Marriage as a moral ideal

Marriage as a moral ideal is the ethical measure that the critic finds insufficiently developed in Malory’s Morte Darthur. The romances can condemn wrongdoing and portray sincere penitence, but, in the critic’s account, they do not clearly set marriage above celibacy and illicit love as the fullest ideal of human relationships; Shakespeare’s comedies and tragedies provide the sharper contrast.

The Ideal Missing from Malory

The critic argues that Malory’s book does not present marriage with enough power or clarity as the highest and purest realization of human relations. The lives of Sir Galahad and Sir Percivale offer a spiritual ideal in chastity, but the critic distinguishes that ideal from the one needed to order ordinary human life: not withdrawal from marriage, but marriage as a sacred and enduring bond. Malory’s narrative, the critic suggests, leaves this standard indistinct even as it depicts love in other forms.

That absence complicates the book’s moral judgment. Its tragic conclusion passes a silent, implied judgment on lawless love, and its account of Sir Launcelot includes sincere but weak resistance to temptation, followed by penitence for suffering brought upon himself and those dear to him. Yet the critic finds this moral effort confused and incomplete: the narrative can register the damage of wrongdoing without offering marriage as a clearly articulated alternative or ideal.

Shakespeare’s Contrast

The critic turns to Shakespeare to show what Malory’s treatment lacks. In Shakespeare’s works, marriage explains and justifies happiness, grants forgiveness to the flawed, and lends dignity and abiding peace even to the closing scenes of tragedy. Its force extends beyond the married couple: marriage makes the love of Ferdinand and Miranda, and of Rosalind and Orlando, a source of radiance for those around them. The contrast is not simply between lawful and unlawful attachment; marriage supplies the moral framework through which love can be blessed and life reconciled.

The critic also invokes Helena and Elaine to mark the distinction. Marriage, in the critic’s reading, justifies Helena’s boldness in a way that the self-surrender of Elaine cannot. Likewise, it secures forgiveness for Leontes and even for Angelo, while Desdemona’s marriage to the man who wrongs her shapes the sympathy the audience is compelled to extend to him. These examples make marriage an ordering principle: it can expose weakness and suffering while still making forgiveness and reconciliation imaginable.

Marriage and Tragic Possibility

Ophelia’s imagined marriage gives the argument its most concentrated tragic example. The critic cites Gertrude’s farewell, which mourns that Ophelia’s bridal bed has become her grave. The lost marriage matters not as a happy ending added after the tragedy, but as a measure of the future that might have been. To understand Hamlet’s tragic destiny fully, the critic argues, readers must see the marriage that his mother had hoped for and that death has made impossible.

The comparison ultimately identifies a gap in Malory’s moral vision rather than denying that the book can distinguish virtue from vice. The critic allows that Malory often attempts to condemn vice and support the nobler elements of his society, but holds that the ideal of marriage remains less clearly realized than in Shakespeare. Marriage thus serves as a critical standard: it shows what a powerful literary account of love can affirm, and what Malory’s romances leave underdeveloped.