King Richard II fled to Cheshire seeking rebel support for his beleaguered monarchy; not far from Cheshire, Owain Glyn Dwr organized what would become a very nearly successful home rule rebellion against Henry IV, appealing to the French crown for assistance; the Wars of the Roses fractured aristocratic communities in both London and the North; Henry Tudor, with ties to Wales and to France, killed a crowned Richard III at Bosworth field under the banner of Arthur, king of the Britons. The messianic figure of the Sovereign Returned (or the Welsh Mab Darogan), an image variously and repeatedly identified with Arthur Pendragon, appears in the politics of Glyn Dŵr’s Cymric home-rule movement, and in the mythology of the apparently “British” Tudor who claims to unite Wales and England in his rule from a London court. This same period, moreover, witnessed a significant increase in the manuscript production of tales of Arthurian romance in England: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; Arthur; The Red Book of Hergest (containing, among other things, the Welsh tales “Owein,” “Peredur,” “The Dream of Rhonabwy”); The Marriage of Sir Gawaine; the Stanzaic Morte Arthur; the Alliterative Morte Arthure; Awntyrs off Arthure; Avowynge of King Arthur; Henry Lovelich’s History of the Holy Grail; Henry Lovelich’s Merlin; Weddyng of Sir Gawen and Dame Ragnall; the prose Merlin; Malory’s Morte Darthur; Grene Knight.5 This book examines the intersection between this remarkably prolific cultural production and the political disputes over the meaning of Arthur’s legendary kingship.
From the late fourteenth to the fifteenth century English sovereigns, the last Plantagenets, lose many of their territorial holdings in France. Adversarial relations with France (seen in the Hundred Years War) and aristocratic fragmentation in England (as in the Wars of the Roses) will urge the elaboration of a specifically insular set of affairs. Middle English Arthurian traditions become a crucial means to explore England’s historic indebtedness to, and intimacies with, insular cultures; yet those same traditions will also, in part, be the means whereby English sovereignty claims Welsh (and eventually Scots) loyalty away from the French. In is in this context that I read Arthurian tales as “sovereign fantasy”: these stories allow nobles to repudiate their dynastic ties to their French cousins and (in the wake of the Hundred Years War) to claim an insular heritage. This “imagined community” across time enables the imagination of a parallel community across the space of a realm and united under its “sempiternal” kingship.6
A number of scholars have argued the case for linkages between late medieval theories of political sovereignty like that of Kantorowicz and Malory’s Morte Darthur. Scholars are likewise examining the political import of individual Arthurian tales.7 Those studies have made important interventions into an earlier opposition of the romance genre to the politics of history itself. The current study, while certainly interested in political readings of particular texts, foregrounds aspects of Arthurian romance thought to compromise the genre’s political nature: its link to legend, its delectation of loss, its interest in death, its fascination with prophecy, its incorporation of strangeness and magic. These are the aspects of legend usually thought to be opposite the realpolitik of statecraft; yet these same attributes impel the material power of Arthurian fantasy. This is, I argue, because they offer a way of understanding the fascination with loss, trauma, fragmentations, and disaffections—the drives and desires that circulate within group identities, yet which rhetorics of union or enduring sovereign genealogies seek to disavow. I will argue that late-medieval British Arthurian legend has broad and far-reaching cultural ambitions. Those ambitions can be read in the tropes that signal the failures of and resistances to a monolithic community: in the losses that accrue to Arthur, and in the various Arthurs imagined in the contradictory multiplicities of romance and legend.
Middle English Arthurian traditions organize an extended meditation on British ruin, a poignant and abjected sovereignty that fascinates through its representations of pleasure and pain, longing and loss. This “sovereign fantasy” obtains in both senses of the phrase: sovereign here means both the King and the power (pretended or legitimate) to hold or to contest rule; fantasy signifies both (as often in the colloquial sense) utopian hopes for imagining a different world and (as often in psychoanalytic use) the jouissance (enjoyment) that surfaces through desire. Psychoanalytic treatments of fantasy emphasize the limitations fantasy places on pleasure, structuring an enjoyment that resides “beyond the pleasure principle.” Arthurian romances, especially in their Middle English emphasis upon destruction and death, fascinate through stories of hopeless impossibility.8 I am thus interested in a psychoanalytic notion of fantasy for its explication of enjoyment as, paradoxically, “pleasure in unpleasure”; yet I also deploy the term fantasy to signal more utopian possibilities.
Louise Fradenburg has shown us that the fascinations of romance can offer subversive pleasures, since both “the transformation and preservation of relations of power depend on the fantastic pleasure of imagining the world otherwise” (“Fulfild of Faerye” 220). My interest in claiming Arthur as “sovereign fantasy” registers these fantastic pleasures too: the imaginative expansiveness and interpretive play of Arthur’s rule over archaic Britain signals hope for utopian community, for insular wholeness as a promise of satisfaction. I explore when and how the Arthurian promise of satisfaction “preserves” the power of English rule, yet I also note when and how it encodes the desire to transform or to resist such rule. In its psychoanalytic meaning, moreover, sovereign fantasies gains a purchase upon the material consequences of imaginative texts. It can help us read the longstanding controversies over the “truths,” historical or otherwise, of Arthur’s story. Shared fascinations with Arthur, furthermore, channel antagonisms across insular space, between (for example) the Welsh and Anglo-Norman audiences of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae, or among England’s regions.9 Early modern Arthurian editors (as in William Caxton’s edition of Malory’s Morte Darthur) or authors (as in Edmund Spenser’s epic The Faerie Queene) view Arthur as the genealogy necessary for imagining a British national future; those imaginings depend upon the losses and the antagonisms crucial to this earlier romance tradition. Finally, my use of the term fantasy is meant to signal an interest in how these romances work both subjectively and culturally, that is, both for exploring the desires of particular subjects and for encoding broad contests concerning a British “imagined community.”
I have, up to now, avoided using the term nation, while also repeatedly deploying the phrase that cannot help at the present moment but evoke it: “imagined community.” My phrase, like my thinking, is indebted to Benedict Anderson’s monumentally influential Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. The present study marks a set of medieval identifications that suggest the need to qualify Anderson’s (but not only his) insistence on the “nation’s” modernity, on what Anderson calls its “astonishing youth.” I do not, however, simply appropriate Anderson’s analysis for a late medieval case. It would be difficult to do so since Anderson, as Kathleen Davis has shown in detail, conceptualizes nation precisely through an absolute difference from things medieval. Anderson defines national affiliations as possible only after the loss of three “medieval” perceptions: sensibilities having to do with religion (a consciousness of international Christendom), state power (a confidence in dynastic sovereignty), and time (typological notions of history). The importance of these “medieval” sensibilities to his analysis means that Anderson must ignore the particularity and variability of medieval cultures in favor of the familiar caricature of historical difference which “medieval” so often signifies in scholarship of later periods. This has made Imagined Communities an account of nation that medievalists love to hate; but Anderson’s work has also been useful for medievalists, as Michelle Warren argues, precisely because “imagined community” offers a substantial conceptual flexibility. Deploying this flexibility, medievalists have, sometimes without referencing Anderson explicitly, offered lots of examples that belie Anderson’s historicism.10
There is, pace Anderson, a tradition within medieval studies suggesting the significance of national formulations to medieval politics. More than fifty years ago, V. H. Galbraith linked medieval concepts of nationality with the content of a people’s language and customs. Joseph
