Davidic Kingship and Thomas Malory: Reinterpreting Lancelot as a Kingly Figure in Le Morte Darthur

Despite a continuous stream of scholarship, Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur remains a hotly debated text, with the discovery of the Winchester Manuscript and Eugène Vinaver’s edition of Malory Works inspiring a series of disagreements in the Malorian critical field that persist today. These debates, ranging from textual unity to the text’s secular or spiritual underpinnings, often overlook or marginalize sections of the story, or even ignore characters in an effort to understand the complicated combination of sources that Malory used to create his own Arthurian narrative. In this thesis, I reexamine Lancelot’s role in Malory’s text, especially as he relates to King Arthur. I argue that, while initially obscured by his primary role as a knight, Lancelot has a kingly identity in the text that helps to explain the uncanny similarities between his and Arthur’s character arc, and Malory’s precise revisions and additions to the canon of Arthurian legend. This kingly identity helps uncover a deeper motive in Malory’s writing, as the imprisoned knight critiques the qualities of an ideal King by having Arthur and Lancelot regularly fail to live up to these standards. This finding allows for a middle ground to the debate on the preeminence of secular versus sacred in Malory’s text. This thesis ultimately interprets kingship in Morte as a dual-natured construct that at once addresses the longing of England for an ideal human ruler while also pointing to a deeper spiritual need