Memorable Readings

As we have seen in Chapter 2, the story of Tristram and Isolde can fairly be considered to be a central romance because it is one repeatedly cited. Those who were thinking of the category of romances thought of a version of the story of Tristram and Isolde. And yet despite its centrality it is in certain ways unusual as a romance. For one thing, it is deeply at odds with the sexual morality of the majority of romances in England. C. S. Lewis's Allegory of Love famously decreed that courtly love had to have certain characteristics, among them Adultery with a capital A. But as Rosalind Field points out, in Anglo-Norman romances, “Courtship leads to marriage, and in a majority of these tales marriage occurs in the middle of the action, so that the marriage relationship itself is tested and demonstrated.” There are other sympathetic depictions of adultery in the literature of late medieval Britain, some of Marie's lais, for example, and most famously that of Lancelot and Guenevere. We saw something of the complicated story of Guenevere's adultery in Chapter 2. But the whole-hearted empathy required of the audience for the lovers and the opposition to the betrayed husband and his sympathizers found in the story of Tristram and Isolde are unusual in insular romances. Such potential characteristics of romance as integration of the exiled hero into society, foundation of family, establishment of peace are flirted with and then abandoned in Tristram's story, made impossible by his continued adultery.