A Queen Before She Was an Adulteress

Guinevere's earliest appearance in the developed legend carries no trace of the love affair that later defines her. Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae, writing around 1136, names her Guanhumara and gives her one central role: victim of Mordred's treachery, seized along with the throne itself while Arthur campaigns against Rome on the continent, an act of usurpation with no romantic betrayal attached to it at all in Geoffrey's telling. It is Chretien de Troyes, writing in French some four decades later, who first gives Guinevere a lover, in a romance whose very title, Lancelot, the Knight of the Cart, centers Lancelot's devotion to her as its subject, Lancelot's willingness to suffer public humiliation, riding in a cart normally reserved for criminals, simply to reach her. Once introduced, the affair does not stay a minor color in the legend; the following century of French prose romance, and above all the thirteenth century Vulgate Cycle, builds an entire tragic architecture around it, so that by the time Malory writes his English Le Morte Darthur in the fifteenth century, the affair is no longer a late addition to Arthur's story but its very engine, the private failure that becomes a public catastrophe.