Abstract
Gwenyvere has received much more attention from literary critics than have other female characters in Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur.² Nevertheless, she has often been misread. Critics’ consistent misreading of Arthur’s queen is the result of three interrelated causes: a Victorian sensibility that leads critics to denigrate and trivialize Gwenyvere yet attempt to deny the sexual nature of the Gwenyvere–Launcelot relationship; a consistent underestimation of the stanzaic Morte Arthur’s influence on both Malory’s development of characters and his conception of the Arthurian world; and an insistence that Malory’s Trystram section depicts the failings – rather than celebrates the glories