Sir Dynadan from Malory’s late medieval Arthurian prose romance,
Le Morte Darthur, contrasts with the other examples discussed in this chapter. Thus far, resistance to love was mentioned briefly (with the exception of
Guigemar) at the start of each text and then swiftly overcome, turning reluctant lovers into exemplary ones. In contrast, Dynadan’s resistance to love is introduced very late in Malory, after he has already played a significant role in the adventures of Tristram. This may seem to minimise the importance of Dynadan’s romantic a(nti)pathy, making it merely a part of his widely recognised role as a comic questioner of chivalry.
1 See Carolyne Larrington, ‘Gender/Queer Studies’, in Handbook of Arthurian Romance: King Arthur’s Court in Medieval European Literature, ed. by Leah Tether and Johnny McFadyen (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2017), pp. 259–72 (p. 269); Gergely Nagy, ‘A Fool of a Knight, a Knight of a Fool: Malory’s Comic Knights’, Arthuriana, 14.4 (2004), 59–74; Dorsey Armstrong, Gender and the Chivalric Community in Malory’s ‘Morte d’Arthur’ (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003), p. 142; D. Thomas Hanks, Jr., ‘Characterization or Jumble? Sir Dinadan in Malory’, Medieval Perspectives, 2.1 (1987), 167–76 (p. 173); Donald L. Hoffman, ‘Dinadan: The Excluded Middle’, Tristania, 10.1–2 (1984–85), 3–16 (p. 14); Keith Busby, ‘The Likes of Dinadan: The Rôle of the Misfit in Arthurian Literature’, Neophilologus, 67.2 (1983), 161–74 (p. 166). However, this late introduction is appropriate to the different function of Dynadan’s resistance. In contrast to the usual pattern of reluctance to love being overcome to facilitate narrative resolution, Malory’s Dynadan never falls in love (as is the case in most – but not all – versions of Malory’s source for this part of the
Morte, the
Tristan en prose).
2 Version I of the Tristan does include a brief episode where Dynadan falls in love: see Le Roman de Tristan en prose: Version du manuscrit fr. 757 de la Bibliothèque nationale de Paris, ed. by Joël Blanchard and Michel Quéreuil, Classiques français du moyen âge, 123, 5 vols (Paris: Champion, 1997), i, 113–4 (28). However, Malory used a version of the Tristan combining Versions II and IV, so was likely unaware of this episode. See Ralph Norris, Malory’s Library: The Sources of the ‘Morte Darthur’ (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2008), p. 96. His romantic a(nti)pathy persists and endures, marking him out as an alternative, queer figure who stands at odds with the normative patterns of romance.
3 My interpretation here departs from Johnson’s suggestion that Dynadan’s rejection of love is a rejection of a specific kind of love, fin amor. In comparison with other representations of men’s romantic a(nti)pathy I think Dynadan’s resistance appears much more thoroughly subversive and queer. See David F. Johnson, ‘“A grete bourder and a passynge good knyght”: Sir Dinadan: “Gareth with a Twist”’, Arthurian Literature, 37 (2022), pp. 49–65 (p. 64).While Dynadan does not reinforce sexual and marital norms through his own narrative trajectory, there is a sense in which his character can be seen to reinforce romance norms through the contrast he offers to Tristram, the superior knight and lover. As D. Thomas Hanks comments,
Dinadan as foil is perhaps an idea that explains itself as soon as voiced. Where Tristram is invariably brave, Dinadan is as likely as not to flee danger […]. Where Tristram loves Isolde faithfully (excepting his inexplicable marriage to Isolde of the White Hands), Dinadan refuses to love at all. Tristram shines the brighter through his contrast with Dinadan.
4 D. Thomas Hanks, Jr., ‘Foil and Forecast: Dinadan in The Book of Sir Tristram’, Arthurian Yearbook, 1 (1991), 149–63 (p. 159). Dynadan as a foil to Tristram in some ways replicates the use of romantic a(nti)pathy as a contrast to subsequent passion in the romances discussed previously, albeit through two different figures rather than within one character (although Dynadan is sometimes thought of as a double for Tristram).
5 See Busby, ‘The Likes of Dinadan’, p. 165; Stefano Mula, ‘Dinadan Abroad: Tradition and Innovation for a Counter-Hero’, in The European Dimensions of Arthurian Literature, ed. by Bart Besamusca, Frank Brandsma, and Keith Busby (= Arthurian Literature, 24 (2007)), pp. 50–64 (pp. 54–5). Their unequal martial prowess is evident from Dynadan’s first major appearance in the
Morte, when he rides to Cornwall to seek Tristram, jousts with him, is unhorsed by him, and joins him in fellowship.
6 Johnson has recently drawn attention to the potential significance of the earlier mentions of Dynadan, but I concentrate on the later, more substantial episodes in which he appears: ‘Sir Dinadan: “Gareth with a Twist”’. The contrast between them is linked to love when Dynadan complains ‘in all the worlde ar nat such too knyghtes that ar so wood as ys Sir Launcelot and ye Sir Trystram!’ (p. 400), railing against the eagerness to fight of the two ‘trewyst lovers’ in the Arthurian court (p. 57). This anticipates the later and more extensive contrast drawn between Dynadan and Tristram, when Dynadan’s disinterest in love is revealed in full for the first time. As Dynadan scorns lovers, declaring ‘fye on that crauffte!’, Tristram counters that ‘a knyght may never be of proues but yf he be a lovear’ (p. 544), voicing what ‘is virtually an equation of chivalric behavior’.
7 Dhira Mahoney, ‘“Ar ye a knyght and ar no lovear?”: The Chivalry Topos in Malory’s Book of Sir Tristram’, in Conjunctures: Medieval Studies in Honor of Douglas Kelly, ed. by Keith Busby and Norris J. Lacy (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994), pp. 311–24 (p. 311). Yet although Władysław Witalisz misleadingly claims that ‘in his reaction Dinadan questions this romance truth’, in fact Dynadan tells Tristram ‘ye say well’.
8 Władysław Witalisz, ‘A (Crooked) Mirror for Knights – The Case of Dinadan’, Studia Anglica Posnaniensia, 44 (2008), 457–62 (p. 460); Malory, Le Morte Darthur, p. 544. Dynadan does not challenge the romance equation of love with prowess through his response but accepts this paradigm and his own disconnection from it. This acceptance may seem to uphold the normative expectations of romance, but Dynadan may also be read as offering a kind of ‘yes, and…’ here. His acceptance of this equation
and his own distance from it marks him out as an alternative to the norm, opening up different, more subversive and queer possibilities.
These queer potentialities may be read as celebrated or contained within dominant norms, depending on how we understand Dynadan’s comic role to function. Dynadan’s comic role is directly related to his resistance to love in his dialogue with Isode, when he arrives at Joyous Gard looking for Tristram in the second book of ‘Sir Tristram de Lyones’. Isode and Dynadan discuss Dynadan’s resistance to love and its merits or disadvantages, Isode ultimately asking Dynadan whether he would live up to the example set by Sir Bleoberys de Ganys by fighting three knights for her, going so far as to say ‘insomuche as ye bene a knyght of Kynge Arthurs, I requyre you to do batayle for me’ (p. 549). Dynadan responds,
‘I shall sey you ye be as fayre a lady as evir I sawe ony, and much fayrer than is my lady Quene Gwenyvere, but wyte you well, at one worde, I woll nat fyght for you wyth thre knyghtes, Jesu me defende!’
Than Isode lowghe, and had good game at hym. So he had all the chyre that she myght make hym, and there he lay all that nyght. (p. 549)
Isode responds to Dynadan with laughter, a response that Dorsey Armstrong reads as acceptance, aligning with recent work by Stephanie Trigg and Debra Best, who have argued that the ability to make someone laugh is a knightly or courtly accomplishment.
9 Armstrong, Gender and the Chivalric Community, p. 141; Stephanie Trigg, ‘“Laughe and pleye so womanly”: Feeling Happy’ (presented at the 22nd Biennial New Chaucer Society Congress, Durham, 2022); Debra E. Best, ‘“A lowed laghtur that lady logh”: Laughter, Snark, and Sarcasm in Middle English Romance’, in Words that Tear the Flesh: Essays on Sarcasm in Medieval and Early Modern Literature and Cultures, ed. by Stephen Alan Baragona and Elizabeth Louise Rambo (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2018), pp. 143–64. In this sense, Dynadan’s comic role could indeed be seen as ‘a positive alternative to the standard “knights who serve ladies” paradigm’; Dynadan the famous japer may be celebrated not despite but in part because of his resistance to love, which he mobilises to comic effect.
10 Armstrong, Gender and the Chivalric Community, p. 141. The ‘chyre’ Dynadan receives from Isode certainly indicates a positive reaction to his answer. However, might we not stop and ask: is Dynadan actually joking here?
Dynadan’s response to Isode is entirely characteristic: while he displays bravery at times in the
Morte, he is no stranger to weighing up the odds and, if he decides they are not in his favour, doing everything in his power to avoid fighting. There are some notable exceptions, including his offer to fight Palomydes for Tristram when Tristram is wounded, even if this would result in his death. However, this seems to testify to his particular love for Tristram more than his innate bravery. While Dynadan’s response may be intended to make Isode laugh, then, it also seems likely to be true. So where exactly does the humour come from here? Theories of camp, specifically camp conceived as queer discourse and as performative, may be a helpful way to understand the humour of Dynadan’s response. Dynadan often deliberately performs and exaggerates his chosen roles of japer or coward, aligning with the queerness of camp as an exaggeration of a stereotype that functions as ‘a survivalist strategy (working through a reinscription of stigma) for the subordinated, the excluded, the unnatural, the fake’.
11 Fabio Cleto, ‘Introduction: Queering the Camp’, in Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject, ed. by Fabio Cleto (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), pp. 1–42 (p. 8). That is, Dynadan recognises that a good knight is required to be brave and to be in love with a woman, and that he is neither, and he responds to this difference not by hiding it or denying it but by exaggerating it. This maps onto understandings of the humour of camp: Esther Newton has argued that ‘camp humor is a system of laughing at one’s incongruous position instead of crying’, while Ann Pellegrini suggests with regard to Jewish camp that ‘when the joke’s on you, perhaps the best defence is getting there first’.
12 Esther Newton, Mother Camp: Female Impersonators in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), p. 109; Ann Pellegrini, ‘After Sontag: Future Notes on Camp’, in A Companion to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Studies, ed. by George E. Haggerty and Molly McGarry (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), pp. 168–93 (p. 178). This seems to me an apt model for Dynadan’s humorous role-playing, and particularly his exchange with Isode. Dynadan may recognise that refusing to fight three knights for Isode is shameful, but he also realises that her beauty and encouragement do not motivate him. He responds to the threat of shame not by shying away from it but by making this truth comic, sharing it as a joke with Isode rather than allowing her to mock him: getting to the joke first.
This shared joke, however, acts as a survival strategy not only for Dynadan but also for Isode. When Armstrong considers the use of laughter elsewhere in the
Morte, in the episode where Dynadan is forced to don women’s clothing, she suggests that laughter is not only ‘reflecting the dissipation of gender anxiety, but rather, functioning as a strategy to diffuse such anxiety’.
13 Armstrong, Gender and the Chivalric Community, p. 140. See further Sandra M. Hordis, ‘Gender Anxiety and Dialogic Laughter in Malory’s Morte Darthur’, in Medieval English Comedy, ed. by Sandra M. Hordis and Paul Hardwick (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007), pp. 145–70. Dynadan and Isode’s exchange may also operate in this dual direction, both marking and diffusing anxiety over Dynadan’s response and its challenge to romance’s chivalric and romantic priorities. Dynadan must present himself as camp, comic, playing a role in order not to be read as deviating threateningly from expected norms, while Isode must read Dynadan this way in order to overlook his challenge to these norms, both tacitly agreeing that it is ‘only’ a joke. However, this strategy of assimilation may not be entirely successful, because identifying Dynadan as only telling a joke draws attention to the performative nature of the opposite role against which Dynadan defines himself: the role of the brave lover–knight, which is no less performative than Dynadan’s cowardly persona. The performativity of knighthood is indeed foregrounded in the comparison and contrast between Tristram and Dynadan because of the episode where Tristram pretends to be a coward and Dynadan berates him for this, performing a direct reversal of their roles (pp. 544–6, 549–52). Tristram, too, is revealed as a master role-player here, denaturalising not only Dynadan’s posturing but the posturing of all knights, even – or perhaps especially – the ‘good’ ones.
To read Dynadan as camp, with a focus on camp as intertwined with queer gender or sexuality, both aligns with and opens up the wider queer resonances of his role in the
Morte Darthur. That Dynadan has queer potential is suggested in gendered terms when he is forced to wear women’s clothing at the tournament of Surluse, making Guenevere and the court laugh so hard they fall down.
14 On this episode, see Armstrong, Gender and the Chivalric Community, pp. 135–40; Molly Martin, Vision and Gender in Malory’s ‘Morte Darthur’ (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2010), pp. 91–3; Hoffman, ‘Dinadan: The Excluded Middle’, pp. 9–12. Again, pausing to ask exactly what is funny here highlights Dynadan’s camp role, as well as the way in which laughter might enable or contain subversive potential. Guenevere laughs at Dynadan ‘ibrought in so amonge them all’ (p. 530), but she does not seem to be laughing at the sight of a knight dressed in women’s clothing, as Launcelot has just donned women’s clothing with no humorous effects. Instead, it seems to be the sight of
Dynadan dressed in women’s clothing that is humorous. Why might this be? Is it a matter of intention – is it amusing that Dynadan has been forced to wear women’s clothing as a token of humiliation before the court, where Launcelot wore such clothing as a deliberate disguise on the battlefield? Or is Dynadan the source of humour because of something about him? Newton writes that drag ‘is a double inversion that says, “appearance is an illusion”. Drag says “my ‘outside’ appearance is feminine, but my essence ‘inside’ [the body] is masculine”. At the same time it symbolizes the opposite inversion; “my appearance ‘outside’ [my body, my gender] is masculine but my essence ‘inside’ [myself] is feminine”’.
15 Newton, Mother Camp, p. 103. Is Guenevere laughing because she recognises that Dynadan’s enforced drag expresses his difference, a difference that he himself expresses comically and that others receive as comic – perhaps in part to assimilate it rather than be forced to recognise it?
Dynadan being forced to wear women’s clothing imposes queerness upon him in relation to gender, but he could with more accuracy and more attention to his self-expression be seen as queer in terms of sexuality. Indeed, this may be what Guenevere and the court are picking up on in framing Dynadan as different through the enforced drag. Dynadan’s love of Tristram is well known. It is perhaps most clearly illuminated during the tournament at the Castle of Maidens, when Dynadan uncharacteristically bravely volunteers to fight Palomydes for Tristram, who is wounded, telling him ‘yf I be slayne ye may pray for my soule’ (p. 419). In addition, Gareth remarks upon Dynadan’s love for Tristram at Lonezep, telling Tristram ‘ye ar the man in the worlde that he lovyth beste’ (p. 589), while Dynadan himself tells Palomydes ‘I love my lorde Sir Trystram abovyn all othir knyghtes, and hym woll I serve and do honoure’ (p. 479). Although Corinne Saunders suggests that in Dynadan’s declaration of love, ‘the reader is drawn away from the individual erotics of love by Malory’s inclusion of Lamorak’s affirmation of this sentiment’, Lamerok’s response has a rather different emphasis to Dynadan’s, as he declares ‘so shall I […] in all that I may with my power’.
16 Corinne Saunders, ‘“Greater love hath no man”: Friendship in Medieval English Romance’, in Traditions and Innovations in the Study of Medieval English Literature: The Influence of Derek Brewer, ed. by Charlotte Brewer and Barry Windeatt (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2013), pp. 128–43 (p. 138); Malory, Le Morte Darthur, p. 479. While Dynadan articulates his love for Tristram and his intention to serve him, Lamerok affirms his service without expressing his love. Of course, love for another knight is not necessarily erotic: references to knights’ love of each other are fairly frequent and often platonic in the
Morte. However, the eroticism of Dynadan’s love for Tristram is suggested by his comment in the scene with Lamerok that ‘I woll nat abyde, for I have suche a talente to se Sir Trystram that I may nat abyde longe from hym’ (p. 479). P. J. C. Field glosses ‘talente’ as ‘longing’;
17 P. J. C. Field, ‘Glossary’, in Le Morte Darthur: Apparatus, Commentary, Glossary, and Index of Names, ed. by P. J. C. Field, 2 vols (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2013), ii, 893–988 (p. 974). it can also mean ‘desire’, ‘inclination’, ‘inherent physical urge or drive’, or ‘resolve’ (‘talent’ is also the Anglo-Norman word used to describe Guigemar’s lack of desire to love).
18 ‘Talent n.’, Middle English Dictionary <https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/middle-english- dictionary/dictionary/MED44433> [accessed 19 July 2023]. ‘Talente’ is rare in Malory’s
Morte: Tomomi Kato’s concordance records it only once, in this scene.
19 Tomomi Kato, A Concordance to the Works of Sir Thomas Malory (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1974), p. 1192. This unusual term marks out Dynadan’s powerful attachment to Tristram as unusual and perhaps excessive, going beyond the normative boundaries of chivalric attachment to indicate a queer connection. Analogous figures to Dynadan provide further support for a queer reading: Keith Busby explores the parallels between Dynadan and Galehaut of the
Lancelot en prose in the Vulgate
Lancelot-Grail Cycle, commenting that ‘the intensity of Galehaut’s love for Lancelot can be illustrated from practically every page of the “Galehaut” section’.
20 Busby, ‘The Likes of Dinadan’, p. 164. Of course, the fact that Dynadan’s love for Tristram is less intense and less frequently commented upon in Malory and the
Tristan en prose is significant: Galehaut’s love for Lancelot is of a different quality. But the influence of Galehaut upon both the
Tristan en prose and directly on Malory suggests that Dynadan’s love for Tristram carries a queer residue. This is not fully activated by Malory, but in combination with Dynadan’s resistance to love (or, more accurately, his resistance to love
women) and his camp and comic expressions of gender and alternative sexuality, it reveals the presence of queer identities in the
Morte.
21 The Vulgate Lancelot-Grail Cycle was one of Malory’s main sources for the Morte: see Norris, Malory’s Library, pp. 4, 11, 70–3. The humorous role attributed to Dynadan therefore also illustrates how queer identities can be subsumed into the dominant courtly culture. Yet such assimilation is not complete: Dynadan’s performance of comedy and cowardice may foreground the ways in which more normative roles are themselves performed and constructed, inhabiting both the radical and conservative possibilities of camp and leaving them open for the reader to activate. Like
Guigemar, then, the role of Dynadan in the
Morte both reveals the strategies romance deploys to circumscribe queerness and indicates the queer potential of the motif of resistance to love.