ABSTRACT
In J. H. Shorthouse’s Victorian novel Sir Percival: A Story of the Past and the Present, one of the characters, the Duke of Cressy and de la Pole, observes that Sir Percival was hardly treated in the ‘Morte d’Arthur.’ The Grail theme was generally dormant in English literature between the Middle Ages and the Victorian era. Renaissance writers adapted the Arthurian legends to the political and literary concerns of their contemporaries. Grail stories in the eighteenth century, when Arthurian literature was used primarily for purposes of parody, would have been even more unlikely. Jonathan Swift created in 1709 an absurd prophecy, supposed to have been uttered by Merlin, to mock the almanac Merlins of his day; and Henry Fielding made a chapbook favorite the greatest hero of King Arthur’s court in his Tom Thumb, a play satirical of everything from doctors and lawyers to contemporary playwrights.
