ABSTRACT
King Arthur is perhaps the most famous historical figure to emerge from the Middle Ages. This is rather strange, for he is also, with the possible exception of Robin Hood, the one historical figure about whom we know the least in terms of cold, hard facts. Nevertheless, King Arthur is recognized and beloved throughout the Western world. More movies have been made about him than about any other medieval character. Indeed, one recent compilation has identified no less than 262 films, TV shows, and cartoons with an Arthurian theme, beginning in 1904 with the Edison Film Company’s silent version of Wagner’s opera, Parsifal, down to Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, the first prequel to the Star Wars science fiction trilogy, released in 2000. And this is but the tip of an iceberg of modern Arthuriana that encompasses nearly every other possible medium in the creative arts: novels, short stories, plays, poetry, opera, ballet, choral and orchestral works, musicals, popular music, paintings and illustrations, sculpture, stained glass, tapestries, photographs, comic books, postage stamps and coins, jewelry and silverware, and a variety of trinkets, collectibles, and souvenirs. King Arthur has enlisted the talents of some of the most famous writers and artists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: novelists such as Mark Twain and T.H. White; poets such as Alfred Lord Tennyson, Edwin Arlington Robinson, and T.S. Eliot; composers such as Richard Wagner, Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Lowe, and Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart; painters such as the pre-Raphelites, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Edward Burne-Jones, and illustrators such as Gustave Doré and Aubrey Beardsley. Many of these mens productions later became the basis for films. Truly, the modern cult of King Arthur can be said to be an industry all unto itself.
