"ARTHURIAN BRITAIN"
Sir,-Maybe there are those who prefer their spring lamb served as colonial goose, and who will wash it down with vin ordinaire rather than savour it with hock, moselle, or chablis. But may such tastes be anticipated in a book review such\as appeared in your issue of January 28, where the literary discovery of the first half of this century is passed off. virtually as just another version of love and lure in Logres? The significance of the Oxford Standard Authors edition of the Winchester MS of The Works of Sir Thomas Malory is merely economic for New Zealand book buyers. Here is presented for the price of 26/- a text (less Professor Vinaver’s copious annotations) which in the Clarendon Press threevolume edition now sells in this country for £9 or so. The Times Literary Supplement of June 7, 1947, begins a two-page review of the larger edition with these words: "It was on July 23, 1934, that Mr. W. F. Oakeshott made in the library of Winchester College the most startling literary discovery of the century-a manuscript of Malory’s Arthurian romances roughly contemporary with Caxton’s print and independent of it." Sir Frederic -Kenyon, in the correspondence columns of the same issue, writes: "Professor Vinaver’s monumental edition of The Works of Sir »Thomas Malory, just published by the Clarendon Press, enables the public for the first
time to read Malory’s great work substantially as he wrote it, beforé Caxton edited and printed it." In view of such statements from such sources, and in view of the factual information available on where and when Caxton set up his presses and what works: he produced, I am wondering what your reviewer can mean by saying of the Winchester M.S., "As a publication it may be said to have beéh a Caxton firet."’
P. A.
CORNFORD
(Wellington).
(Our reviewer replies: "Yes, Mr. Cornford is quite right, and I am obliged to him, It is important to make it clear that this is not the Caxton but the Winchester version. As to
hock with lamb I regretfully differ.’’-
-Ed.)
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https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/NZLIST19550225.2.12.2
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 32, Issue 813, 25 February 1955, Page 5
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347"ARTHURIAN BRITAIN" New Zealand Listener, Volume 32, Issue 813, 25 February 1955, Page 5
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Copyright in the work University Entrance by Janet Frame (credited as J.F., 22 March 1946, page 18), is owned by the Janet Frame Literary Trust. The National Library has been granted permission to digitise this article and make it available online as part of this digitised version of the New Zealand Listener. You can search, browse, and print this article for research and personal study only. Permission must be obtained from the Janet Frame Literary Trust for any other use.
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