Jen Cadwallader and Laurence Mazzeno [Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan]), outlines his methods for teaching an introductory course in "literature and psychology," using as example poems by Christina Rossetti, Robert Browning, and William Morris ("The Defence of
Guenevere").
Hearing of this apparent gesture of affection,
Guenevere "en est tant a malese qu'ele ne set quel conseill prendre de soi, fors tant que ele se venchera de Lancelot" (32).
In a description of his relationship with Lady
Guenevere, for example, we learn that "he had fallen in love with her as much as he ever fell in love, which was just sufficient to amuse him, and never enough to disturb him" (49).
Luhrmann couldn't "fix" Puccini, but Lee has worked a neat piece of staging legerdemain by keeping his
Guenevere and Lancelot onstage, in the background, during Arthur's solo "How to Handle a Woman." It gives the piece an intriguing subtext and, more important, prepares us for the queen's romantic conversion when she later witnesses Lancelot's jousting miracle.
But around 1883 the author of 'The Defence of
Guenevere' and one of the most renown of the late Romantic artists, William Morris, had also embraced revolutionary socialism.
The students know of King Arthur, or
Guenevere, or Lancelot, or even Gawain (particularly if they read Sir Gawain and the Green Knight earlier in the semester) in a way that most students do not know of the Red Cross Knight or Chaucer's The Wife of Bath.
Guenevere and Lancelot's illicit romance has been discovered, and while Arthur seeks revenge against Lancelot, the villainous Mordred takes over all of England.
The imaginatively superior works of Morris's first collection, The Defence of
Guenevere and Other Poems (1858), are included as one might expect.
(27) The reader may be initially unsure about whether the beautiful women are 'just a dream' or real; yet as the remaining story unfolds at King Arthur's court, where Launfal must deal with a very nasty Queen
Guenevere, it becomes clear that Dame Tryamour is an Otherworld woman whose realm is closely connected to this time and earthly space.
In other words, its reasonable to expect that King Arthur be played by a male, and
Guenevere by a female.
William Morris's "The Defence of
Guenevere," Robert Buchanan's "Liz," and Meredith's "Love in the Valley" are insightful judgments among the usual familiar choices.
Gregory) While texts recounting the Mordred story were in circulation by the middle of the twelfth century and therefore some version was probably known to Chretien's audience (as indeed they may have known an even earlier tradition of the abduction of
Guenevere, which is reflected in the sculptures at Modena, Italy), (9) dating our surviving twelfth-century Tristan texts is more problematic: none can with certainty be placed earlier than the earliest possible date for the composition of Chretien de Troyes's romances; (10) and it is even harder to establish in what form Chretien's audience would have known the story.
