The Italian poet Boiardo, a near-contemporary of Malory, guides readers to question the adequacy of their moral response to violence. Malory's Morte Darthur (1485) smooths the rupture between the Platonic narrative form of romance and that increasing awareness of social identity that Shakespeare will later explore in his dramas: the struggle for orientation, in a world of love and death, against the effects of the past and the moral weight of social convention. The chapter on Malory's Weeping Castle reveals how a foul custom and its endurance reinforces the moral authority of the past. Boiardo and Ariosto use the topos to talk about the politics of power Spenser uses it to start each legend of The Faerie Queene that concerns a social virtue and Shakespeare inherited this long tradition of imagery. They did so in ways that reflect changing conceptions of the law. Later romances redeployed Chrétien's latent social allegory of the mysterious power of custom. A story raises concerns analogous to those of jurisprudence, which asks, What is the origin and function of a law or custom? How do we recognize good laws? What are the biases and values that dwell within them? What are the duties and responsibilities of those who maintain the institutions that support them? Jurisprudence recognizes that justice is a value that depends on a social order and its goals. One of the things narrative can organize for our perception is the moral problem created when the standards of one society or group clash with the customs of others. The custom of the caste topos serves this purpose by providing a narrative means of thinking about society. The standards they represent bear scrutiny, as do all social values. They take on a social role, especially when their superior strength seems to predetermine their success. Yet knights also uphold standards and values, often those associated with King Arthur's court.
Series of adventures that test the prowess of individual knights. The book demonstrates, for the first time, the impact on Shakespeare's plays, particularly Macbeth, of an earlier way of thinking about the strengths and weaknesses of social customs.Ĭhivalric romances may be regarded from two perspectives, that of the individual and that of society. The book concentrates on single scenes, common to a series of epics, in order to show how nuanced narratives explore the social limits of order, violence, justice, civility, and political conformity in Renaissance masterpieces by Sir Thomas Malory, Matteo Maria Boiardo, Ludovico Ariosto, and Edmund Spenser. Where previous studies have dismissed the convention or conceived it as no more than a heroic test or a common expression of an ideology of court, this study uses the changing legal and cultural conceptions of custom in France, Italy, and England to uncover a broader array of moral issues.
Conceived by Chrétien de Troyes in the twelfth century and widely imitated in medieval French romance, the "custom of the castle" flowered again when Italian and English authors, during the century before Shakespeare's plays and the rise of the novel, adopted this well-known motif to serve serious social purposes. Renaissance romances often include seemingly fantastic stories about castles that impose strange, mostly evil customs on traveling knights and ladies. Translations are my own, except where noted. The forms Tristram, Isode, Breunor, and Galahalt refer to Malory's work in English. The forms Tristan, Iseut, Brunor, and Galehaut refer to the French texts. I usually cite from the modern version of Malory for the convenience of the reader, but I retain Caxton's spelling of the title Morte Darthur. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974). Unless otherwise noted, all Shakespeare references are to the The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. Le Roman de Perceval ou le come du graal.