Manuscripts of the Lancelot-Grail Cycle were widely available throughout Europe during the Middle Ages. They were produced in large numbers from the first half of the thirteenth century, when the individual texts were composed and the Cycle brought into being, until the first years of the sixteenth century, by which time they were being superseded by the succession of printed editions that had begun with the Lancelot of 1488. As one would expect, most of the manuscripts were written in northern France, but significant numbers were made on the fringes of French-speaking territory, in areas such as England, southern France and Italy, where part of the population had French as their native language and part did not. The manuscripts circulated freely within France itself (north and south) and frequently passed to neighbouring areas, including those that were not French-speaking. The movement of manuscripts in the opposite direction, from surrounding regions to northern France, was doubtless much less common, and there is virtually no evidence for it until the very end of the medieval period.

The manuscripts themselves were of various types, some relatively small, much the same size as modern books, others extremely large and in several volumes. Some were written in haste, others with great care. Many of the survivors are richly decorated with miniatures and other artwork, whilst others are entirely plain. The high proportion of extant manuscripts with miniatures is not likely to be an accurate reflection of the original state of affairs. Their status as luxury items, as well as any interest aroused by the paintings themselves, will have tended to preserve the illustrated books in greater numbers, whereas the copies containing nothing but text (in a language that was becoming increasingly difficult to understand) could be discarded with few qualms, or replaced by the more convenient printed editions.

There are approximately 220 surviving manuscripts and larger fragments of the various texts that make up the Lancelot-Grail Cycle. The majority are in France and have probably been there ever since they were written, but 42 (including 3 fragments) are now in England or Wales, 2 now in France were probably in England during the Middle Ages, and a further 25 were in England during the nineteenth century before returning to the Continent or moving on to the United States or Japan. Thus, nearly a third of the survivors have been in England or Wales at some time.

The subject of incest, whether in historical or present society, has always received much attention from scholars in the arts and humanities. However, as a taboo of the highest order, the more extreme activities associated with the word “incest” can often obscure a broader understanding of its subtleties and gradations. Aside from fully-consummated sexual acts, there is also a wide range of intra-family relationships which are based upon incestuous tendencies. The interest of this study lies with an examination of incestuous tendencies found in the plots of medieval texts, and further, how to interpret these accounts using modern concepts of incest and the incest taboo.

Despite centuries of fascination with this topic, it has been only since the development of feminist theory that the study of incest has attained a new degree of dynamism. Further, the feminist perspective has been able to achieve new accessibility to this especially sensitive topic in a variety of scholarly disciplines. Even the primary occidental incest myth of Oedipus has been opened to broader interpretation. To further advance the rethinking of incest themes, feminist criticism has proposed revisions to two of the most important theories on incest: Freud's psychoanalytical theory and Lévi-Strauss's anthropological theory.

As an introduction to my examination of the incest motif in courtly literature, it is with this last point that I wish to begin. Some aspects of Freud's and Lévi-Strauss's theories seem to me to contain a high level of plausibility. I also believe they are helpful in clarifying the incest themes found in courtly literature.

Two works by feminist writers have had particular influence on this topic: a paper written in the 70s by anthropologist Gayle Rubin, and Judith Butler's study, Gender Trouble. Rubin's paper is important because of the connection she draws between the ideas of Freud and Lévi-Strauss, and further how she appropriates their concepts for the cause of feminist theory. She interprets these works as the two most advanced theories of female oppression – of course without that being the original intention of the conceiving “fathers.” One of Rubin's central hypotheses states that the concepts of the two theorists interlock with each other nearly perfectly:

Feminizing Chaucer is a revised edition of the volume entitled Geoffrey Chaucer in the Harvester-Wheatsheaf Feminist Readings series, published in 1991. Since the nature of the book is no longer defined by the series in which it originally appeared, it has been re-christened with a title that reflects its contents and approach more directly. The new title has – as I suppose is readily apparent – a dual significance. In the first place, it signals that the book interprets Chaucer's work from a feminist standpoint, and in the light of modern feminist writings. Secondly, it aims to show that the ethos that pervades Chaucer's work is a ‘feminized’ one – that women are central to his imaginative vision and his explorations of ethical and religious problems. The central substance of this book remains unchanged since 1991, but it has been updated by means of additional references, footnotes, and bibliography, and a new Excursus on ‘Wife-Swapping in Medieval Literature’, which extends the discussion of the Franklin's Tale, has been added. In this Preface, I shall try to sketch some of the developments in Chaucerian gender studies over the last ten years, and to re-situate my own study in relation to them.

At the end of the 1980s, feminist criticism seemed rather thin on the ground. True, exploration of gender stereotypes played a significant role in the work of David Aers and Sheila Delany, but both these critics aligned themselves primarily with the tradition of Marxist criticism rather than with feminism tout court. Despite a number of pioneering articles by (among others) Mary Carruthers (1979), Louise Fradenburg (1986), Lee Patterson (1983), and Susan Schibanoff (1986, 1988), there was no book-length study of gender in Chaucer. All that changed in a short space of time, with the appearance of Carolyn Dinshaw's Chaucer's Sexual Poetics (1989), closely followed by Priscilla Martin's Chaucer's Women (1990), my own volume in the Feminist Readings series (1991), and Elaine Tuttle Hansen's Chaucer and the Fiction of Gender (1992). These volumes appeared so rapidly that in each of them there is barely a mention (if that) of any of the others. These first forays into the territory are also strikingly different in approach and attitude.

In 1301 a series of ordinances was issued for York which was designed to regulate trade in response to the difficulties caused by the residence of the royal court within the city. One of the more remarkable of these was that baldly entitled ‘pigs and prostitutes’. The juxtaposition is a very telling one. Not only were pigs symbolic of lust, but they created problems by wandering the streets. So did prostitutes, whose feet, like the archetypal harlot of the book of Proverbs, ‘will not abide within the house’. Thus when the mother in The Good WyfeWold a Pylgremage warned her daughter, ‘rene thou not fro hous to house lyke an Antyny gryce’ [piglet], she was intimating that such behaviour implied a lack of chastity. Clearly within clerical, didactic and civic governmental sources women’s mobility was frowned upon. Here we may note that only two of Chaucer’s pilgrims were female, the Prioress and, more significantly, that singular creation of anti-feminist discourse, the Wife of Bath. The movement of women may have been regarded as in some way particularly subversive, but the labour legislation of the later fourteenth century warns us that all migration was seen in some quarters to be subversive. The Commons’ petition against vagrants of 1376, for example, saw in the mobility of labourers ‘the great impoverishment, destruction and ruin of the commons’ and hinted darkly that such migrants often became ‘staff strikers’ (clearly the medieval equivalent of New Age travellers) who ‘lead an idle life, commonly robbing poor people in simple villages’. But neither the petition against vagrants nor Chaucer’s fictional pilgrims are simple mirrors of society. Any perusal of conventional historical sources reveals that medieval men and women were both highly mobile and that such mobility played an essential part of the functioning of a complex society. The purpose of this paper is to try to reconcile these two perspectives.

There is a wealth of evidence to indicate that medieval society was highly mobile and that significant numbers of people would have moved from their natal homes during the course of their lives.

The large number of films either inspired by Arthurian themes (modern in scope) or drawn more closely from Arthurian works of literature is testimony to the continuing power of the Arthurian legends to fascinate and inspire, in the true spirit of the medieval tradition of continuation. The change of medium is not restricted to feature films, since television producers have adapted the cinematic art to the small screen with serializations and made-for-television movies. Kevin Harty lists 564 medieval movies produced since the first film was made in 1897, two years after the Lumière brothers invented the medium, to the present day, and a total of 79 Arthurian movies, the earliest of which were French. But if the sheer quantity of output is evidence of the modern vitality of the medium, a rapid breakdown of the films reveals that the English-speaking world has a proprietary hold, and in the words of a recent author, ‘overall quality does not seem to be on the upswing in Arthurian films.’ The medieval sources most frequently exploited for Arthurian film, insofar as sources can be adduced, tend to be of anglophone origin, especially Malory's Death of Arthur, but the Perceval story, based on Chrétien de Troyes's Le Conte du Graal or Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival, the Tristan and Isolde story, and Le Chevalier de la Charrette also have their place. Medieval Arthurian literature sprang from a common Celtic heritage – the matter of Brittany as well as Britain – which was actively exploited at a time when the English court's official language was the Norman variety of French, but in the domain of film, there is a linguistic and cultural divide. Anglophone directors understandably have a predilection for the English medieval tradition, French directors tend to take the French tradition, and German directors the German tradition, but it has been suggested that anglophone audiences view the Arthurian legends through a different lens from that of francophone audiences because of historically-determined differences in cultural perception. For native English speakers, King Arthur is not only a literary figure but also a historical figure, and this linkage influences the significance they would attach to Arthurian legends.

Social attitudes towards children are an important means towards understanding the past. It is through the procreation of children that a society seeks to perpetuate itself. Securing this continuity is thus one of the most important goals of any society. By examining attitudes towards children and childhood we are presented with a tool which allows us to expose the social values and aspirations, the weight of a society’s fears and pressures and its basic rules and norms. The question of attitudes towards children and childhood was raised by Philippe Ariès’s book Centuries of Childhood, first published in French in 1960. Ariès argued that throughout the Middle Ages, and up until the seventeenth century, the concepts of childhood and family were very differently understood from those which developed subsequently. In his opinion, prior to the seventeenth century children were not recognized as entities separate from adults and were in fact perceived to be merely ‘small adults’. Avariety of reactions, both positive and negative, followed the publication of Ariès’s theory. These served to place the topics of children and childhood at the forefront of historical research, just as they are in the fields of psychology, sociology, and anthropology. This paper will examine the place of children in Jewish society of northern France and Germany during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in the light of the debate about Ariès’s thesis.

During the Middle Ages the Jewish group in Christian countries perceived itself to be threatened by the Christian society that surrounded it. The threat was multi-faceted and stemmed among other things from the knowledge that Christians could and did convert Jews to Christianity by force, by inducement, or by persuasion. In the long era of persecution and forced expulsion following the first Crusade of 1096, Jews as a community concluded that Christians intended to focus their missionary efforts particularly on Jewish children. This concern of the Jews was predicated on active attempts by both ecclesiastical and lay authorities to take control of Jewish children. For example, in 1497 in Portugal all Jewish children were forcibly baptized, undoubtably as a preliminary to baptizing their parents.

Aknight paradoxically associated with a shameful cart rescues the Queen, liberates the captives, and becomes Guinevere's lover. In its barest outline, that is the plot of Chrétien de Troyes's Chevalier de la Charrete, the romance that catapulted Lancelot into fame and forever changed the course of Arthurian history. What existed before Chrétien remains uncertain, but there is no doubt that his version became the starting point for all subsequent tales of Lancelot as the knight whose extraordinary prowess is inextricably linked to his love for Arthur's Queen. Identity and love, the two great themes of the Charrete, set the agenda for the prose Lancelot, where they were amplified, redeployed, and ultimately redefined. Across the large canvas of the Lancelot-Grail Cycle, the Cart episode remains at the center of Lancelot's story, even as it marks an important shift in Lancelot as hero, still the best of Arthurian chivalry but not ‘the good knight’ who will achieve the Grail.

The manner in which the prose author exploits Chrétien's model is as idiosyncratic as Lancelot himself for subsequent romance tradition. In Myrrha Lot-Borodine's words, the prose Lancelot literally incorporates Le Chevalier de la Charrete. Fully digested, Chrétien's text reappears as ‘li contes de la Charete.’ The reference is a tribute to the fame of Chrétien's romance, but the loss of authorial connection corroborates the extent to which the episode has lost its separate boundaries within the interlaced space of the prose narrative. How does the prose romancer both recapitulate and transform Chrétien's romance? Comparison of their opening passages will give a detailed sense of what the global change in context entails on the levels of style and narrative shape. That analysis will lead in turn to a better understanding of the thematic consequences observable with particular clarity in two sets of episodes, the eponymous cart and the marvelous tomb adventures.

Chrétien's romance opens with a prologue, which places author, story, and public in a triangular dialogue:

Introduction

What could be more natural than translating an Old French prose text into Middle Dutch prose? Two small fragments from a fourteenth-century manuscript illustrate precisely this, for they contain a Middle Dutch prose translation of the French prose Lancelot. And yet in the Low Countries there is far more manuscript evidence of translations of the same text in rhymed couplets: Lantsloot vander Haghedochte (c. 1260), and the Lanceloet–Queeste van den Grale–Arturs doet trilogy (c. 1280) preserved in the Lancelot Compilation (c. 1320). It is generally assumed that the two rhymed versions preceded the prose version, although there is as yet no conclusive evidence for this. The three independent translations of the Old French prose Lancelot might therefore represent a gradual introduction of its literary innovations, such as the use of prose and the use of li contes as an impersonal narrator, into Middle Dutch literature. Whether this idea is completely convincing is debatable, but first we must consider the texts themselves, starting with the prose fragments. Then we will focus on the famous Middle Dutch Lancelot Compilation.

The Middle Dutch Prose Lancelot

The prose manuscript fragments belong to the Rotterdam Gemeentebibliotheek collection (hence the name ‘Rotterdam Fragments’ and the initial R) and are dated c. 1340–50; the original prose translation may have been done in the thirteenth century, after or about the same time as the verse translations. They consist of two non-consecutive parchment folios with two columns of prose on each side, eight columns of forty-one lines in all, with four red and blue initials two lines high; the end of sentences is usually marked with a dot. The dialect is predominantly Brabantine. Both folios contain episodes belonging to the so-called ‘Préparation à la Queste’ section of the French prose Lancelot. The first fragment describes how Gawain is invited to take part in the tournament at the ‘Chastel del Moulin.’ In the second fragment Lancelot lies ill after drinking from a poisoned well and the damsel who can cure him wants to know what her reward will be for restoring him to health. In her groundbreaking study and edition of the fragments, Orlanda Lie calls this episode (R II) the ‘Virgin Love Covenant,’ and the other episode (R I) the ‘Chastel del Moulin.’

The topic of this paper is the definition of loyalty demonstrated in three thirteenth-century texts which present contemporary people. The behaviour of kings is contrasted with the justice and urbanity of knights: King John of England especially is inept, unfair and discourteous.

The chronicler Roger of Wendover, reporting on John's Irish campaign in 1210, tells how John had the penny, halfpenny and farthing of English coinage struck for use in Ireland, till then moneyless; the coins were valid in both countries, and destined for his royal treasury. Apparently randomly, Wendover proceeds:

Wendover's account shows the aspects of John's rule which impressed contemporaries: his intense interest in filling his treasury, his political insecurity and ruthless pursuit of his enemies, his treatment of women, and the political importance of Ireland and Wales as outpost Angevin colonies. John's personal interest in Ireland dated from 1185 when he was proclaimed lord of Ireland. Wendover's narrative is contextualized by the barons of the Welsh March (border country) who had colonized Ireland and held vast estates there: de Briouze was a marcher baron. They had enjoyed unusual independence since Henry II's reign, but except for de Briouze and Fouke fitz Warin they were loyal to John. John had inherited a huge debt resulting from payment of the enormous ransom demanded by the Emperor Henry VI for his brother Richard's release in 1193–94, further compounded by his own desperate desire to regain the Angevin lands in France lost in 1204. Very shortly after this, in 1212, the very rebellion of the barons which John feared began brewing, leading to Magna Carta in 1215 and French invasion in 1216.

John's view of his situation is not recorded by Roger of Wendover, who is a partial and inaccurate chronicler, informed by hearsay and bitterly prejudiced against John.

The Queste del Saint Graal is a remarkable feat of the imagination. It is a deeply religious story, yet it has little basis in the received history and teachings of the Church, and is embedded as an integral part in a series of romances which have quite other, secular values. Despite the unofficial nature of its material, the theology it contains is complex and subtle; yet at the same time it succeeded in appealing to the courtly audience for whom the romances were created.We may well wonder how these disparate themes of chivalry, mysticism and apocryphal stories of the Crucifixion were welded into one.

Chivalry itself was of course a primarily secular movement. The rise of the knightly class in the tenth and eleventh centuries, and the emergence of a specific ethos attached to the concept of knighthood, is a vast and difficult theme in itself. Who or what a knight was depended on the language you spoke: the Latin miles means soldier, the German Ritter and the French chevalier a horseman, the English knicht a man who serves a lord. Only in English can we distinguish between chivalry and knighthood.

What we can say is that the knights were key players in the evolving feudal world of this period, and that somehow, from the newly developed arms and tactics of the period, an esprit de corps emerged which came to transcend immediate social rank. It can be seen in the conduct of war and in the introduction of restrictions aimed at mitigating the risks of war for the knightly classes. There is evidence for organized training in the use of knightly weapons on horseback – spear, shield and sword – developing from the early eleventh century onwards into a violent form of sport, mock fights where war to the death was prevented by a series of rules and restraints. This in turn developed in the mid-twelfth century into a spectator sport, with distinguishing badges and commentators: heralds and heraldry were needed to make it possible for the onlookers to make out what was going on, and the emblems of opposing sides in war became individual coats of arms marking the prowess of the single knight.

Aunque Rafael Lapesa considere que, con excepción del Marqués de Santillana, “sería aventurado afirmar que cualquier poeta castellano anterior a Boscán tuviese familiaridad con el Canzoniere petrarquesco” creo menos que aventurado reconocer entre las páginas de nuestros cancioneros la esporádica huella del vate de Valclusa tanto en el de Estúñiga como en el General. Sería muy raro que Juan de Dueñas no hubiese conocido las Rime Sparse cuando compuso en Nápoles su muy imitada “Nao de Amor,” por lo cual me parece acertado Pierre Le Gentil cuando propuso como fuente del poema el bellísimo soneto CLXXXIX de Petrarca:

Aquí se alegoriza el estado y las fatigas del amante-nave, gobernado por el Amor, su señor y enemigo. Cada parte de la embarcación y cada accidente de la tormenta que la acosa conllevan el símbolo de la inquietud, perturbación y congoja que sufre el alma amante y los peligros por los que atraviesa. El poema de Dueñas usa también la metáfora del enamorado-nave, pero en vez de los 14 versos de Petrarca, su alegoría se expande por 293 en 22 estrofas y una finida. A todas luces aquí estamos ante algo sustancialmente distinto del soneto italiano. Tanto en el poema de Petrarca como en el de Juan de Dueñas se dice de una navegación por un mar tempestuoso, en la cual los vientos rompen las velas y el dolor anega al amante:

Si bien Dueñas usa como Petrarca la metáfora de la nave, la varía de tal modo que, estrictamente hablando, no se trata de la misma metáfora. En Petrarca el amante es a un tiempo embarcación y tempestad ya que, por un lado, sus pensamientos son los remos y las sartas están hechas de ese error e ignorancia propios de un alma-nave “colma d’oblio”; mientras, por otro lado, la tormenta no es menos subjetiva: los vientos son sus suspiros, esperanzas y deseos, la lluvia su llanto, niebla la pena del desdén, mientras en las turbadas aguas han muerto “la ragion e l’arte” bajo un cielo ausente de los ojos amados. Como se verá, el yo poético del poema español es a la vez y confusamente navegante y nave, y su tormenta parece un fenómeno exterior, ajeno y distinto del enamorado.

In his Historia regum Britanniae, completed in 1136, the Oxford cleric Geoffrey of Monmouth tells the following story:

It is nowadays a commonplace that the meaning of a term is not fixed in isolation, but only in relation to the cultural or linguistic structure of which it forms part. So the value assigned to ‘woman’ or ‘womanhood’ cannot be fully determined without reference to the values invested in the term ‘man’. To make ‘woman’ into a moral positive is not enough, if she becomes thereby merely the ‘silent bearer of ideology’, as Mary Jacobus puts it (1979, 10) – if, that is, her morality acts only as a salving conscience for the men who are left free to practise the realpolitik required for effective action in the world. The question of how Chaucer conceives of men is thus the last and most crucial element in determining the status of women in his writing.

Male heroes are, as I have already noted, few and far between in Chaucer. In the Canterbury Tales, the moral high ground is occupied by Constance, Griselda, Cecilia, Prudence, and no man is accorded the central and dominating position in the narrative that they enjoy. It is only in Troilus that a single male consciousness becomes the central locus of poetic meaning; whatever the prominence given to Criseyde, the central subject of this poem is the loss of happiness, and it is to Troilus and not to Criseyde that this experience belongs. The question raised by this experience – the question of what meaning can be attached to human happiness in a mutable world – has urgency only if we believe that it was a true happiness, and also that its loss cannot simply be written down to failings or vices – female fickleness, male inertia – which could be avoided by those wishing for better fortune. Chaucer takes pains, therefore, to present Troilus as admirable throughout; he is ‘this ilke noble knyght’ to the last (V 1752). In his final emotional rejection of human love, Chaucer still speaks, not of Troilus's weakness or folly, but of his ‘grete worthynesse’ and his ‘noblesse’ (V 1829, 1831). It is to Troilus that we should look first, therefore, for evidence of Chaucer's conception of a masculine ideal.

Dans son article « Réflexions sur le Nibelungenlied », Jean Fourquet attirait l’attention sur « l’absence du surnaturel chrétien, que ce soit sous la forme de l’intervention divine dans le cours des événements, ou de l’influence, sur les décisions des héros, de leur qualité de chrétiens, de l’idée de leur salut » (283) et il ajoutait que, pour lui, « l’absence de l’ordre de la grâce [était] essentiellement une loi du genre, déterminée par la fonction de cette poésie destinée à la distraction des cours » (283). Il ne fallait absolument pas en conclure que « le [Nibelungenlied] reflèterait la vie d’une société dont Dieu et l’expérience religieuse profonde était [sic] absents » (” Sur une nouvelle étude » 291). En effet, « [l]’absence de Dieu dans une grande oeuvre littéraire n’implique pas nécessairement … son absence dans la vie de l’auteur et dans le monde où l’auteur puise son expérience. Tout ce qui est supérieur à la nature humaine est seulement ‘mis entre parenthèses’, ausgeklammert » (” Sur une nouvelle étude » 292). Je vais reprendre cet aspect de l’oeuvre sur nouveaux frais en me bornant aux points essentiels et en comparant à l’occasion la Chanson des Nibelungen à la Thidrekssaga, une oeuvre qui vraisemblablement est la traduction en vieux-norrois de la source de la Chanson dans une vaste compilation en prose norroise de récits ayant trait à Dietrich.

Il est dans la Chanson des Nibelungen un personnage parfaitement chrétien, c’est Ruedeger; Rodingeir, le personnage qui lui correspond dans la Thidrekssaga, ne l’est pas: c’est donc le rédacteur-narrateur de la Chanson qui aura remodelé Ruedeger, qui est appelé « vater maneger tugende » (” père de toutes les hautes qualités », 2202,4); il est foncièrement bon, désintéressé, altruiste, pour lui le problème essentiel est d’effectuer la synthèse entre gotes und der werlt hulde, c’est-à-dire de satisfaire aux exigences de l’honneur héroïque d’ici-bas et à celles d’une instance supérieure dans l’au-delà. Son comportement de vrai chrétien se révèle quand, au moment où Kriemhild lui rappelle le serment qu’il lui a prêté à Worms de la servir jusqu’à leur mort à tous deux et lui enjoint de lui prêter maintenant son aide, il lui répond: « Je ne le conteste aucunement: je vous ai juré, noble femme, que pour vous je risquerais l’honneur et aussi la vie.

Some time in the early 1190s a knight, identified only as ‘B’, who had been cured of a severe illness, decided to enter the religious life in the monastery from which he held his land. He also required his under-age son to take the habit as a monk. Unfortunately, the boy did not adapt to the monastic life and, having reached the age of ‘discretion’, after only ten weeks he absconded. With the support of other relatives he then claimed his father’s goods back from the abbot. The relatives swore that the boy had been under age and unwilling when he took the habit and, on encountering resistance from the abbot, took the case to the papal curia. In 1195 Pope Celestine III (1191–98) ruled that if it were true that the boy had not been willing to be professed and had left the monastery when he had attained the age of discretion, he was to be considered free and was not to be compelled to return to the monastery. He was also free to demand the goods of his father which belonged to him by succession. Celestine’s decision was of such significance that it was included in the Decretal collection drawn up for Gregory IX (1227–41) and established as a precedent for later disputes.

This case raises interesting questions about the relationship between parental responsibility and religious vocation. In this episode there were other relatives who could help the boy and seem to have done so with some vigour, pursuing his cause all the way to the pope. But the dispute also reveals the dilemma for the parent who wished to do something for the good of their soul and yet had responsibility for children. The knight wished to take the habit and resolved the problem of his son as he saw fit. Presumably, as eventually happened in this case, relatives might quite often take on the children of such individuals. But what if there were no relatives? Oblation, in spite of a slight waning in popularity from the twelfth century, remained a common way of providing for children.

The topic of ‘youth’ suggests a natural connection with good advice: the older generation seem to find it irresistible to advise the young. In romances, the giving of advice often takes a very specific form. The young person – most often male, and usually the hero too – has just reached the point where he is about to leave his own family, the familiar society in which he has been brought up. At the very moment at which he reaches the threshold, he is stopped and given what sometimes amounts to several pages of good advice on how to conduct himself in the outside world. The precision of the convention can be seen with particular clarity in a late but thoroughly familiar example: Polonius’s advice to the departing Laertes in Hamlet. The way in which the giving of advice disrupts the schedule for departure is here made explicit to the point of parody:

But despite this hurry, Polonius still insists on giving his son ‘these few precepts in thy memory’, which indeed make up one of the longer speeches of the play. As advice goes, Polonius’s is not at all bad: it amounts to a fairly comprehensive economic, social and moral survival kit for a young gentleman: don’t borrow or lend money; instructions on dress codes; ‘to thine own self be true’. As such, it constitutes a nice mix of the pragmatic and the ideal. Just the same kind of pattern is found extensively in romances, and especially in late romances.

The Hamlet example is also a reminder, however, that the giving of advice is not as straightforward a topos as it might appear at first sight. It is very rare, in fact, for there not to be something odd about it. In this instance, the whole episode invites the basic question of why the passage exists at all. Why, so far as Polonius is concerned, should he hold up the ship? Why, even more pressingly, should Shakespeare hold up the action, for a passage that appears completely irrelevant to the play?