Camelot
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Lerner, Alan Jay and (music by) Frederick Loewe. Camelot. New York: Random House, 1961. (This copy is inscribed by both Julie Andrews and Robert Goulet, who played Guinevere and Lancelot in the original Broadway production.)
T. H. White's The Once and Future King was adapted as the play Camelot (1960) by Alan Jay Lerner, with music by Frederic Lowe. The play emphasizes the glorious ideal that Camelot represents and that survives the human tragedy. This theme, along with the tragic love of Lancelot and Guinevere, the pageantry, and the enduring music, has inspired many productions of the play. Because of John F. Kennedy's fondness for the play Camelot, coupled with an interest in the legends that originated with his childhood reading of a version of Malory, his presidency has been referred to as 'Camelot.' Actually, the identification of Kennedy with Camelot first occurred soon after Kennedy's death, when Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy urged her friend, reporter and historian Theodore H. White, to label her late husband's historical myth in specifically Arthurian terms.
