The Flawed Characters of King Arthur and Sir Lancelot Paul Patterson College

There was a trend toward well-rounded, realistic characters during and throughout the Renaissance that arguably began with, or at least along roughly the time frame as, Thomas Malory’s famed Le Morte D’Arthur. The characters in older pieces of fiction were often unrealistic and one-dimensional. They were designed very specifically to reflect particular characteristics and lacked the flaws and intricate details of sophisticated and well-rounded characters. In the case of the fabliau, a style of storytelling that originated in France and is seen in flashes in the works of Chaucer, characters are deliberately absurd, caricatures of realistic personality traits. Malory, however, designed characters with obvious, as well as realistic, flaws. Over a century after Malory’s work, Shakespeare would create some of the most well-known characters in the history of fiction, characters that were popular due to their accurate representation of the human condition. The moral, yet flawed protagonists of Thomas Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur, such as King Arthur and Sir Lancelot, laid the groundwork for an entirely new era of fiction.

In The Middle Ages, knights were evaluated by something called the “Chivalric Code.” The Chivalric Code was an...