Sir Thomas Malory (1394?-1471) was attached in his young manhood to the retinue of the great Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, widely celebrated as a pattern of chivalry. After much military service he sat in the Parliament of 1445. Arraigned in 1451 before a local court at Nuneaton on the charge of breaking into the abbey of St Mary at Coombe and robbing it, and further of ambushing the Duke of Buckingham, he was remanded to the King’s Bench and imprisoned for most of his last twenty years. In Newgate Jail he finished his Morte d’Arthur (1469-1470). These few facts, opening much inference, tell us surely that he was imprisoned for violence in a time of violence. The chivalry that he celebrates in the greatest English literary work of a sterile period has the relief of contrast.
Matteo Maria Boiardo (1434-1494), usually called “the Count,” was brought up at the brilliant ducal court of Ferrara. He was sent on embassies, married a Gonzaga, was gentleman of honor to Eleonora, and governor (Capitano), first (1480) of Modena, and then (1487, the year in which he published the first two books of his Orlando innamorato) of Reggio. Tradition has him genial and easy-going, and adds picturesquely that when he found a sonorous name for one of his Carolingian heroes he volleyed his castle bells.
His writing was abundant, various, characteristic of his time: ten Latin eclogues and several Latin epigrams; many Petrarchan sonnets, with canzoni and madrigals; ten Italian eclogues; capitoli on fear, jealousy, hope, love, and excellence (virtù); a five-act comedy, Timone, drawn from Lucian; translations from Herodotus, Xenophon’s Cyropaedia, the Golden Ass of Apuleius, and the Lives of Cornelius Nepos.
Different enough in fortune, the two had the same experience of actual war, and turned from it with the same literary motive, a wistful and generous desire to animate the dislocated and groping present with the courage and devotion of an idealized great past. Poetry of escape, this is also poetry of faith. It lifts Symphorien Champier’s clumsy Gestes ensemble la vie du preulx chevalier Bayard (1525) with the ideal of a knight “sans peur et sans reproche.” It will seize upon the death of Sir Philip Sidney as romantic. It will survive the allegorizing of Spenser. It is the refuge from the industrial age in Tennyson’s Idylls of the King. If fighting and politics remain as ugly as in the fifteenth century, Edwin Arlington Robinson will not be the last poet of romance.
Boiardo makes the contrast very explicit.
[The robber replied] “What I am doing every great lord does in your upper world. They make havoc of their enemies in war for aggrandizement and to cut a bigger figure. A single man like me makes trouble for seven, perhaps ten; they rage against ten thousand. And they do still worse than I in that they take what they do not need.” [Said Brandimarte] “It is indeed a sin to take from one’s neighbor as my world does; but when it is done only for the state, it is not evil; it is at least pardonable.” [The robber replied] “A man is more easily pardoned when he frames the charge himself. And I tell you, and make full confession, that I take what I can from any one who can less” (II. xix. 40).
O Fame, attendant of emperors, nymph so singing great deeds in sweet verse that thou bringest men honor even after death and makest them eternal, where art thou fallen? To sing ancient loves and tell the battles of giants. For the world of this thy time cares no longer for fame or for excellence (II. xxii. 2).
Then with choice rhymes and better verse shall I make combats and loves all of fire. Not always shall the time be so out of joint as to drag my mind from its seat. But now my songs are lost. Of little avail to give them a thought while I feel Italy so full of woe that I cannot sing, and hardly can I sigh. To you, light lovers and damsels, who have at heart your noble loves, are written these fair stories flowering from courtesy and valor. They are not heard by those fell souls who make their wars for despite and rage (II. xxxi. 49-50).
The distinctive difference between the two fifteenth-century romancers is that Malory translates; Boiardo rewrites. Malory may contract or expand, adapt or add; but in general he follows what he calls “the French book.” Boiardo, finding the Italian versions vulgarized (tra villani, II. xii. 3), wishes to make the old tradition once more literary. To restore their dignity, he gives the paladins more than verse. So romance throughout the Renaissance, as before and since, both survived and was changed. It was rehearsed, translated, printed in its medieval forms; and it was shaped to a distinctive Renaissance pattern.