Elizabethan period

The Elizabethan period appears in the introduction as a later age that inherited and reshaped the chivalric ideals embodied in Malory’s Morte Darthur. It marks both a moral transition beyond Malory’s own time and a literary transformation: Spenser continued romance’s chivalric forms, while Shakespeare and others recast their ideals in newer forms.

A later moral horizon

The introduction describes Malory’s age as one of transition rather than completed moral reform. The suppression of the Lollards, the Wars of the Roses, and the conduct of the court under Edward IV are presented as forces that had damaged the country’s moral and social life. Yet the book also contains signs of a new moral life that would gain greater force during the Reformation. The account cautions against treating Malory as if he had already advanced far beyond the morality of Chaucer’s age toward that of the Elizabethan period.

Chivalry carried forward

The distance between Malory and the Elizabethan period is also a change in how readers could regard knight-errantry. In Malory’s day, the introduction argues, readers could still believe in its marvellous adventures and take its knights as serious embodiments of chivalric ideals. A century later, Spenser used the old forms to express allegory, while Cervantes treated belief in knight-errantry as the fantasy of a generous but deluded mind. Malory’s work could therefore serve as a cultural inheritance: its ideals were preserved even as the imaginative conventions that had once made them seem immediate changed.

Spenser and Shakespeare

Spenser represents one route by which that inheritance entered the Elizabethan period. The introduction links his projected portrait of Arthur, formed through twelve moral virtues, to the Arthurian material known from Malory. It also points to correspondences between Spenser’s Redcross Knight and Una’s adventure and Malory’s account of Beaumains and Linet, while acknowledging differences between them. The proposed connection is not presented as certainty, but as a literary probability grounded in shared ideals of knighthood and romance. Malory may have helped transmit what was most worth preserving from earlier romances to the generation that produced The Faerie Queene.

Shakespeare represents a different transformation of the same chivalric inheritance. Where Spenser worked within the old forms of romance, Shakespeare embodied their ideals in newer dramatic forms through figures such as Ferdinand, Prince Henry, and Hamlet, presented as models of the gentleman. The introduction also sets literary ideals beside their possible counterparts in contemporary life, naming the Sidneys and Raleighs. Ben Jonson’s response shows that the old tradition could be treated both humorously, as errant knighthood, and seriously, as a noble education in the qualities of a gentleman.

The inheritance and its limits

The introduction does not treat Malory’s legacy as simple approval of every part of his book. Roger Ascham objected that its pleasure rested on killing and adultery, and the discussion acknowledges that his criticism contained a partial truth while judging that he overstated the harm and overlooked the good. Against that dispute, the account emphasizes the book’s later influence: Malory could embody chivalric ideals in serious characters at a moment when those ideals remained credible, and his work could continue to produce new literary fruit in the Elizabethan period and beyond. The period thus signifies not a return to Malory’s original world, but the survival and remaking of its ideals across changing forms and moral expectations.