Lost & Found

Literature detectives, says Professor Richard D. Altick of Ohio State University, can be just as clever as any other kind. What kind of mysteries do they solve? In a brisk, well-written book, The Scholar Adventurers (Macmillan; $5), Professor Altick, an English teacher himself, chronicles a few.

Some of the mysteries, Altick admits, have been solved more by chance than by special cunning. Biographer Mason Wade unearthed the Western journals of Francis Parkman by going to the historian's old home in Boston and rummaging through his desk. Usually, however, the scholar's quest takes a good deal more ingenuity.

"In Cancro Joyned." Astronomy helped Princeton Dean Robert K. Root settle one matter that had long tantalized Chaucerians: the date of Chaucer's Troilus and Crlseyde. Dean Root was struck by the passage: "The bente moone with hire homes pale,/-Saturne, and Jove, in Cancro joyned were . . ." No astronomer, Dean Root suspected that such a conjunction of Saturn, Jupiter and the moon was no common occurrence. He was right: for the first time in 600 years, the planets had come together in the sign of Cancer in 1385. That, concluded Root, to the general applause of Chaucerians, was the year Chaucer wrote his story.

By such reasoning, supplemented by a good deal of digging through library stacks and tracking down the descendants of famous men, scholars have turned up some lively bits of unexpected history. They have exposed a host of literary forgeries, revealed that Poet William Wordsworth fathered an illegitimate daughter during a stay in France in 1792,* established that Poet Christopher Marlowe was not killed in a row over a bawd (as Puritans told the story), but over who should pay a tavern check/-. One of the most impressively persistent investigations of all was the case of old Sir Thomas Malory, a job that challenged two generations of tracers of lost literary persons.

Malory, Mallore, Mallery. For four centuries, Sir Thomas, author of Morte Darthur and thus literature's main source for the King Arthur legends, had been nothing but a name in Caxton's 1485 edition. Then, in the late 19th Century, Harvard's famed George Lyman Kittredge began poring over the records of every likely Malory, Mallore, Maulore, Mallere, Malure, Mallery, and Maleore in 15th Century England. After months of investigation, he finally fixed on Sir Thomas Malory of Warwickshire, a member of the Earl of Warwick's retinue during the Hundred Years' War.

That stimulated other scholars, and soon they were turning up new and startling additional information about Kittredge's Sir Thomas. It appeared that Sir Thomas had been a prodigious troublemaker in his day, had tried to ambush the Duke of Buckingham, had broken into the home of one Hugh Smyth and raped his wife Joan, had extorted 100s, from a Margaret Kyng and a William Hales and 20s. from a John Mylner, had broken into Hugh Smyth's place and raped Joan again, had gone to Leicestershire and there stolen "seven cows, two calves, a cart worth -L-4, and 335 sheep." Sir Thomas, it appeared from the records, had also twice looted the Cistercian Abbey of Blessed Mary at Coombe and at least twice escaped from jail.

"Amen." Could such a Sir Thomas have been the author of Morte Darthur, from which Victorian Poet Laureate Alfred Lord Tennyson had drawn his delicate and melancholy Idylls of the King? It was not until 1934, when another literary detective accidentally discovered at Winchester the earliest known manuscript of Sir Thomas' book, that anyone could be reasonably sure. What caught scholars' eyes were the lines--missing from the later editions: "This was drawyn by a knyght presoner sir Thomas Malleorre, that God sende hym good recover. Amen." Like many another, it seemed, Sir Thomas in his prison intervals had had both a spirit of repentance and a good, unhurried opportunity to write.

*The reluctant detective in the case: Princeton's beloved George McLean Harper, a reverent authority on Wordsworth who could bring himself to reveal the news only after deciding that some less sympathetic ferreter might some day publish it. Harper's scholarly approach did not preserve him from the following campus doggerel:

Harper went to France to get

The red-hot dope on dear Annette!

And there performed a deed of note,

Revealing Wordsworth's one wild oat.

/-Thus presumably disposing of an even more interesting hypothesis once advanced by the Louisville Courier-Journal's great and gusty editor, Henry ("Marse Henry") Watterson (1840-1921). Poet Marlowe, suggested Marse Henry, was not killed in the row at all but killed the other fellow instead and, to save his neck, fled to the Continent. After a while he settled down in Padua and got busy again writing plays. These he shipped off to London to his fellow Cantabrigian, Francis Bacon, who polished them a bit and passed them (for stage production) to a backstage character at the Globe Theater by the name of Shakespeare.

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