The Legends of King Arthur and His Knights

The Legends of King Arthur and His Knights is a retelling of the Arthurian legend by James Sheridan Knowles, the Irish playwright and writer who lived from 1784 to 1862 and who was one of the most successful English language dramatists of the early nineteenth century. The book belongs to Knowles’s substantial nondramatic prose work, alongside his much better known plays for the London stage.

Knowles’s principal reputation rested on his verse dramas, particularly Virginius of 1820 and The Hunchback of 1832, both of which were major commercial successes on the London stage and which remained in the standard nineteenth century repertoire for many decades. He worked in the tradition of romantic historical drama that dominated serious English theater in the first half of the nineteenth century, with subjects drawn from classical, medieval, and renaissance history handled in a style that combined elevated verse with strong dramatic action.

The Arthurian retelling fits naturally with Knowles’s broader interests in medieval and romantic historical material. The Arthurian legend had been undergoing a substantial Victorian revival during the years when Knowles was active, with Sir Walter Scott’s medievalism, the various translations and adaptations of Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, and eventually Alfred Lord Tennyson’s Idylls of the King all contributing to a renewed popular interest in the Arthurian material. Knowles’s retelling belongs to this broader Victorian Arthurian revival.

The book covers the standard Arthurian narrative material. There are sections on the birth and early years of Arthur, on his coming into kingship and the establishment of the Round Table, on the major knightly adventures including the quests of Sir Lancelot, Sir Gawain, and the other major knights, on the Holy Grail quest, on the tragic love of Lancelot and Guinevere, and on the final destruction of the Arthurian world in the last battles. Knowles handles the material in the elevated romantic manner that Victorian medievalism favoured, with attention to the moral and emotional substance of the legend rather than to the literary or historical questions about its sources.

The book is mostly of interest now as a document of nineteenth century Arthurian retelling and to readers interested in the broader nineteenth century reception of the Arthurian material. It pairs naturally with Tennyson’s Idylls of the King and with the various Victorian editions of Malory.