LANCELOT: THE KNIGHT OF THE CART

byChrétien de Troyes

(ca. 1176–82)

Probably the fourth of the five extant Arthurian verse ROMANCES by the French poet CHRÉTIEN DE TROYES,Lancelot: The Knight of the Cartis thought to have been written sometime close to the writing of Chrétien’sYVAIN: THE KNIGHT OF THE LION. Incidents from the narrative ofLancelotare thrice referred to inYvain, and some critics suggest that the poet’s unusual references to episodes in one of his own compositions indicate a close chronology of composition and/or serve as thematic contrast in Yvain’s negation of adulterous love, which figures so prominently inLancelot. Indeed it has been argued that Chrétien’s discomfort with the unsanctified love of Lancelot and Guenevere leads him to give responsibility for the poem’s “subject” and “meaning” (Chrétien 1997, ll. 26–27) to his patron, the Countess MARIE DE CHAMPAGNE, and to leave the poem to be completed by the otherwise unknown Godfrey of Lagny.

The central plot ofLancelotis fairly straightforward, although there are a series of seemingly disconnected episodes and adventures leading to the central action in the fashion of Arthurian romances. The poem opens at Arthur’s court where the evil Méléagant (who holds many of Arthur’s people captive) challenges Arthur to send one of his knights with Queen Guenevere to the woods where, if Arthur’s knight defeats him in battle, the evil knight will free Arthur’s people, but if Méléagant himself is the victor, Guenevere is the prize. By means of petulance and a rash promise, Kay is given the honor of accepting the challenge, which he promptly fails. Arthur is persuaded by Gawain to follow Méléagant, and they soon come upon Kay’s riderless horse, which confirms their worst fears. Gawain rides ahead and comes upon an unnamed knight in need of a horse because he has ridden his to its death.Gawain gives the knight a horse (we later learn this is Lancelot, although the romance convention of disguise or failed recognition clearly suggests to the audience, if not to Gawain, Lancelot’s identity at this first meeting) and follows him, only to find the horse the knight had taken “dead in the road” (l. 306) and the signs of a “furious” fight with many knights (l. 310). Gawain rides on until he comes upon the “unknown” knight “alone and on foot,” following a cart into which the knight climbs only after some moments of “hesitant shame” (l. 363).

The cart is, of course, the cart of the title, and Lancelot’s hesitation is key to understanding one of the central tensions in the romance: the conflict between ideal knightly honor and duty (including the avoidance of shame and fealty to one’s secular lord) and the ideals of COURTLY LOVE (including duty in the service of and submission to one’s lady). Chrétien explores this conflict in his earlierEREC AND ENIDE, but here the conflict takes on additional significance: Here the lovers are involved in an adulterous affair, and the lack of balance or moderation will find no final resolution in a measured marriage of knightly and courtly values. Lancelot hesitates to enter the cart because it would shame his honor as a knight—carts being used to display the infamy of criminals,murderers, and other low-lifes; yet after his initial hesitation, Lancelot listens to Love which “hurriedly ordered him / Into the cart” (ll. 372–73), and thus sets in motion a series of adventures in which he must prove his devotion to women to redeem his sin against the courtly code of love.When Lancelot does finally rescue the queen, her coldness to him is not, as he thinks, because he shamed himself by riding in the cart, but because he hesitated to do so and thus put his knightly honor before his love. When Guenevere forgives Lancelot they manage to spend an adulterous interlude together in the midst of enemies and Arthurian knights. Méléagant discovers the adultery—though he believes the queen has been with Sir Kay—and brings a legal charge against the queen (in medieval legal documents adultery between a lady and one of her husband’s knights is a felony). Lancelot defends her and, after further adventures, Lancelot defeats Méléagant in a trial by combat.

There are early- and mid-12th-century Welsh and Breton versions of Guenevere’s abduction and rescue, yet Lancelot’s role and the adulterous relationship seem to originate with Chrétien’s romance. Critical commentary tends to focus either on the poet’s distaste for his subject matter, and particularly the adultery (and to invoke this to explain Chrétien’s unusual gesture of ascribing subject matter and meaning to his patron), or on the ways in which the poet may be validating courtly codes of love. Examples of those were found in theArt of Courtly Love(ca. 1185) of ANDREAS CAPELLANUS, an author not only contemporaneous with Chrétien, but writing for essentially the same courtly audience, including Marie, countess of Champagne. Chrétien’s willingness to portray his romance characters as shamed or foolish seems to support those who would argue for the poet’s discomfort with too strict an adherence to the principles of courtly love. Yet adultery is not a new issue in Chrétien’s Arthurian romances: InCLIGÈSthe poet presents an adulterous affair that, however many times the lovers claim they will not be TRISTAN AND ISOLDE, is very like that adulterous relationship without the excuse of a magic potion.

Nonetheless it is worth noting the ambiguities and conflicts that arise from the adultery inCligèsseemingly expressed in the wholesale fragmentation of bodily and emotional integrity throughout the romance. If the moral conflicts inLancelotare not easily resolved by modern critical analysis, they were immensely popular for their medieval audience, andLancelotbecame one of the most influential romances of the Middle Ages. The adultery between Lancelot and Guenevere is the cause of the destruction of the Arthurian court in the 13thcentury VULGATE CYCLE, which was the primary source for Sir Thomas MALORY’s 15th-centuryMORTE DARTHUR, which is, in its turn, the source for most of the hundreds of retellings of the Arthurian legend into the 21st century.

■ Andreas Capellanus.The Art of Courtly Love, by Andreas Capellanus. Translated by John Jay Parry. New York: Ungar, 1941.

■ Chrétien de Troyes.Lancelot: The Knight of the Cart. Translated by Burton Raffel. Afterword by Joseph J. Duggan. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997.

■ Baldwin, John W.The Language of Sex: Five Voices from Northern France Around 1200. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.

■ Benton, John F. “The Court of Champagne as a Literary Center.” InCulture, Power, and Personality in Medieval France, edited by Thomas N. Bisson, 3–43. London: Hambledon Press, 1991.

■ ———.“Clio and Venus: A Historical View of Medieval Love.” InCulture, Power and Personality in Medieval France, edited by Thomas N. Bisson, 99–121. London: Hambledon Press, 1991.

■ Cross, Tom Peete, and William Albert Nitze.Lancelot and Guenevere: A Study on the Origins of Courtly Love. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1930.

■ Frappier, Jean.Chrétien de Troyes: The Man and His Work. Translated by Raymond J. Cormier. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1982.

■ Kelly, Douglas. “Sens”and“Conjointure”in the Chevalier de la Charette. Studies in French Literature, 2. The Hague:Mouton, 1966.

■ ———.Medieval French Romance. Twayne’s World Authors Series, 838. New York: Twayne, 1993.

■ Noble, Peter S.Love and Marriage in Chrétien de Troyes. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1982.