by Melvyn Bragg
MARK CHINCA: She says, ‘Take this ring so that you will remember me by it.’ But she then says it is a seal or symbol of fidelity. Again, that exact formulation is borrowed from canon law. It’s very striking that both of these authors, Thomas and Gottfried, allow the adulterers to talk about their own relationship as though they were legitimately married in the eyes of the Church, and that obviously magnifies the moral ambiguity and ambivalence of the story.
With the popularity of the story came more retellings. The Welsh version, Juliette Wood told us, was very different. It dates from the sixteenth century or earlier and has Tristan and Iseult living in the forest, and nobody can attack Tristan because, if they do, his blood would cause their death, so no one can wound him. By this time in the Welsh tradition, Mark, Tristan and Arthur were all associated.
JULIETTE WOOD: Arthur is brought in and he says, ‘Well, look, one of you is going to live with her when there are leaves on the tree and one of you is going to live with her when there aren’t leaves on the tree.’ And Mark says, ‘Well, I want winter because the nights are longer.’ And it’s Iseult who says, ‘There are three trees that never lose their leaves therefore I’m going to stay with Tristan.’ And off she goes. It has a happy ending. She picks the evergreens and it’s interesting that it is Iseult who does this.
Iseult is a very active heroine, like Deirdre and Diarmuid’s Gráinne, and they are quite different from many of the other medieval heroines.
French fifteenth-century miniature depicting Iseult on horseback accompanied by knights.
Melvyn asked Laura Ashe to explain Thomas’s handling of the psychological complexity of the four characters: Mark, the first Iseult, Tristan, and Iseult of the White Hands (the second Iseult). In Thomas, it begins with Tristan’s debate with himself over whether to marry the second Iseult. He thinks the first Iseult has forgotten him, or she has not, but she is married and has pleasure with her husband, and perhaps, if he were married, he would know what she felt. He then says at least the first Iseult cannot blame him for exercising lust with someone else, because he would be married to that person and that would be allowed. He then realises that he only wants this second Iseult because she represents the first Iseult to him.
LAURA ASHE: This comes to fruition horribly when, on the wedding night, he is getting undressed for bed and the ring that Iseult gave to him, which Mark mentioned, is pulled off his hand by the shirt that he pulls over his head, and he is stricken with the realisation that he has done something terrible. And now he has to betray both women because he’s married another woman and betrayed Iseult, but also he cannot bear to sleep with this woman and so he betrays his wife by refusing to consummate the marriage.
He never does consummate the marriage with Iseult of the White Hands. Thomas gives us a psychological exploration of how Tristan could have done this, then talks about what these four suffered in this terrible pattern.
LAURA ASHE: Mark has the body of the woman he loves but will never have her heart, and he knows it. Iseult must submit to her husband in bed but does not want him and does not love him, and she cannot have or be with the man she does love. Tristan, meanwhile, cannot have the woman he loves and he lies in bed next to a woman he cannot bear to touch. And Iseult of the White Hands longs for her husband, loves her husband, and he cannot and will never touch her. And this description of this quadrille of hurt is, I think, just profound.
This pattern gives a psychological insight to all of the characters. What is important in Thomas is not just that our hero and heroine have feelings, as is the case in other versions, but that there are other people whose feelings matter, and we see that.
LAURA ASHE: There’s an astonishing episode worth mentioning. Iseult of the White Hands is one day riding along with her brother when her horse steps in a puddle and water splashes up her thigh and she starts laughing uncontrollably and her brother, who’s a bit paranoid, says, ‘Tell me why you’re laughing,’ and she says, ‘That water touched higher up my thigh than my husband has ever touched me.’ And it is the most astonishing moment. So it’s that psychological realism, which is incredible in Thomas.
What happens in this quadrille of misery, Mark Chinca added, is that Thomas goes through each of the characters and explains why they have a claim to be miserable in love, which is quite a striking thing to do if he is telling a love story. But then the narrator in this story stops his narration and says he is lost for words.
MARK CHINCA: He says, ‘Now I don’t know what I can say, which of the four of these has the greater suffering in love? I will hand the judgement over to lovers in the audience because I, myself, have no experience of it.’
MELVYN BRAGG: Him being a monk, I presume?
MARK CHINCA: We assume he is a cleric, so he probably doesn’t if he’s being a good cleric and an unmarried cleric and a celibate cleric.
LAURA ASHE: He’s fairly knowledgeable, though.
On the one hand, it seems he puts the audience above him in knowledge but, on the other hand, experience is a very double-edged sword in Thomas. Tristan’s decision to marry Iseult of the White Hands is based precisely on this idea of wanting to try things out, of gaining experience, and that is disastrous.
Melvyn recalled that a key factor in the story was that, as Tristan was bringing Iseult over to Cornwall from Ireland to marry Mark, they are given the love potion together by Iseult’s servant, and then that was it.
MELVYN BRAGG: Why was a love potion introduced? Why didn’t they just fall in love with each other like they do in movies?
There are lots of different interpretations of this, Laura Ashe replied. In Béroul, it was very clear that it was just a potion that wore off and then the plot could go in different directions. In Thomas, you can reasonably claim it is just symbolic, a way of saying to readers, ‘You may not doubt this love now.’ That then has a bearing on the moral question, the question of whether they are free to act or bound into their love.
LAURA ASHE: If we take it as symbolic, if we then ask ourselves the question, ‘If our emotions are this strong, if this is a love that means that you would burn yourself in the world to be with this person, does that then justify actions you take for that love or does it not?’ And, in the Middle Ages, there’s a strong Christian line that says that the goal of life is to deny the self’s longings in order to reach God. Now we are much more likely to have an ideal of self-fulfilment, to say, ‘It is to be true to myself to fulfil who I am, to pursue love, to pursue my highest desires.’
Thomas, she added, was ahead of both of those camps. He developed a genuine ethical exploration. Thomas showed that their emotions explained everything they did, but also that they could not justify anything that they did, and he showed us that through the pain of others. Laura Ashe summarised this: ‘Can you justify what they do? Well, it’s impossible to say; others are hurt by it. Should they not have done it? They could not do otherwise.’
The idea of not being able to act otherwise is found in other stories, even if it is not explored in such a way.
JULIETTE WOOD: In the Diarmuid and Gráinne story, Diarmuid has a love spot and it’s only …
MELVYN BRAGG: A love what?
JULIETTE WOOD: A love spot, something that makes all women fall in love with him. And this is only actually in the oral tales, which we get from Scotland. And Gráinne, when she realises she’s married to this old man, puts everybody under a sleep spell and [puts] Diarmuid under geas, which is a compulsion, almost like a love potion. She says, ‘You have to love me.’ And Deirdre does much the same.
Melvyn wanted to know why the themes in Tristan and Iseult appealed to medieval audiences as much as they appear to have done when they seem so foreign to most of the experience that we find in other literature at the time. Mark Chinca pointed to the changes in marriage practices that had been affecting aristocratic families for a century before this story of adultery at court was written down. Until the Church had taken over, a couple married because the parents had exc
hanged contracts. It was the way of producing legitimate heirs, the way of passing down landed property.
MARK CHINCA: With the Church’s insistence on consent also defining and constituting a marriage, there’s a new element, which is that you get married because you want to, the individuals concerned have actually wished it. And, if you think about it, what you’ve got in the adulterous relationship is this mixture of must and should and want. The lovers must love because they’re compelled, they drank a potion; they should because they’re so suited to each other; and they actually want to, they make statements about how they want to be together.
The appeal of the story was thus that it offered a fictional medium through which an aristocratic public could begin to think about what it was that determined why two people were together for life: because they must; because they should be; because they want to be.
There is a famous Wagner version of the story, featuring the liebestod, the love death. Anticipating this, Laura Ashe said that, within the format of the story in the twelfth century, love could only end in two ways – either someone died or it went wrong. Therefore, as soon as a narrative of love appears, if an author wants to say that someone’s love is perfect, then, logically, we must see the characters die. Marie de France, who was writing in England at about the same time as Thomas, gives us a series of short romances, or lays, with different structures of love, and she shows the idea that someone’s willingness to suffer is a measure of how noble his or her love is and ultimately, when someone loves perfectly, love endures until death and, implicitly, love brings with it death. Marie de France retold a short version of the Tristan story in which she said their love was so perfect that it brought them to death on the same day. In the Thomas legend and in Gottfried, Laura Ashe added, we are told that, when they drank the love potion, they drank their death; they drank love, they drank death – both are the same.
Melvyn recalled how, in Wagner, this was taken up very seriously in one of his greatest works, Tristan und Isolde, with the love death at the end, ‘the music waiting, waiting, waiting for it’ and then resolving itself in the love death. He asked if that was Wagner’s addition or something that had become an accepted part of the story by then.
MARK CHINCA: I think that’s Wagner, this notion of the liebestod, the love death that’s the fulfilment and the culmination of love. Death is what actually ensures the perpetuation of your love because it means you won’t ever wake up from the night of love. That’s what the lovers sing in that duet in the second act of Wagner.
JULIETTE WOOD: In the early versions, when the two lovers die, they are buried on opposite sides of a river and plants grow out of their graves and unify. They’re cut down and they grow again, and they’re cut down and they’re finally left. There’s this folk motif of lovers united in death by the image of these twisting plants, which, of course, Marie takes up very much in her lay. Certainly Wagner’s romanticism takes it to the highest levels, however one sees Wagner, but I think the implication is there beforehand.
In Marie de France, Tristan and Iseult are the hazel and honeysuckle bound together for ever. Laura Ashe thought that Thomas did something very different from the liebestod as the couple do not die together.
LAURA ASHE: Tristan dies and then Iseult comes and finds his body and lies down next to it and dies out of despair. It’s not the same: he dies for his love, she dies for pity; they’re separated by death. And I think this is because Thomas is not trying to write a symbolic liebestod, he’s not trying to write something celebratory and glorious, he’s trying to write something about real suffering.
JULIETTE WOOD: That says something about the power of these storytelling patterns, they can go on and they can spread and they can be reinterpreted, they can fall out of fashion and they can come back into fashion.
In the studio afterwards, Melvyn’s guests discussed some of the humour in the stories, such as the supposed disguise of Tristan when he passes himself off as ‘Tantris’ and no one but his dog recognises him. Another example was the idea of the older king being outsmarted by his young wife and her young lover, such as the time, in one version, when Tristan disguises himself as a monk and attends the ill Iseult to ‘cure’ her in private, and Mark thanks him profusely. That, Juliette Wood said, was pure Boccaccio.
EMMA
At the end of 1815, the great London publisher John Murray brought out a novel by an anonymous writer identified as ‘The author of Pride and Prejudice etc. etc.’ This writer we know to be Jane Austen and the novel was Emma, described by some of the speakers in this programme as her masterpiece and, by one, as the greatest novel written in English. The plot revolves around Emma Woodhouse, described by Austen as ‘a heroine whom no one but myself will much like’. Several of the other characters do very much like her, though – particularly the conceited vicar Mr Elton (for a while), the gentlemanly Mr Knightley and, in his way, the charming Frank Churchill. Emma, meanwhile, tries to arrange marriages for her female friends; she claims success for that of her governess and wants even greater success for the lowly Harriet Smith. It all takes place in a small Surrey village, a place in which Emma is virtually immured. Her father wouldn’t let her leave the place and she has little inclination to displease him.
Frontispiece to Emma.
With Melvyn to discuss Emma were: John Mullan, Lord Northcliffe professor of modern English literature at University College London; Janet Todd, professor emerita of literature at the University of Aberdeen and honorary fellow of Newnham College and Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge; and Emma Clery, professor of English at the University of Southampton.
It was around the time that Emma was written and published, Emma Clery told us, that Jane Austen began to define her field as a novelist. She wrote in one letter, ‘three or four families in a village is the very thing to work on’, and, in another, that she specialised in scenes of domestic life in a country village. These were her roots and what she knew best. She had been born in December 1775 in the village of Steventon, 16 miles south of Basingstoke, and her parents had six boys and two girls. Her father was George Austen, a clergyman, who was very well educated, cultivated and hard-working.
EMMA CLERY: He was also quite poor. He also, on the side, ran a boarding school for boys from his home and did a little bit of farming as well. Her mother, Cassandra, was also very intelligent; she had a dry sense of humour. She had aristocratic connections but was really willing to put her shoulder to the wheel as well.
Jane Austen had drafts or first versions of Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice and Northanger Abbey by the 1790s, but did not have the connections to get these works published until, in 1810, with the help of her brother Henry, by then a banker in London, she succeeded with Sense and Sensibility.
Her parents, as Melvyn noted, supported their children in their literary interests and had a well-chosen library.
EMMA CLERY: They were enthusiastic about novels, that was unusual. I think her father even read Gothic novels. It was a very stimulating environment. There were amateur theatricals, there were riddles, games, like in Emma. And they were all scribblers, almost all of them did some form of writing, wrote comic poems or essays.
Jane Austen lived in Bath for a while with her sister and parents, moving to Southampton in 1805, when their father died, to live with a brother who was a sailor. Finally, they had a cottage in Chawton, part of the estate of her brother Edward, and it was at this point that she revised her manuscripts, and away she went with her career.
By the time Emma was published in 1815, Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility and Mansfield Park were quite successful, and she made a little money from some of them. This body of novels became known to the polite reading public, even if the author did not.
JOHN MULLAN: Most of those people would not have known who Jane Austen was. It was actually with the publication of Mansfield Park, the year before Emma, that the secret, if that’s the right word, began to leak out. Her brother Henry started boasting
about it. And it’s a famous fact that Emma, when it appeared, was dedicated to the Prince Regent, a man whom Jane Austen abhorred, a dissolute gourmand with many mistresses. But he was a fan of her writing.
It was important, John Mullan added, that Jane Austen was not a member of a literary circle, but was writing in an age when literary circles were the thing. Her work was being read and talked about by friends and family but not other literary figures. There were two other important things about her, he added, one provable and the other something he felt.
JOHN MULLAN: The provable thing is she cared a great deal about making money. She didn’t have much money, she relied on the charity of her brothers. The second thing is that anybody who steeps themselves in Jane Austen, particularly the novels from Mansfield Park onwards, cannot doubt that she was an artist with really high ambitions. She was doing completely new things with fiction. She is one of the great experimental writers of European fiction.
Emma is a fantastic novel, Janet Todd said, before gamely outlining the plot. There are three or four families in a country village, she recapped, and the story is about a community as well as about Emma. She lives in intellectual solitude, although rich, privileged, healthy, only twenty and beautiful, with a sickly, selfish, adoring, elderly father, and she is bored. She seeks Harriet Smith, below her in social status, only seventeen, and she proposes to train her up to be a friend. She treats her rather like a doll, and Mr Knightley, the neighbouring squire who has been advising her since she was a very small child, warns her that she will do Harriet damage. And she does, persuading her not to be interested in the tenant farmer who is in love with her, but to hold out for the handsome new vicar, Mr Elton.
