SOURCE: Dwyer, Richard A. “Arthur's Stellification in the Fall of Princes.” Philological Quarterly 57, no. 2 (Spring 1978): 155-71.

In the following essay, Dwyer discusses the unusual features of Lydgate's version of the legend of King Arthur, particularly his raising of the hero to the stars (“stellification”) at the end of the story, and argues that the poet was including scientific and philosophical thought in the Arthurian myth.

Although medieval readers liked it well, they apparently had it no easier than Thomas Gray in his time or than we have in ours in responding to John Lydgate's mammoth Fall of Princes as a manageable work of art. They tended instead to excerpt set pieces from it and to list in their manuscripts the locations of the better parts in much the same spirit as its twentieth century editor, Henry Bergen, helpfully asterisks the “passages of special interest or charm” in his...