Abstract
The purpose of this thesis is to conduct an academic analysis of two television adaptations of the Arthurian Legend, specifically Starz Camelot and BBC s Merlin, with the goal of discovering whether or not they are worthy of greater scholarly attention than they have so far been privy to from an otherwise very active field. Chapter one introduces the two shows, first walking the reader through the Arthurian tradition, and then discussing the major changes the shows have made to the commonly accepted story, and how these changes impact the shows themes. For Merlin, the greatest change is the addition of a death penalty placed on the use of magic in Camelot, meaning the hero, Merlin, must keep his true nature a secret from King Arthur. Camelot on the other hand places great emphasis on a parallel between King Arthur and his half-sister Morgan, complicating the traditional black-and-white portrayals of protagonists and antagonists. Chapter two examines the shows from the perspective of Joseph Campbell s monomyth theory as presented in his The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Merlin runs into trouble with the theory because it has two hero s attempting to complete the same story-circle. Camelot meanwhile continues to complicate our ideas of heroes and villains by having the protagonist-hero, King Arthur, fail to prove himself in the last stages of Campbell s story-circle. Finally, chapter three uses Andrew B. R. Elliott s Remaking the Middle Ages to say something about how the shows go about communicating their medieval worlds to the viewer. Merlin relies mostly on accepted icons of knights and kings to transport the audience back to its fairy-tale Middle Ages, a tool Elliott calls iconic recreation , while Camelot uses a mixture of icons and paradigms, the latter being a process by which modern concepts are made to stand in for the original medieval concept in order to better explain it to a modern audience, such as drawing a comparison between the knight and for instance the cowboy. The conclusion of this thesis is that Camelot and Merlin are important additions to the Arthurian tradition, and also deeper and more complex than they may seem at first. The two theories used in chapters two and three both highlight different aspects of the shows worth discussing, whether they are flaws or strengths, and it seems likely that new theories would reveal still more unexplored topics. The Arthurian legend on television is a largely neglected area of study, and this thesis aims to be a step towards remedying that.