Henry of Huntingdon, who wrote in the earlier portion of the twelfth century, regarded Arthur as a genuine historical character, and attributed the then ignorance of precise localities of the twelve battles described by Nennius to "the Providence of God having so ordered it that popular applause and flattery, and transitory glory, might be of no account."
William of Malmsbury, in the twelfth century, although evidently aware of the legendary character of the mass of the Arthurian stories, seems, however, to have had some confidence that a substratum of historic truth underlying or permeating the mass, might, with skill and diligence, eventually be extracted. Probably a few years before Geoffrey's work appeared, he writes--"That Arthur, about whom the idle tales of the Bretons (_nugæ Britonum_) craze to this day, one worthy not to have misleading fables dreamed about him, but to be celebrated in true history, since he sustained for a long time his tottering country, and sharpened for war the broken spirit of his people."
It is a remarkable circumstance that Shakspere, who has availed himself so profusely of the old historic and legendary records, as well as of the popular superstitions, with two trivial exceptions, which merely prove his acquaintance with the traditional hero, never refers to Arthur. The exceptions are so slight and even casual that they seem rather to confirm the probability that the great poet, in the main, endorsed the opinion of William of Newbury as to Geoffrey's presumed _historical_ verities. This critical monk, in the latter portion of the twelfth century, indignantly exclaims: "Moreover, in his book, that he calls the 'History of the Britons,' how saucily and how shamelessly he lies almost throughout, no one, unless ignorant of the old histories, when he falls upon that book can doubt. Therefore in all things we trust Bede, whose wisdom and sincerity are beyond doubt, so that fabler with his fables shall be straightway spat out by us all." The fact that the story of "Lear" is given pretty fully in Geoffrey's work in no way affects this conclusion, as Shakspere, in the construction of his plot, has followed an older drama and a ballad rather than the _soi-disant_ Welsh historian. One allusion by Shakspere to Arthur is in the second part of "Henry IV." (Act 3, Scene 2), where Justice Shallow says: "I remember at Mile-end Green (when I lay at Clement's Inn, I was then Sir Dagonet in Arthur's Show)," &c. The other is in Act 2, Scene 4, of the second part of King Henry IV., when Falstaff enters the tavern in Eastcheap singing a scrap of an old ballad, as follows: "'_When Arthur first in court_'--Empty the jordan--'_And was a worthy king_'--[Exit Drawer.]--How now, Mistress Doll?"