Treason and the Feast in Sir Thomas Malory's Morte Darthur

Home , Geoffrey of Monmouth, Guinevere, Lanval, Thomas Chestre, Thomas Malory

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320 Ridley Elmes

Chapter 13 Treason and the Feast in Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur

Melissa Ridley Elmes

Queen Guinevere is rarely viewed as a powerful figure in the Arthurian literary tradition. However, for Sir Thomas Malory, Guinevere possesses one power that is essential to his narrative: the power to elicit great emotion from textual knight and text audience, alike. In Malory’s version of the Arthurian legend, Le Morte Darthur (completed 1469–70; published 1485),1 Camelot is King Arthur’s center of governing power; it is also a center of emotional power tied to the central issue of treason at the heart of Malory’s romance. Guinevere’s narrative role in Malory’s Arthuriad as the catalyst for heightened emotions—excessive increases in individualized, sometimes conflicting, and always problematic emotional responses, including suspicion, fear, anger, dismay, pride, conster- nation, and vengeance, unique to Malory’s interpretation of the story and essential in the development of his version’s dénouement—is most apparent in her feast and its aftermath in the “Tale of Sir Launcelot and Queen Guinevere.” Treason, and the potential for treason, in its many varieties is woven throughout the Morte Darthur (hereafter Morte) as an anchoring theme, both in major narrative events, as with the kings brought into submission during the early uprisings as Arthur secures and builds his kingdom, the Orkney brothers’ feud- ing practices, Meleageant’s machinations, Balin’s slaying of the Lady of the Lake, the Lady Aunowre’s attempt to seduce, then to kill, King Arthur, and of course, Tristram’s and Lancelot’s adultery, and in smaller but no less telling mo- ments, such as when Bedivere seeks to keep Excalibur rather than return it to the lake as Arthur bids him to do. Despite its essential presence throughout the Morte, prior to Guinevere’s feast, Malory confines his discussion of treason to Arthur’s efforts to curtail it, as with the Pentecostal oath, and to mitigate it, as when he forgives his disgraced knights, choosing to view their transgressions as acts of dishonor more generally rather than treason explicitly. It is only when Guinevere is accused of the murder of a knight at her table—a signifi- cant venue—that the extent of treason at Camelot and the damage it has done to individuals and community alike is revealed. The feast is a public spectacle:

1 Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte Darthur, ed. P.J.C. Field (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2017). Hereafter, page and line numbers will be given in parentheses.

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Treason And The Feast In Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur 321

what transpires at a feast is witnessed by everyone present, and therefore cannot be ignored. The feast is also a site of community. When a feast erupts into calculated violence it is intended to be seen, and is usually the result of latent issues that cannot or have not otherwise been addressed by existing codes of governance. Violence at the feast reveals the tensions at the heart of a community that threaten to destroy it—in this case, tensions caused by Arthur’s unwillingness or inability thus far to deal with treason effectively. In Malory’s Morte, Guinevere’s feast brings the community together to witness collectively a murder that reveals the treachery that threatens its core, and the individual responses of knight, king, and queen to this event showcase the limitations of law or custom to deal effectively with it. Malory employs the feast as a crucible of treason, which Camelot fails. In medieval texts generally, feasts are also events intimately tied to gendered constructs of power and agency. A man throws a feast as a display of his wealth and largesse to convince others of his prominence, an act which highlights either their better fortune or their complete humiliation under his lordship.2 When women oversee feasts not directly tied to a formal occasion such as a coronation or wedding, they are either acts of retaliation or of persuasion.3 In the Arthurian tradition specifically, the meals overseen by Guinevere clearly articulate this gendered approach to feasts. Every feast Guinevere hosts is an effort on her part to sway one or more knights’ opinion of her, either to conceal or to commit an act of treason that is intimately linked to her sexuality.4 Mal-

2 For example, King Arthur’s coronation feast in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae, which provides an opportunity for Arthur to demonstrate the bounty of his realm and expanse of his reputation, or conversely Albinus’s insistence that Rosamund drink from the skull of her father, taken in battle, as evidence of his sovereignty in John Gower’s “Tale of Albinus and Rosamund.” See: Russell A. Peck, ed., “The Tale of Albinus and Rosamund,” in John Gower, Confessio Amantis, Vol. 1 (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2000), 167–176. 3 For example, Guðrun feeding Atli’s sons to him at a feast in The Saga of the Volsungs as retaliation for the death of her brothers; the Sultaness ordering the wedding guests massacred at the feast in retaliation for her son’s marrying Custance and converting to Christianity in The Man of Law’s Tale; and Wealtheow’s use of the feast to persuade Beowulf to support her sons. See, respectively: Jesse L. Byock, The Saga of the Volsungs (New York: Penguin Books, 1990); Geoffrey Chaucer, “The Man of Law’s Tale,” in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry Benson, 3rd edn. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1987), 89–103; Roy Liuzza, ed., Beowulf, 2nd edn. (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2013). 4 Besides the Morte Darthur and its source texts, this pattern is also evident in the group of texts—Marie de France’s twelfth-century Breton lai, an anonymous early fourteenth-century Middle English romance, and Thomas Chestre’s late fourteenth-century version—that focus on the figure of Sir Lanval, in which Guinevere throws a sumptuous banquet in an effort to seduce Lanval, which is inherently an act of treason since she is married to the king. See: Lanval in The Lais of Marie de France, ed. and trans. Robert Hanning and Joan Ferrante (Grand