A love triangle it is defined as a situation where one partner is romantically involved with another person. A perfect love triangle to me would be, a Queen who is married to a rich King with a love for her Kings knight. Guinevere is a young beautiful queen who marries King Arthur. Lancelot is a knight of King Arthur, but Guinevere is romantically involved with Lancelot.
In the movie First Knight, King Arthur truly believes Guinevere when she says “I want to marry you. Not your crown, not your army. Just you.” What King Arthur did not know was that Guinevere was already in love with someone else. When traveling to marry King Arthur, Guinevere was attacked on the road with her knights. As her knights battled for her she ran into the forest,
where Lancelot saved her. She there fell in love with the hero. Later in the movie King Arthur meets Lancelot and makes him a knight. Not knowing the love he had for his queen Guinevere. When becoming a knight Lancelot is to kiss Guinevere, but Lancelot will not. He says “I dare not kiss so lovely lady, I have but one heart to lose.” Lancelot is trying to be loyal to his king and not risk the temptations. Lancelot wants to be devoted to his King but knows with Guinevere around he will not be. As he tries to leave Guinevere stops Lancelot and she asks him for the kiss he never gave her. As he gives her this kiss, King Arthur comes walking into the room, to see his queen and his best knight being romantically involved. So the love triangle is now exposed. King Arthur furious at his wife asks her “have I failed you?” Guinevere then states, “Love has many faces. I may look at you differently, but not with less love. Guinevere loves Arthur but is also in love with Lancelot. Just as Guinevere says “I only know one way to love my lord, and that is body and mind and soul.” Guinevere has a valid point to me, humans are designed to love more than one person, whether they act on their feelings or not.
In the Arthurian romance genre, Guinevere plays various roles; the purpose of her role depends on the story that she is in. In three separate stories, written by different poets, specifically Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Morte Darthur, and The Wife of Bath’s Tale, Guinevere is used to achieve different goals. In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Guinevere is the catalyst of all of the stories events. The burning desire of Morgan le Fay to destroy Guinevere through dismantling the Round Table is what spurs the arrival of the Green Knight in Arthur’s court and the subsequent quest that Gawain goes on that tests his character and allows him to learn more about himself. The Guinevere in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is the reason that Arthur’s
The love triangle of Arthur, Lancelot, and Guenever is a constant theme throughout every account of the Arthurian legend. Geoffrey Ashe's The Arthurian Handbook states that "We may say that these knights are expected to serve their King..."(81). The revelation of the affair finally comes when Sir Agravaine shouts, "'Traitor Knight! Sir Lancelot, now art thou taken'"(White 569). Lancelot was summoned to Queen Guenever's bedroom, and Sir Agravaine is finally exposing the affair and gaining revenge on Lancelot for unhorsing him many times in the past. The two people that Arthur trusts most are Guenever and Lancelot. Arthur is well aware of the affair between the two, but chooses to pretend that nothing is going on. Due to this naivety, Arthur earns the disrespect (and even hatred) of Agravaine and Mordred, who eventual...
In the novel The Once and Future King, by T.H. White, the character, Queen Guenever, is depicted as a confused and lost woman in an arranged marriage. She had an internal struggle with a shameful secret, an affair with the ugly knight, Lancelot. In the time of King Arthur, women were limited to what they could do, and what decisions they were able to make. She ultimately made some wrong choices in her life, which led to the disapproval from those around her. She was in her marriage by force and had no malicious intensions, but did what she felt she needed.
The victim is nineteen year old Khadijah Stewart. Stewart had grown up in the south side of Richmond, Virginia (a high crime area) where she met a boy named Tommie. Both were in middle school but Tommie soon got arrested for robberies and gun charges, he was sentenced to life as a juvenile. As time goes on Stewart forms a history of dating bad boys. The main on and off again boyfriend throughout her high school years was a young man named Lionel. In High school Stewart is skipping school to hang out Lionel and his gang members. Afraid how the streets could impact Stewart, the mother moves the family to Chesterfield County, a successful middle class suburbs, to create new life. As her life is changing for the better her heart longs to maintain
Sir Gawain and The Green Knight is an example of medieval misogyny. Throughout Medieval literature, specifically Arthurian legends like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the female characters, Guinevere, the Lady, and Morgan leFay are not portrayed as individuals but social constructs of what a woman should be. Guinevere plays a passive woman, a mere token of Arthur. The Lady is also a tool, but has an added role of temptress and adulteress. Morgan leFay is the ultimate conniving, manipulating, woman. While the three women in this legend have a much more active role than in earlier texts, this role is not a positive one; they are not individuals but are symbols of how men of this time perceive women as passive tokens, adulteresses, and manipulators.
Medieval and Renaissance literature develops the concepts of love and marriage and records the evolution of the relation between them. In Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Christian love clashes with courtly love, as men and women grapple with such issues as which partner should rule in marriage, the proper, acceptable role of sex in marriage, and the importance of love as a basis for a successful marriage. Works by earlier writers portray the medieval literary notion of courtly love, the sexual attraction between a chivalric knight and his lady, often the knight's lord's wife. The woman, who generally held mastery in these relationships based on physical desire and consummation, dictated the terms of the knight's duties and obligations, much like a feudal lord over a vassal. This microcosm of romance between man and woman was anchored by the macrocosm of the bonds among men and their fealty to their lord. The dominance of women and fealty to the leader in courtly love contrasts with the dominance ...
Courtly love was a secret love or romance between the first knight and the king’s lady that would usually begin with something as small as an exchange of looks through eye glances. Next, a declaration is then discussed by both parties to pursue a relationship under the table from their king or anyone else in the castle. “Gawain glanced at the gracious looking woman …Gawain and the beautiful woman found such comfort and closeness in each other company (line 970,1010)”. Sir Gawain had courted Guinevere while he was at kings Arthurs castle but being here in Bertilak’s Castle he now found a much more stunning lady superior to Guinevere, Lady Bertilak. He had really fallen in love with lady Bertilak at first glance and Lady Bertilak was in love with his heroicness. Moreover, the relationship was established, Sir Gawain was to love her and be obedient to all of her commands as well as to always be polite, courteous and to never exceed the desires of the lover. At one point of the story, Lady Bertilak goes to Sir Gawain’s room in the morning while her husband is away and everyone is sleep because she desires to be with him, “I shall kiss at your command ...should it please you, so press me no more (line 1303). Abiding by the rules of courtly love Sir Gawain is to be a good knight and do as she pleases but
In a relationship, Love is a feeling that humans share with a special person. Some bonds could be mutual, while others are dissociated. During the Medieval period, love affairs were dominated by one gender, men, and the women had little or no control over decisions. Before a gentleman married a lady, the gentleman first boasted about her beauty, championed the cause of the lady, and did whatever the lady requested. The era was influenced by knights, and dictated by honor and chivalry that each knight had to display to their king and queen. As a gentleman, a knight had to be just at all times, especially toward ladies. At this time, there was a king named Arthur. King Arthur had a flourishing kingdom that abruptly ended. Later on, many authors recounted the story of the reign of King Arthur. Sir Thomas Malory published Le Morte d’Arthur, and Geoffrey Chaucer published The Wife of Bath’s Tale. Although both of these books recount the reign of King Arthur, the stories are very diverse and unique in their own way. Both stories demonstrate for a relationship to be successful, both partners must be submissive, must be brave, and must be willing to learn from mistakes.
Societal and environmental factors, even from the beginning of adolescence, shape people’s interpretation and comprehension of love (Hartup 8-13). This makes it decidedly difficult for people to notice a distinction between the different types of love. Not only do copious types of love exist, but also there are varying definitions of love (Rubin 2-4). Whilst some people may define love as immaturity, others may define it as a positive passionate emotion between two, occasionally multiple, people (1). The primary type of love, defined by the latter statement in the previous sentence, in King Lear is familial love — rather than the romantic love that a multitude of Shakespeare’s other plays revolve around. Bloom mentions
In the play The Crucible we find ourselves in a love triangle. This is between Abigail Williams, John Proctor, and Elizabeth Proctor. It is all over a silly man, that and getting caught for doing what is believed that a few teenaged girls were not being the proper girls that fit in this time frame. This was strongly frowned upon. Something that we realize as we read the play is that there is a major role between two women and this keeps both the trials and the issues alive.
Despite the fact that this lady was supposedly untouchable due to her status as “taken” this man or rather knight made it his mission to win her over or it was his mission to please her. This Knight would go to great lengths sometimes setting into long journeys, battling other knights and going into chivalric adventures in what is known as the other world. This knight or the courtly lover is like a slave to this passionate, romantic love for example in the tale “Le Chevalier de la charrette”, a courtly romance whose hero obeys every imperious and unreasonable demand of the heroine. A slave willing to put his own life at risk in order to show his love and passion for this one woman. For example, In “Lancelot, the Knight of Cart” Lancelot first part is a physical quest though driven by love, the knight tries to rescue Guinevere. However, once he finds her, he does not stop, he continued to quest in order to deserve her love. Even after they consummate their relationship in the tower, he must continue to do her bidding, suggesting that the quest for love never ceases. We see this untouchable love through his love and adulterous feelings for the queen, Lady Guinevere, this lady made untouchable through her marriage to King
Lancelot and Guinevere’s affair leads to the destruction of friendship, illustrated by the tragedies faced between friends within Arthur’s kingdom. In The Once and Future King, the greatest knight in the world, Lancelot, has great affection for his King Arthur’s wife, Guinevere. King Arthur, whom is Lancelot’s lord, admires Lancelot’s relentless fighting style and claims Lancelot his friend and partner. Yet, after holding his feelings for Guinevere back, Lancelot decides to “indulge” himself by sending every captive he has captured to Guinevere instead of Arthur, in order to demonstrate his passion for the Queen: “Thinking
Courtly love can only exist from afar, a worship of the woman who is on a pedestal of purity and goodness and righteousness by the man who wins her favor through actions, usually fighting. This means if the woman ever makes a mistake, she falls forever from the pedestal and is no longer worthy, one mistake is sin enough to be permanently unlovable. Later writers however, mapped courtly love onto romantic love and came up with a problems, because now the marriage between Guinevere and Arthur must be false if Guinevere’s love of Lancelot is true, instead of separating those two into different kinds of love, or simply not caring. The oldest legends of Arthur make no judgements about Guinevere’s cheating on Arthur, they label her as a villain, or as nothing at all and leave it at that. In the medieval legends all the heroes were flawed, all the characters were flawed, but that didn’t matter because the point of the stories wasn’t to showcase or enforce a morality, but as simple entertainments. But post courtly love authors like Malory and Tennyson are wrapped up in how true Guinevere is to Arthur or Lancelot, and use her purity as the only measure of her whole person. She has sinned and thus she cannot be worthy of Arthur, even though Arthur fathers Mordred out of wedlock in Malory’s
Throughout the events which unfold in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare delivers several messages on love. Through this play, one of the significant ideas he suggests is that love is blind, often defying logic and overriding other emotions and priorities. Helena loves Demetrius unconditionally and pursues him despite knowing that he loathes her; conflict arises between Helena and Hermia, childhood best friends, over Demetrius and Lysander; and because she is in love, Queen Titania is able to see beauty and virtue in the ass-headed Nick Bottom.
"Shakespeare in Love - on William Shakespeare." Shakespeare in Love - on William Shakespeare. N.p., n.d. Web. 28 Apr. 2014. .