Guinevere

Guinevere's treatment is the clearest test of what a given author thinks the story is about.

Geoffrey gives her a straightforward political function: while Arthur is campaigning abroad, Mordred takes both the crown and the queen, and she retires to a convent. There is no love story. The betrayal is a coup.

Chrétien invents the love, and invents it as an honour. In The Knight of the Cart Lancelot's devotion to her is what makes him the greatest knight alive, and his brief hesitation before disgracing himself for her sake is the only fault the poem finds in him. She is the standard against which he is measured.

The Vulgate makes the love mutual and makes it fatal: the White Knight loved the queen and was fairly sure that the queen loved him as well. Here it is both the engine of Lancelot's supremacy and the reason he cannot achieve the Grail.

Malory gives her the most difficult and most human treatment. She is jealous, imperious and often wrong; she banishes Lancelot in a temper, is nearly burned twice, and is defended each time by the man whose love condemns her. And Malory will not join in condemning her. The famous digression on love — the old love was not so; men and women could love together seven years — arrives in her defence. At the end she takes the veil at Amesbury, refuses to see Lancelot again, and asks God that she may never look on him with her worldly eyes.

Tennyson puts her on the floor at Arthur's feet and has him forgive her at length, which is the version most readers have absorbed without reading it, and which the Middle Ages never quite managed.