An exploration of any and every aspect of the code of chivalry - including history, literature, philosophy and contemporary cultural influences. SO much more than "medievalism" or "gentlemanly manners."
Friday, October 30, 2009
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Saturday morning ... When I'm not rushing around on the weekends, I enjoy taking a few minutes to listen to the radio while the coffee is brewing. What a surprise when, this morning, the host of Weekend Edition said, "Now, we take you to Maryland for a report on the sport of jousting, which is making a comeback." Even without coffee, my ears perked right up. The report, by journalist Jacki Lyden, took an inside look at a company of jousters who do the "touring circuit" of several Renaissance Faires throughout the country every year, and both the dangers and rewards they face in preparing for, and putting on their shows. The piece touched on several aspects of the values of chivalry - how the sense of honor that permeates this sport appeals to audiences who "spend their days sitting in a cubicle" and "want to escape the everyday mundane grind"; and also the degree of trust and respect this competitive sport builds among its participants. Unfortunately, the story left the concept of chivalry within the confines of the Renaissance Faire - the reporter didn't explore whether the jousters or the spectators took away any sort of lasting ideals or different impression of a code of honor when the show was over. Still, the report (free of the usual hokey pirate language and lame puns - they even resisted the urge to call the piece "Living the Knight Life") left listeners with the impression that there is something serious - even respectable - to be found among the athletes and performers who put on modern day jousting shows.
Regular listeners of the Chivalry Today Podcast know we’ve kicked off our fourth season with a show that included an interview with actor Christopher Gurr, who has just taken over the role of King Arthur in the touring company of the Tony award-winning musical Spamalot. The show is based on (or, as its creator, Eric Idle, says, “Lovingly ripped off from”) the motion picture Monty Python and the Holy Grail (released, believe it or not, in 1975).
Last night (that’s “night” without a K) I got to see Spamalot, which, after my lengthy conversation with Gurr, gave me an opportunity to search for nuances and hidden messages within the show (as well as enjoying some classic bits and hilarious new material, of course).
Now, anyone attending Spamalot expecting a deep, thoughtful exploration of the values of chivalry and honor, or the legends of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table is going to be sadly disappointed. (They’ve replaced the Winchester Round Table with a roulette wheel, for Pete’s sake!)
The show is all about bringing the visuals and jokes from the venerable film to life on stage — and in that, Spamalot succeeds delightfully. There are a variety of effects and production pieces that provide great visual humor — from the catapulted cow crushing Patsy to a pair of monks who provide “moving” scenery by rolling themselves in a backdrop. And there are also all the unforgettable scenes from the movie (“Bring out your dead,” and the knights who say “nee!”) that have been given just the right amount of updating.
Enjoyable as all that is, however, what keeps Spamalot from becoming nothing but a regurgitation of jokes that were getting old when President Obama was in high school are the performances, primarily those of Gurr and Merle Dandridge, who plays the Lady of the Lake.
Dandridge’s performance is rock-solid and her voice is stunning. The majority of the humor she brings to the stage comes from the vocal gymnastics she performs throughout the numbers — proving she is thoroughly capable of “over singing” any song. (You could easily imagine her as a finalist on “Camelot Idol.”)
Similarly, Gurr doesn’t mug for laughs or play Arthur as an empty-headed fop. While his knights find the humor in their roles, Gurr brings a sincerity and dignity to the character of Arthur — which, as he mentioned in the podcast, is the key to making the role, and the show, work. Even when Gurr is skipping about the stage with Patsy clopping coconut shells together to imitate hoofbeats, there’s an unmistakable regalness to Gurr’s carriage. He makes King Arthur the most emotionally engaging character in the show, and, even amid the wackiness, he makes the audience feel that King Arthur is the leader we all want to follow, and the ideal we all want to be.
It’s a metaphor that plays out very nicely in the first musical number of the second act, “Look On The Bright Side Of Life.” Arthur’s down in the dumps and feels his quest has failed. His knights all come out to cheer him up and, amid gloom and thunder, they all whip out their umbrellas and begin to sing, whistle and dance; suddenly the sun is shining all around them, even though it’s pouring rain up above.
It’s easy to miss if you’re tapping your toes to the music, but the heraldic symbol on King Arthur’s tabard in this show (just as in the original movie) is not the traditional lion, dragon or Virgin Mary … but a shining sun. And that symbol is perfectly mirrored on the surface of the umbrellas the knights twirl as they’re “singin’ in the rain.” The message is simple and nicely underplayed: Arthur is the sunshine on a rainy day.
Spamalot wasn’t created to reveal the emotional or moral depths of Arthurian legend, but this is just one of several moments in the show that demonstrate there is something thoughtful lurking under the jokes — a message that the image of King Arthur has been, is and always will be that ray of hope in an hour of darkness, the light of optimism and strength that glows even when the world seems cloaked in the clouds of doom.
Though he maybe galumphing across the stage, tap dancing on the Round Table or enduring the merciless taunts of the French soldiers, Gurr portrays King Arthur in a manner true to the chivalric ideals of the 13th century Spanish knight and author Ramon Llull, who observed that, “Hope is the principle instrument of the office of knighthood.” And whether it’s proving the power of hope and joy to overcome adversity, or just putting a smile on our faces, King Arthur and the cast of Spamalot succeed in their quest most nobly.
Spamalot runs in San Diego through Sept. 13; tickets are available through Broadway San Diego. The show also runs in San Jose, Tucson and Costa Mesa – more details are on the Spamalot website.
The past three-day weekend marked the unofficial “end of summer.” Kids are all back in school, college campuses are bustling, and everyone’s returning to work and sharing pictures and tales of what they did and where they went over the summer.
Of course, I’d love to tell you I went on a lengthy tour of the castles and museums of Europe on a quest of discovery of the history and culture of knighthood … but for me (like many people this year) this was a summer for things a little closer to home. But, ironically, that doesn’t mean that I didn’t have a few pleasant, surprise (and completely serendipitous) encounters with the history of medieval knights.
Let me share them with you:
Meet Me (With Some Armor) In St. Louis
In August, I was traveling with a friend through the city of St. Louis, Missouri. We were on a quick business trip, and when I found myself with an hour to spare in the downtown area, I decided to take a stroll through the historic Forest Park, site of the 1904 World’s Fair.
Sadly, since I was there on a whim, I didn’t have nearly enough time to explore the many museums, gardens and activities that are housed in the park. But I was drawn to one very prominent feature: A bronze statue of a knight on horseback, which stands in front of a very impressive building on a hilltop overlooking the park.
The statue, it turns out, is a monument to the city’s namesake, St. Louis, also known as Louis IX, the famous crusader king of medieval France. The building, it turns out, is the celebrated St. Louis Art Museum, whose motto, “Dedicated to Art and Free to All,” is carved right above the front door.
Since the price was right, I decided to poke my nose in the door and ask one simple question: “Do you have any armor on display?” The docent directed me downstairs where I spent the half-hour I had to spare visiting the museum’s gallery of medieval armor — a small but respectable offering of late-medieval weaponry and knightly equipment, including a fine example of German “Maximilian” plate armor of the 16th century.
The armor gallery is obviously very popular with museum visitors — there’s even a “Family Guide To Arms & Armor” brochure available at the front desk that allows kids to properly identify every piece of a knight’s harness, from sallet to sabaton. Unfortunately, this very nice gallery of the armor-maker’s craft is tucked away in a remote corner of the basement, and is accompanied by relatively rudimentary historical information. The display is just ripe for an active interpretation to help visitors understand the craft, function and symbolism of medieval armor — and since there’s a beautiful patch of lawn right there under the gaze of the St. Louis statue, all the museum needs is the right person or group to coordinate a demonstration of arms and armor in action.
(And if anyone from the St. Louis Art Museum is reading this, please feel free to contact Chivalry Today!)
If you’re at all intrigued by medieval arms and armor and you’re in the St. Louis area – even for a few minutes! – be sure to stop by the Art Museum and visit the armor gallery (and enjoy a picnic lunch at the riverside in Forest Park).
A Cowboy’s Spurs Aren’t The Only Things Jingling
A few weeks later my wife and I decided to take a little “road trip” vacation before the start of school through the heart of California’s Gold Rush country. We spent several days driving along the back roads along both sides of the Sierra-Nevada mountain range, haunting the mining towns that the freeway system has bypassed. There are a lot of intriguing landmarks and historic monuments in this area, but when we got to the Calaveras County Historical Society & Museum (in the town made famous for the frog-jumping contest in Mark Twain’s short story) we were surprised to see a shirt of chain mail hanging in a display case at the back of the town museum. Medieval armor is not the sort of thing you expect to see in a quiet three-room museum upstairs from the Hall of Records (and town bookshop) in California’s prospecting country.
The story of the shirt of mail was displayed on a placard beneath the case: Apparently it was owned by the notorious outlaw George Washington Cox, who was arrested in Calaveras County and sentenced in the county courthouse (which is now part of the museum). The display said “armored protectors” like the one worn by Cox were not uncommon among men who spent time on the Western frontier, since the chain mail, worn underneath a shirt or coat, was essentially proof against arrows, tomahawks, Bowie knives and just about any other sort of weapon short of a sixgun. According to the museum, there was a relatively lucrative business being done in San Francisco crafting these shirts of mail for scouts, miners, homesteaders and anyone else heading out to the dangerous reaches of the Wild West.
It seems particularly ironic that the cowboys and gunslingers, sometimes called “knights of the Old West,” might, in fact, have been a little closer to their medieval counterparts in their equipment than anyone previously thought.
Of course, neither of these chance encounters with knightly arms and armor has anything to do with the principles of chivalry other than to serve as a reminder that references, artifacts and images of medieval culture sometimes pop up in the most unexpected of places. The more we study and understand the world of history — whether it’s armor and castles, or chivalry and the tales of the Round Table — the more we are prepared to understand the world we live in today.
We think of the tales of King Arthur as ancient tales of a long-ago fantasy world, but it's important to remember that, in their time, these stories were used as both political commentary and social satire. The tales of Camelot could be epic and romantic, but they could also be absurd and hilarious.
(Anyone who thinks the stories of the Knights of the Round Table are stuffy and serious should read the French tale Aucassin et Nicollette, in which the king gets pregnant and gives birth while the queen leads the knights in an epic food fight. Today's mindless, gross-out summer comedies are tame by comparison!)
In a recent episode of The Daily Show, however, viewers were treated to a taste of the lore of King Arthur as biting, contemporary political humor. It's not often that the fine points of the stories of Lancelot, St. George and Guenevere (as well as Aesop's Fables) are used to elicit laughter out of footage from C-SPAN - but maybe that's why fans of chivalry find this segment from a recent episode of Comedy Central's "news" show particularly funny.
Warning: The attached clip from The Daily Show contains "bleeped" adult language. Please use your discretion when viewing.
Time Magazine called him, The Man With America’s Trust — Walter Cronkite, of course. His recent death following his 70-year career in journalism and broadcasting has given the world an opportunity to examine, and even reassess, a value central to the Code of Chivalry: trust.
Cronkite was voted (in a 1972 public opinion poll) “the most trusted man in America.” The many obituaries and retrospectives that followed his death paint him as the very image of a modern knight: honest, brave, competitive and humble — implying that, on some level, it was the principles of chivalry that earned the trust of his listeners and viewers.
Yet amid the fond memories and professional analyses, there are commentators who regard “trust” (like “chivalry”) as a relic of a bygone age — something that has outlived its relevance, and would be best left in the era of automotive tailfins and big-band orchestras. Some see the very idea of a “most trusted” person in America as a reflection of bias, gullibility and naiveté among the public.
Slate Magazine, in a piece titled, Why I Didn’t Trust Cronkite, postulated that the age of journalistic trustworthiness stemmed from an FCC policy (discontinued in 1987) mandating that both sides of controversial issues had to be given equal time on the air. “One way around (the policy)” Slate explains, “was to tamp down controversy.” They dismissively speculate that Cronkite’s trustworthiness was a result of blandness rather than integrity.
Other news sources took a different angle in their critique of trust by seeking to quantify the concept in scientific terms, distilling trust to nothing more than a behavioral response to sensory stimuli. A symmetrical face and a deep, resonant voice are both indicators that elicit a sense of trust in most people, and perhaps there was no more to Cronkite’s trustworthiness than that (at least according to a report put out by PR firm Decker Communications, coaching business executives on how to polish their “brand” by looking and sounding trustworthy).
Of course, in today’s society, which seems to be weathering a veritable hailstorm of corruption and scandal, trust is (understandably) in short supply. But abandoning trust merely because the concept has been abused is a bit like junking your car just because it’s in need of a tune-up. The cynical voices calling for the obsolescence or commercialization of trust point to a critical misunderstanding of the concept: the difference between trust that is given and trust that is earned.
Trusting someone blindly — be it a reporter, an officer, a politician or a lending agent — can be a recipe for disaster. This is undoubtedly why writings about chivalry from medieval literature emphasize the importance of intelligence and discretion among the qualities of a knight. Knights were expected to be discerning and self-sufficient, not to merely take someone else’s word about what was right and wrong.
Yet at the same time a knight was expected to act in a manner that was faithful and reliable. There was hardly anyone more deplorable in medieval society than a knight who broke his word or swore a false oath.
Perhaps the greatest indication of the power of trust in the ideals of chivalry is the final words of the king in Sir Thomas Malory’s “Le Morte D’Arthur.” As Sir Bedevere laments the collapse of the Round Table, Arthur tells him:
“Do as well as thou mayest, for in me there is no trust to trust in.”
It is a very potent statement. Arthur doesn’t cite a lack of charity, justice or valor as the downfall of his knights. For him, it’s not until trust is eroded that the Round Table is finally doomed, and his words remind us that when there’s no one or nothing left to trust, it’s every man for himself.
Building trust, of course, takes time — and time like that isn’t easy to come by in today’s world. Trust is not a virtue of a single, grand gesture, but an ideal for the long haul. Yet, like chivalry, trust and trustworthiness are goals worth working for. Cronkite might have been the “most trusted person in America,” but he wasn’t the “last trusted person.” Even in a skeptical, cynical age, he stands tall as an example of trustworthiness, intelligence and chivalry that everyone can (and should) aspire to.
They say that every generation re-invents the legend of King Arthur to meet its own needs, and to reflect its own values. The Victorians had the nostalgic idealism of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King; in the 60’s there was Camelot as a spot for peaceful happ’ly ever-aftering; and ushering in the 70’s was the biting social satire of Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
And now, fans of the Arthurian lore have another interpretation of the legends to consider: the series Merlin, which is airing on NBC Sunday nights. This show turns its focus backwards, exploring the “origin story” of Arthur (the young prince), Merlin (the budding wizard) and many of the other familiar characters in their formative years.
There are plenty of overviews and reviews of NBC’s Merlin on the web (including in The New York Times, The Hollywood Reporter and the Boston Globe), so there’s no need to rehash the basic details of the premise here. More to the point might be some insight into how the concept of chivalry is treated in this series, and what the message of Merlin is for today’s world.
On one hand, Merlin falls into the realm of Arthurian stories founded on the premise that knights, quests, jousting and castles have to be “kid’s stuff.” As many reviewers have pointed out, the writing, acting and production of Merlin seems better suited for a Saturday morning adventure than for a prime-time network historical drama. Don’t look for any nuanced characterizations of heroes in the making, or subtle explorations of the challenges of following a code of honor (much less developing and establishing such a code – which could have been an intriguing subject in an “origin” story).
By making the world of Camelot a place of simplistic storylines and campy dialogue, perhaps Merlin is a not-too-flattering reflection of ethics in today’s society: Where children are taught to “play nice,” “be fair” and “do the right thing,” then turned loose in a world where those kinds of ideals are largely considered impediments to success. We might think of Merlin, on some level, as a cautionary reminder that in today’s world, decency, honor and chivalry are too often treated as “childish fantasies.”
On the other hand, perhaps the contemporary lesson of Merlin’s King Arthur can be found more in what isn’t there than in what is. For instance, don’t look for any foreshadowing of the sword in the stone in this tale — Arthur is already the acknowledged (and entitled) prince and heir of the realm. There won’t be any need for him to draw a magical sword to prove he’s next in line to be king.
Similarly, don’t expect Arthur’s prospective bride to be portrayed as a princess. Although Guenevere is traditionally characterized as the daughter of King Leodagrance, whose marriage to Arthur brings peace to the fractured realm (and, incidentally, a large, circular table to the halls of Camelot), in this version Gwen is a scullery maid to Morganna and daughter of a humble town blacksmith.
And along with the traditional story elements, another thing that seems to be missing in Merlin is a recognition of moral absolutes. In the course of the first few episodes, Merlin is told repeatedly: “There is no right and wrong, only what is.” (Another way of saying, “The ends justify the means.”) Is this most recent adaptation of the King Arthur legend a story that has been stripped of its foundational elements, thus reflecting a world at risk of being robbed of its core principles as well?
Ironically, there is one element of the traditional Arthurian storyline that does remain in Merlin: Beneath the palace of King Uther Pendragon, there is a cavern where “the great dragon” is imprisoned. (In the usual telling of the story, a pair of dragons resides beneath Uther’s tower, and their struggles cause an earthquake that topples the fortress — Merlin himself reveals the presence of these dragons to King Uther.)
In Merlin, when Merlin need advice and guidance, it is not to his mentor, Gaius the physician, he turns, but rather to this captive monster in its subterranean dungeon, last of the wise and powerful race of dragons that Uther exterminated by royal decree. Is this a subtle depiction of a society in which untrustworthy leaders have abandoned their sense of chivalry and honor in favor of tyranny and brute force? Where a young generation must grope in the darkness for tidbits of wisdom as their role models operate with little regard for the constraints of “right and wrong”? Where chivalry lies chained underground while amoral and self-centered rulers are given free rein in the sunlit world above?
Of course, this maybe focusing far too much philosophical analysis on a lighthearted action show. But if the legends of Camelot reflect cultural identity, then it seems the metaphor deserves consideration at least.
Only time will tell if Merlin has the depth to become a generational portrayal of the lore and ideals of Arthurian legend, or serves merely as a fun and campy (but ultimately forgettable) romp into the world of Camelot. But at least for now, anyone who enjoys the legends of chivalry, whether deeply thought or lighthearted, can enjoy a little touch of Arthur on Sunday nights.
Below: Anthony Head, who plays King Uther Pendragon in Merlin, talks about his role and the approach of the series.
