be much appreciated!

Answer 1

I don't know but I would guess that a lot depended on where they came from. Without printing accents were a lot more varied and Caxton transcribed everything into his own East English (or whatever) patois/dialect. He wasn't just the printer he was the archetypal editor. As for shortness I guess there are always practical and economic pressures. My guess is that this is where you have to look for an answer. Can't help any more sorry.

Answer 2

Here is information about this at the link below. Scroll down at that website to read the rest. It appears that prison, printing press and convenience had something to do with shortening the changing the original.

Who was Sir Thomas Malory?
Discussion over exactly who was the author of Le Morte d'Arthur continues amongst scholars and academics. What is clear is that the author was a member of the English gentry and that the work was largely written whilst he was encarcerated. An excellent and convincing bibliographical note was written by the 20th Century literary historian A.W. Pollard [ from which ]:

"The Morte Darthur was finished, as the epilogue tells us, in the ninth year of Edward IV., i.e. between March 4, 1469 and the same date in 1470. It is thus, fitly enough, the last important English book written before the introduction of printing into this country, and since no manuscript of it has come down to us it is also the first English classic for our knowledge of which we are entirely dependent on a printed text. Caxton's story of how the book was brought to him and he was induced to print it may be read ... in his own preface. From this we learn also that he was not only the printer of the book, but to some extent its editor also, dividing Malory's work into twenty-one books, splitting up the books into chapters, by no means skilfully, and supplying the 'Rubrish' or chapter-headings. It may be added that Caxton's preface contains, moreover, a brief criticism which, on the points on which it touches, is still the soundest and most sympathetic that has been written.

"Caxton finished his edition the last day of July 1485, some fifteen or sixteen years after Malory wrote his epilogue. It is clear that the author was then dead, or the printer would not have acted as a clumsy editor to the book, and recent discoveries (if bibliography may, for the moment, enlarge its bounds to mention such matters) have revealed with tolerable certainty when Malory died and who he was. In letters to The Athenaeum in July 1896 Mr. T. Williams pointed out that the name of a Sir Thomas Malorie occurred among those of a number of other Lancastrians excluded from a general pardon granted by Edward IV. in 1468, and that a William Mallerye was mentioned in the same year as taking part in a Lancastrian rising. In September 1897, again, in another letter to the same paper, Mr. A. T. Martin reported the finding of the will of a Thomas Malory of Papworth, a hundred partly in Cambridgeshire, partly in Hunts. This will was made on September 16, 1469, and as it was proved the 27th of the next month the testator must have been in immediate expectation of death. It contains the most careful provision for the education and starting in life of a family of three daughters and seven sons, of whom the youngest seems to have been still an infant. We cannot say with certainty that this Thomas Malory, whose last thoughts were so busy for his children, was our author, or that the Lancastrian knight discovered by Mr. Williams was identical with either or both, but such evidence as the Morte Darthur offers favours such a belief. There is not only the epilogue with its petition, "pray for me while I am alive that God send me good deliverance and when I am dead pray you all for my soul," but this very request is foreshadowed at the end of chap. 37 of Book ix. in the touching passage, surely inspired by personal experience, as to the sickness "that is the greatest pain a prisoner may have"; and the reflections on English fickleness in the first chapter of Book xxi., though the Wars of the Roses might have inspired them in any one, come most naturally from an author who was a Lancastrian knight.

"If the Morte Darthur was really written in prison and by a prisoner distressed by ill-health as well as by lack of liberty, surely no task was ever better devised to while away weary hours. Leaving abundant scope for originality in selection, modification, and arrangement, as a compilation and translation it had in it that mechanical element which adds the touch of restfulness to literary work. No original, it is said, has yet been found for Book vii., and it is possible that none will ever be forthcoming for chap. 20 of Book xviii., which describes the arrival of the body of the Fair Maiden of Astolat at Arthur's court, or for chap. 25 of the same book, with its discourse on true love; but the great bulk of the work has been traced chapter by chapter to the 'Merlin' of Robert de Borron and his successors, ... the English metrical romance La Morte Arthur of the Thornton manuscript, ... the French romances of Tristan ... and of Launcelot, ... and lastly to the English prose Morte Arthur of Harley ... As to Malory's choice of his authorities critics have not failed to point out that now and again he gives a worse version where a better has come down to us... But of the skill, approaching to original genius, with which he used the books from which he worked there is little dispute.