SOURCE: Stevenson, Catherine, and Virginia Hale. “Medieval Drama and Courtly Romance in William Morris' ‘Sir Galahad, A Christmas Mystery.’” Victorian Poetry 38, no. 3 (fall 2000): 383-91.

In the following essay, Stevenson and Hale view “Sir Galahad: A Christmas Mystery” as a hybrid of the conventions of medieval religious drama, courtly romance, and medieval mystery play.

Writing of William Morris' use of medieval sources, David Staines observes that the four poems in The Defence of Guenevere volume based on Malory—“The Defence of Guenevere,” “King Arthur's Tomb,” “Sir Galahad, A Christmas Mystery,” and “A Chapel in Lyoness”—give evidence of a “decreasing fidelity” to the original materials. Of “Sir Galahad, A Christmas Mystery” he asserts: “Instead of taking a particular moment in Malory and reshaping it in his own manner, as he did in the Guenevere poem, Morris now creates his own particular incident out of the many similar incidents in...