Below appears the abstract I submitted to the English I: Old and Middle English panel at the 2014 South Central Modern Language Association conference, to be held in Austin, Texas.
While the most famous and most heavily studied editions of Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur are the 1845 Caxton and the Winchester MS, they are far from the only versions of the text to have appeared in late medieval and early modern England. The last of them was the 1634 Stansby edition of the text, after which no further full edition was published until the Regency—yet the Stansby edition is relatively little studied. Most commentaries on it follow both Barry Gaines and Tsuyoshi Mukai in asserting that the work is a low-quality production, at odds with Stansby’s usual quality of work, and they largely set it aside in favor of “better” pieces.
Comments by David R. Carlson, however, and consideration of Stansby’s prior work and cultural context suggest that there may be reasons other than the usually asserted inattention and haste for the perceived low quality of the publication. It is possible to read the features of the 1634 Malory, both the paratextual and the textual, as offering a quiet satire on the topic of the monarchy. Doing so is more consistent with Stansby’s avowed tendencies to land himself in legal trouble and the awareness of station and situation that typifies much of his other abundant printing-house production than the common reading of the 1634 edition as riddled with errors only.