CHAPTER EIGHT
The Renaissance to The Nineteenth Century
After Malory, the Arthurian world—especially when it came to Guinevere—went into something of a drought until the nineteenth century. As Peter Korell notes, the queen was virtually written out of the legend at this point in history. “In spite of Malory’s partial whitewashing of Guinevere, she could not find favor with many later authors dealing with the Arthurian legend. In the first three centuries following Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur, she is almost completely ignored.”253 One of the few Arthurian plays of the Elizabethan age, Thomas Hughes’s The Misfortunes of Arthur (1587), was based on the work of Geoffrey of Monmouth and concentrated on the revenge Arthur takes on Mordred for seducing Guinevere, rather than on the possible culp
