Except insofar as folk tradition continued (such as in the tales recorded in the much later Welsh Mabinogion), the further development of the Arthur legend in England was almost wholly political in impetus. Only Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a few courtly tales such as Chaucer's Wife of Bath's Tale, and a half dozen Scottish Arthurian pieces stand outside the general trend. Wace's Roman de Brut, a poem in French apparently presented to the wife of Henry II of England in 1154, closely paraphrases Geoffrey and maintains the patriotic spirit, merely embellishing it with verse. Layamon's Brut, which began as an English paraphrase of Wace, intensifies the nationalistic spirit of the poem in three respects-first, by the use of the English language; second, by substituting native alliterative meter for Wace's continental poetic form, octosyllabic couplets; and third, by introducing new material — both new events and a new intensity of emotion — to reach more than double the length of Wace's poem; i.e., Layamon expands Wace's 1,500+ lines to 32,000+. Another English alliterative poem, the Morte Arthure, composed in the mid-fourteenth century, during the reign of Edward III, has political implications of a gloomier sort. Here Arthur's conquests are made to parallel Edward's, Arthur's battles grimly parody Edward's battles, and Arthur's tragedy — a fall through pride-warns Edward that a similar fate may await him. The poem is the direct source of Malory's "Arthur and King Lucius" sequence and may, in the opinion of some scholars, have provided Malory with a model for political comment through romance. Whereas the Morte Arthure poet identified Arthur with Edward, Malory alters details as if to equate Arthur and Henry V, suppresses the tragic conclusion of the poem, and thus perhaps sets the glory of Arthur — and of Henry V — in ironic counterpoise with what came afterward in Malory's England.
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