The Custom of the Castle: From Malory to Macbeth

By Charles Ross

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1997.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Nov 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9780520323629

Charles Ross

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The Custom of the Castle

A nineteenth-century sketch of the ruins of Spenser’s Kilcolman Castle, County Cork, presented to the author and his wife by Sir Robert and Lady Sheelagh Davis-Goff, Cynthia O’Connor, Ltd., Dublin, Eire.

The Custom of the Castle

From Malory to Macbeth

Charles Ross

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Berkeley Los Angeles London

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press

London, England

Copyright © 1997 by The Regents of the University of California

Portions of this book have been published in earlier versions:

Chap. 2: Malory’s Weeping Castle, in Chaucer Yearbook 2 (1995X 95— nó.

Chap. 3: Justifying Violence: Boiardo’s Castle Cruel, in Philological Quarterly 73 (1994), 31-51.

Chap. 4: Ariosto’s Fable of Power: Bradamante at the Rocca di Tristano, in Italica 68 (1991), 155-175.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ross, Charles Stanley.

The custom of the castle: from Malory to Macbeth /

Charles Ross.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-520-20430-1 (alk. paper)

i. English literature—Early modern, 1500-1700—

History and criticism. 2. Castles in literature. 3. Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616—Knowledge—Manners and customs. 4. Malory, Thomas, Sir, 15th cent. Morte d’Arthur. 5. Spenser, Edmund, 1552?-1599. Faerie queene.

6. English literature—European influences. 7. Knights and knighthood in literature. 8. Manners and customs in literature. 9. Kings and rulers in literature. 10. Literature and society. 1. Title.

PR428.C27R67 1997

809 ‘-93355—dc2o 96-32809

Printed in the United States of America

123456789

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

For Clare

ULPIAN, Duties of Proconsul, book 4: When it appears that somebody is relying upon a custom either of a civitas or of a province, the very first issue which ought to be explored, according to my opinion, is whether the custom has ever been upheld in contentious proceedings.

HERMOGENIAN, Epitome of Law, book 1: But we also keep to those rules which have been sanctioned by long custom and observed over very many years; we keep to them as being a tacit agreement of the citizen, no less than we keep to written rules of law.

Justinian¹

Then Sir Tristram and Sir Dinadan rode forth their way till they came to the shepherds and to the herdmen, and there they asked them if they knew any lodging or harbour there nigh hand.

Forsooth, sirs, said the herdmen, hereby is a good lodging in a castle; but there is such a custom that there shall no knight be harboured but if he joust with two knights, and if he be but one knight he must joust with two. … [I]f ye beat them ye shall be well harboured. Ah, said Sir Dinadan, they are two sure knights.… And to make a short tale, Sir Tristram and Sir Di- nadan smote them both down, and so they entered into the castle and had good cheer as they could think or devise. And when they were unarmed, and thought to be merry and in good rest, there came in at the gates Sir Palomides and Sir Gaheris, requiring to have the custom of the castle. What array is this? said Sir Dinadan. I would have my rest. That may not be, said Sir Tristram. Now must we needs defend the custom of this castle.

Thomas Malory²

We may never know how much of our sense of history is due to the presence in Europe of systems of customary law, and to the idealizations of the concept of custom which took place towards the end of the sixteenth century. To it our awareness of process in history is largely owing.

J. G. A. Pocock³

CONTENTS 1

CONTENTS 1

ABBREVIATIONS

PREFACE

PART ONE The French Model

CHAPTER ONE Introduction

CHAPTER TWO Malory’s Weeping Castle

PART TWO The Italian Transition

CHAPTER THREE Boiardo’s Castle Cruel

CHAPTER FOUR Ariosto’s Fable of Power

PART THREE The English Conclusion

CHAPTER FIVE Spenser’s Customs of Courtesy

CHAPTER SIX Hamlet’s Ghost Fear

CHAPTER SEVEN Macbeth’s Future: A Thing of Custom

CHAPTER EIGHT Epilogue: The Disappearing Castle

APPENDIX ONE

APPENDIX TWO

NOTES

INDEX

ABBREVIATIONS

Unless otherwise noted, all Shakespeare references are to the The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974)-

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, The forms Tristan, Iseut, Brunor, and Galehaut refer to the French texts. The forms Tristram, Isode, Breunor, and Galahalt refer to Malory’s work in English. I use the spelling Guenevere throughout. Translations are my own, except where noted.

PREFACE

Renaissance romances often include seemingly fantastic stories about castles that impose strange, mostly evil customs on traveling knights and ladies. Conceived by Chretien 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.

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. 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. 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.

Chivalric romances may be regarded from two perspectives, that of the individual and that of society. Some romances seem no more than a series of adventures that test the prowess of individual knights. Yet knights also uphold standards and values, often those associated with King Arthur’s court. They take on a social role, especially when their superior strength seems to predetermine their success.

The standards they represent bear scrutiny, as do all social values. The custom of the castle topos serves this purpose by providing a narrative means of thinking about society. 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. 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.

Later romances redeployed Chretien’s latent social allegory of the mysterious power of custom. They did so in ways that reflect changing conceptions of the law. 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. The chapter on Malory’s Weeping Castle reveals how a foul custom and its endurance reinforces the moral authority of the past. 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 Italian poet Boiardo, a near-contemporary of Malory, guides readers to question the adequacy of their moral response to violence. The Castle Cruel episode of his Orlando Innamorato (Orlando in Love, 1482, 1495) tells how the knight Ranaldo is caught up in a system of ritual sacrifice presided over by a deranged woman who justifies her conduct by telling a gruesome tale of adultery and revenge. The result is a humanist reading of the power of local customs, an allegory designed to give one pause in accepting two social features that most trouble anthropologists who attempt to justify the behavior of others: the sacrifice of innocents and the deliberate infliction of pain.

Even more than Boiardo, Ariosto made the instability of the moral imagination the main theme of another variation on the custom of the castle topos. As a young man, Ariosto spent five years studying civil law before he abandoned it in favor of poetry. In the wake of the sack of Rome in 1527, Italy’s greatest Renaissance poet enlarged the final edition of his masterpiece, Orlando Furioso (1532), by adding two versions of the custom of the castle. The female warrior Bradamante cannot enter the Tower of Tristan, the first of these additions, until she meets the custom of jousting designed to promote a certain social order. As in the later Marganorre episode, Ariosto uses gender bias to exemplify problems of social inflexibility.

To trace the custom of the castle topos from Chretien to Spenser is to see that the problem of the vile custom poses a certain moral dilemma in a way that begins as a conflict between individual desire and the community. By the time of The Faerie Queene this dilemma has been broadened into a conflict between a vision of a civil society and the inability of any community to sustain that vision. The continued strength of the form depends on the power of customs to represent the constraints of institutions as well as the distant past. Well versed in medieval romance, including the Morte Darthur, and a close student of Ariosto’s Furioso, Spenser frequently adopted the narrative convention of the custom of the castle. Overlooked by previous critics, the topos serves as a model of moral uncertainty. Spenser’s legend of courtesy, Book VI of The Faerie Queene (1596), makes the point that courtesy is characterized by imprecision and vagueness. Sir Calidor therefore properly enters a world of romance, pastoral woodlands, and pirates, whose surface hides practical reasoning. Moreover, a general understanding of courtesy sheds light on Spenser’s experience in Ireland.

A similar problem of moral bewilderment occurs in Shakespeare’s plays. Although the setting of Hamlet (ca. 1601) is not recognizably that of epic romance, the moral problem of following prescribed custom is comparable to those examples of the custom of the castle where the power of local tradition depends not just on a veneration for the past but a genuine fear of offending the ghosts of one’s ancestors, a fear whose grip on human activity is as powerful as vanity, sex, and hunger. If Hamlet questions the forms of activity suitable to civil society, Macbeth (ca. 1604) suggests the need to forget the horrors of the past in order to formulate a strong social future. The haunting death of his wife makes Macbeth realize that the only way to end his own foul custom is to abandon his castle at Dunsinane: his demise derives from his best qualities, bravery and insight, in a properly tragic fashion.

By the beginning of the seventeenth century, castles were relics of the past. Those Don Quixote entered were really country inns. Spenser’s castle at Kilcolman had been burned in 1596 during a local insurrection. I have used a nineteenth-century sketch of its ruins as a frontispiece for this volume that reconstructs the sense of an image that once flourished.

A version of chapter 2 appeared previously, as Malory’s Weeping Castle (Chaucer Yearbook, 2 [1995]: 95-116); chapter 3, as Justifying Violence: Boiardo’s Castle Cruel (Philological Quarterly [1994]: 31-51); and chapter 4, as Ariosto’s Fable of Power: Bradamante at the Rocca di Tristano (Italica 68 [1991]: 19-39).

I have benefited from the more than generous assistance of Allen Mandelbaum, Ann Astell, William Dowling, Mihoko Suzuki, Michael Murrin, and two anonymous readers. Robert Rodini, Jo Ann Cavallo, Michael Saida, Martha Craig, Katherine Goodland, and Stephanie Chamberlain edited and commented on various chapters. James Nohm- berg, Bruce Hozeski, Steven Mullaney, Eugene Vance, and Norris Lacy extended professional courtesies in response to my importunities. Stanley Holwitz showed exemplary patience. I would like to thank Dennis Looney, John Watkins, Paul White, and Tony Oldcom for providing academic life with amicizia.

Some may be interested to know that my connection with the works studied in this book is personal, not ancestral. Or that I was teaching Hamlet, a remarkably consoling play, when my father died. He was a selfless and generous person. He paid for me, as my mother prays for me, and would have approved of my giving the last word to Slaney and Sam.

In memoriam: Ira Stanley Ross (1914-1981).

PART ONE

The French Model

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction

By the end of the sixteenth century, there had emerged in northern Europe a notion of custom in some obvious sense related to the modern conception of custom as tradition or, as we now tend to say, cultural practice. This is the idea of custom Montaigne has in mind in the Essays, when, noting that Pindar had called her Queen and Empress of the world, he quite seriously remarks that there is nothing that custom will not or cannot do, for there falls into man’s imagination no fantasy so wild that it does not match the example of some public practice.¹ As a sort of parable, Montaigne tells the story of a man who, asked why he is beating his father, answers that it was the custom of his house: that his father had beaten his grandfather thus, his grandfather his great-grandfather; and, pointing to his son: ‘And this one will beat me when he has come to my present age.’

To call this a mad fantasy seems to invite a modern view of such behavior as, at worst, pathological, at best difficult to justify on grounds of nature or reason. Yet Montaigne’s account, though it in one sense points in that direction, is attentive as well to an opposing logic operating beneath the surface of events, an older understanding in which custom or consuetudo exists in a complex relation to what we should now call justice or jurisprudence, and ultimately, to more primal notions of right and wrong. Thus, for instance, the son dragging his father through the street is commanded by the old man to stop at a certain door, for he had dragged his own father only that far. And the son obeys, leading Montaigne to conclude that the laws of conscience, which we say are born of nature, are born of custom, that in any human community the sense of right and wrong may be seen to proceed in large measure from nothing more than an inward veneration of the opinions approved, and customs received (les opinions et moeurs approuvées) among other members of the community.²

In purely rational terms, the danger posed by such a notion of custom is that, in providing a virtually automatic justification for behavior, it seems to take away all other grounds on which an action might be judged right or wrong: from parricide to torture to ritual murder, anything might be justified on the grounds that the community has done things this way from time immemorial. It is just such a rational or philosophical scrutiny that lies in the immediate background of Montaigne’s discussion, for his citation of Pindar on the power of custom as Queen and Empress of the world has been taken from a translation of Plato’s Gorgias, in which Socrates’ interlocutor Callicles advances the proto- Nietzschean doctrine that the sovereign law (Pindar’s nomos basileus panton) is the natural superiority of the superior and stronger over the inferior and weaker.³ Against this Socrates maintains not simply the salutary status of custom or convention as sources of genuine morality, but, famously, the paradox that no one does injustice willingly.

This is the paradox, I shall argue in the following chapters, lying at the heart of chivalric romance as it registers the dissolution of an older moral and theological order, romance as it renews Socrates’ search into the bases of moral knowledge in narrative rather than dialectical or philosophical terms. For the crucial point, posed now in terms of quest and combat and chivalric honor, will always be that moral duty presents itself as a problem of adequate knowledge, of adjudicating among the competing and very often bewildering claims of nature and reason and custom. This is the context in which the custom of the castle, the rituals and traditions of the community of strangers into which the knight errant is received at one or another stage of his chivalric quest, comes to operate as an archetype of the problem of moral uncertainty, one that continues to exert its force, as we shall see, up to the moment Spenser’s knights find uneasy entertainment in the allegorical castles of The Faerie Queene, Hamlet wonders whether to believe his father’s ghost on the battlement, Lear’s elder daughters oppose the bolt against their father, and Macbeth finds his own castles haunted.

Let us look at an episode in Chretien’s twelfth-century tale of Yvain, where the hero arrives at the Castle of Most Ill Adventure (Pesme Aventure), a workhouse where three hundred maidens weave silk under the command of two demi-goblins, beings born of an incubus demon and a mortal woman. By the time Yvain arrives he has the aura of a Christian deliverer because he is traveling with a tame lion and a young woman who has been disinherited by her elder sister. The foul custom of Pesme Aventure operates figuratively to shadow the struggle of the New Testament (the disinherited sister) as it replaces the Old Law. (In Christian typology, the marriage of Jacob to Leah represented fidelity to the synagogue; his marriage to her sister Rachel represented the transition to the Church.)⁴ Yvain receives an inhospitable reception at Pesme Aventure because the town’s rulers have imposed a foul custom (costume, Y 5146) on the inhabitants, requiring them to harass strangers. Despite the opposition, Yvain persists in entering the castle because his heart draws him there (mes fins cuers leanz me tire, Y 5170). His attraction signals the allegorical nature of Pesme Aventure, since earlier in Yvain Calogrenant cautions his listeners to understand with their hearts, For words are lost completely unless they are understood by the heart (car parole est tote perdue/s’ele n’est de euer en- tandue, Y151-152).⁵

Besides recalling the conflict between the old law and the new, Pesme Aventure creates an allegory of marriage, for another custom of the castle—This is an established custom and rule (ce est costume et rante asise, Y 5496)—requires that Yvain must fight the demi-devils: if he wins, the local lord will give him his castle, his lands, and his daughter. Elsewhere in Chretien’s works and later romances, strange customs figure a similar historical reality, as when Clamadeu besieges Blancheflor in her castle of Beaurepaire to win her and her property in Chretien’s Perceval.⁶ Moral allegories often veil all-too-evident concerns.⁷

The social practice that gives us pause at Pesme Aventure concerns not religion or the details of customary arrangements of marriage, class, and property but a form of legal habit: Yvain’s blind acceptance of the terms of combat with the two demons he must defeat. The two halfdevils insist that Yvain’s lion may not help him: You have to be alone and we two together, they announce. If the lion joined you to fight us, then you would not be alone, and it would be two against two (K 5550-5554)« For no obvious reason except adherence to the custom of the castle, Yvain agrees to put the animal in a small room.⁸ The custom, even of a social Other, has a powerful hold on Yvain. He agrees to its terms, although no one but the proprietors of the castle announce those terms, and by participating he helps maintain them. That the lion eventually claws its way under the threshold and helps defeat the pair does not alter the attitude toward custom this moment illustrates.

Chrétien is typically enigmatic in not providing sources for the customs of combat and behavior that guide his characters. Once or twice he traces them to King Arthur’s father Utherpendragon, as in the first verses of Erec and Enide, where Arthur defends the Custom of the White Stag on the grounds that his father maintained it.⁹ But these few references suffice to establish an anterior order that allows Chretien’s knights to presume that customs coincide with natural law until there is evidence to counter that presumption.¹⁰ Social customs acted as a channel for natural law by partaking of the theological idea of an eternal and imprescriptible law. Later writers, who lived in different legal cultures, lost this regard for the past and felt the constraint of customs for other reasons. Sir Thomas Malory, however, who wrote during the fifteenth century, values the past so strongly that his work may be considered properly in the context of medieval French culture.

In the French model, customs guide knights through the moral uncertainties created by the strange situations they encounter, and in this way they function as a form of natural law. But Chretien’s topos becomes problematic because any identification of customary law with nature must be founded on a denial of either social change or social relativity. Philosophically, custom need not imply change over time; it may be considered as a fixed part of a static social order that has no history. In practice, as Arthur Ferguson points out, it must at some time have adapted to local conditions. Insofar as customs express the character peculiar to a people, they stand in opposition to natural law, even if the moment of adaptation is pushed "back beyond