Reformation

The Reformation is framed in the book’s moral commentary as a decisive change in how Christian culture understood marriage. Set between the late medieval world associated with Malory and the later literary world of Shakespeare, it marks the moment when marriage was brought into fuller religious and ethical prominence, offering a standard against which the romances’ celibacy and forbidden love could be assessed.

Historical and Moral Context

The commentary describes Malory’s age, during the reign of Edward IV, as a time when the suppression of the Lollards, the Wars of the Roses, and the court’s licentiousness had cut deeply into the country’s moral and social life. It does not claim that Malory had already advanced far beyond Chaucer’s moral outlook toward that of the Elizabethan period. Instead, the book is treated as a work from a transitional age: it contains signs of a new moral life, but does not yet give that life a fully developed ideal of marriage.

This assessment is set against a critical dispute about the book’s ethical force. Roger Ascham objected that its pleasures rested on violence and adultery, and that its most celebrated knights were those who killed without just cause and contrived adulterous affairs. The commentary acknowledges the force of this charge, while arguing that much of the violence is directed against cruel oppressors and toward restoring kingdoms to lawful government. It also points to the narrative’s implied judgment on lawless love, expressed through its tragic ending, and to the contrasting spiritual example of Sir Galahad and Sir Percivale.

Marriage and the Reformation

The Reformation is given particular significance through the example of Martin Luther, a monk, marrying a nun. The commentary interprets this act as a public religious declaration that the vows of marriage could be more sacred and binding than conventual vows, and that marriage could lawfully take precedence over them. In this account, the Reformation did not merely mark a change in personal practice: it brought the ideal of love within marriage into full view as a guiding moral condition.

That ideal is also what the commentary finds insufficiently clear in Malory. The book presents celibacy in the lives of Sir Galahad and Sir Percivale, and it depicts the attraction and self-surrender associated with Launcelot and Elaine; yet, in the critic’s view, it does not powerfully establish marriage as the highest and purest realization of human relationships. The contrast matters because spiritual chastity and romantic devotion do not, by themselves, provide the same account of a settled, ethically recognized bond.

From Malory to Shakespeare

The commentary turns from the Reformation to Shakespeare to show how the marital ideal could be developed in literature. In Shakespeare, marriage is described as explaining, justifying, forgiving, and blessing prosperous life, while also giving dignity and peace to the closing scenes of tragedy. The discussion invokes the marriages of Ferdinand and Miranda, and Rosalind and Orlando, as examples of love whose fulfillment radiates beyond the couple themselves.

Other Shakespearean examples sharpen the comparison. Helena’s boldness is justified by marriage in a way that Elaine’s self-surrender is not; marriage also figures in the forgiveness granted to Leontes and Angelo. The argument is that marriage supplies an ethical form for love and reconciliation, not merely a happy conclusion. In this critical history, the Reformation marks the religious and cultural opening through which that fuller literary ideal could be brought into focus, while Malory’s tragic treatment of lawless love and his celibate exemplars reveal both the moral resources and the limitations of an earlier age.