Aubrey Beardsley’s Morte D’Arthur
The nineteenth century saw an incredible uprise in stories and images that recounted the medieval tales of King Arthur and his knights of the round table, but Audrey Beardsley's illustrations of Thomas Malory's Morte D’Arthur were unlike anything the Victorian public had seen before. Beardsley set out to “flabbergast the Bourgeois” in a time when the moralistic tendencies of Tennyson's Arthurian poem Idylls of the King had become a source of inspiration and commission for many artists. Filling twenty illustrations and hundreds of headers and vignettes with effeminate knights, lecherous satyrs and assertive ladies, he held up a mirror that not only exposed the subversive elements of Malory's tale but also brought to light the fictitious nature of Victorian medievalism.
Figure 1. Aubrey Beardsley, “Merlin taketh the child Arthur into his keeping”, Pen and carbon black ink, brush and wash, (28.3 x 22.2 cm) in Morte D’Arthur (London: J.M. Dent, 1893-94), page 5.
One such example is the plate titled ‘Merlin taketh the child Arthur into his keeping’. This is the first full-page illustration adorning the text and it strongly resembles the output of William Moriss’ Kelmscott press. But instead of opting to begin his visual story with Arthur taking the sword out of the stone, Beardsley chooses to start with the moment two ladies and two knight of Uther's court deliver the child Arthur to Merlin, who would “bare it forth unto Sir Ector, and made a holy man to christen him, and named him Arthur.” The sorcerer Merlin plays a vital role in Arthur's life and Beardsley reflects that in his choice of scene. But instead of sporting a wise-man's beard and gnarly staff, Merlin is shown barefaced and wearing feminine clothes that echoes those of the ladies handing him Arthur. Beardsley thus favours Merlin's role as Arthur's caregiver above his role as all-knowing wizard. Considering the fact that Malory omits Merlin's history before Arthur's conception and makes him use his sorcery ever in support of Arthur's cause, Beardsley wasn’t the only one to approach the ancient sorcerer this way.
The child Arthur Beardsley places right underneath a tree that would extend past the border of the illustration into the margins of the page. The pattern of leaves is repeated through the borders, making it seem like the reader is peeking through the wild boundaries of the woods to watch the scene in the castle garden. The margins are, however, not only populated by foliage. Dragons are also winding their way up the page. These creatures refer back to the book's frontispiece, depicting Arthur alongside a draconian beast that makes a noise like “the questing of thirty couple hounds” and only quietes when it quenches it’s thirst. In Malory’s text this questing beast is linked to the incestuous conception of Mordred, Arthur's unwise marriage to Guinevere, and Gawain's oath of vengeance on the first day of the Round table: all examples of the desire and violence that underlie Malory's supposedly moral tale of heroic chivalry.
Figure 2. Aubrey Beardsley, “How king Arthur saw the questing beast and thereof had great marvel” Pen and carbon black ink, brush and wash, (28.3 x 22.2 cm)Morte D’Arthur (London: J.M. Dent, 1893-94), frontispiece.
In his first full-page illustration Aubrey Beardsley draws a line between the child Arthur and the beast that symbolizes the force of his own undoing. Like Merlin himself twenty-one chapters later, Beardsley prophesizes from the start how the King’s choices will be led by his own ungovernable desire. While the artist started this huge undertaking with an admiration of Morte D’Arthur ‘s storytelling, soon after he began looking through the cracks in the gilded surface of Camelot. Beardsley highlights the textual ironies and narrative gaps that haunt Malory's Arthurian legend and provides in this first illustration already a critical reinvention of it's revival.
Sources:
Calloway, Stephen. Aubrey Beardsley. London: V&A Publications, 1998.
Kooistra, Lorraine Janzen. “Beardsley’s Reading of Malory’s ‘ Morte Darthur’: Images of a Decadent World.” Mosaic (Winnipeg) 23.1 (1990): 55–72.
Latham, David, and William E. Fredeman. Haunted Texts : Studies in Pre-Raphaelitism. University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division, 2003.
Lupack, Alan, and Barbara Tepa Lupack. “Moral Chivalry and the Arthurian Revival.” Arthuriana (Dallas, Tex.) 26.4 (2016).
Lupack, Barbara Tepa, and Alan Lupack. Illustrating Camelot. Cambridge: Brewer, 2008.
Zatlin, Linda Gertner. “Aubrey Beardsley’s ‘Japanese’ Grotesques.” Victorian Literature and Culture 25, no. 1 (1997): 87–108.
[Larissa van Vianen]