A Canadian Caliban in King Arthur's Court: Materialist Medievalism and Northern Gothic in William Wilfred Campbell's Mordred

WHEN THE CANADIAN Confederation Group poet William Wilfred Campbell turned to the Matter of Britain in his medievalist verse-drama Mordred , composed 1893–94, he was embarking upon politically fraught aesthetic terrain that was just beginning to be explored by writers of the new Dominion. Prior to 1892 – the year Campbell published his Arthurian poem, “Sir Lancelot” – the principal texts in this nascent tradition of Canadian Arthuriana were Irish emigrant and Anglican clergyman John Reade's “The Prophecy of Merlin” (1870) and Charles G.D. Roberts's “Launcelot and the Four Queens” (1880). In both of these early works, much of what D.M.R. Bentley aptly refers to as “the politically complex … habitus ” of post-Confederation Canadian literature is made apparent by their authors’ self-conscious engagements with a tradition of British medievalism whose availability as a site of national self-recognition was no longer self-evident. Reade, for instance, in his reprising of Alfred Tennyson's “The Passing of Arthur,” feels compelled to justify his ex-centric (post?)colonial site of enunciation by inscribing Canada directly into Arthurian history in the form of a consoling prophecy, spoken by Merlin to Bedivere, about the founding of a new kingdom “In a far land beneath the setting sun / Now and long hence undreamed of… / … a land of stately woods, / Of swift broad rivers, and of ocean lakes,” that Queen Victoria and Prince Albert's son, a new Arthur, will visit and eventually oversee as Governor-General. In this way, Reade “celebrate[s] the British Empire's high destiny,” includes Canada in that destiny, and secures his own poetic authority in a single stroke. Roberts's participation in the Victorian Medieval Revival in Canada was more straightforward than Reade's but no less significant: his poem's dramatization of Morgan le Fay's machinations and Launcelot's guilty conscience simply present no contradiction to him as subjects for Canadian poetry. As a self-described “cosmopolitan nationalist” Roberts was to argue in “The Beginnings of Canadian Literature” (1883) that a Canadian literary tradition should not require works exclusively based on “Canadian themes” to be considered authentic; Canadians were inheritors of “the whole heritage of English song,” and “the domain of English letters knows no boundaries of Canadian Dominion, of American Commonwealth, nor yet of British Empire.”

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