Kinoshita, Sharon. “Royal Pursuits: Adultery and Kingship in Marie de France’s

                    Equitan.” Essays in Medieval Studies, 16, West Virginia University

                    Press, 1999. 6 pages.

The lays of Marie de France are brimming with depictions of couples engaged in illicit love affairs. These separate lays are threaded together by Marie’s remarkably sympathetic portrayal of adulterous lovers. The lay of Equitan, however, deviates sharply from this pattern of compassion. The lusty king and his clandestine lover are not sympathetic characters; rather, they are punished for their extra-marital liaison by means of a horrific death. In her essay, “Royal Pursuits: Adultery and Kingship in Marie de France’s Equitan,” Sharon Kinoshita accounts for this apparent discrepancy in Marie’s representation of adultery on two levels; one simple and one complex. Simply, she states that Marie is moralizing about the consequences of plotting harms to others. Her complex argument, however, hinges on an exploration of the feudal role of kingship. She presents a coherent, insightful argument that is firmly grounded in the historical realities of medieval feudal society, as well as in the context of Marie’s other lays.

Marie’s departure from the charitable portrayal of forbidden lovers found throughout her other lays, Kinoshita argues, is justified by Equitan’s deviation from courtly literature’s traditional amorous pairing of unmarried knight and adulterous queen. Instead, it couples an unmarried king with the wife of his vassal. This reversal of marriage status, in conjunction with the king’s neglect of his feudal role, renders a happy ending for the couple impossible.

To facilitate her argument, Kinoshita examines Equitan within the context of medieval literature, contending that in the sexually objectifying discourse of courtly love, the central figure of male desire is the queen. While devotion to the queen would seem (at least superficially) to empower women, Kinoshita maintains that, in reality, it buttresses the patriarchal feudal system by manipulating obsessive male desire as a means to reinforce ideals of duty to the monarchy. This system only succeeds on the condition that the king does not participate in obsessive games of courtly desire.

Equitan, Kinoshita points out, does not adhere to this rule. He engages in unmeasured passion, allowing it to overcome his feudal duty to marry and beget an heir so that his kingdom may perpetuate. Therefore, Equitan’s sins would be less regrettable if he himself were married.

The marriage status of the seneschal’s wife also complicates the lay. Kinoshita presents the lady as a feudal social climber who is attempting to exchange one husband for another (5). By attempting to kill her husband and marry a higher ranking man, the lady lifts the king’s intemperate passion out of the realm of courtly playacting and into the realm of feudal reality, where it can not exist.

Kinoshita’s critical reading of Equitan is successful on several levels of criteria. It both exists within the parameters of historical reality, and is viable when juxtaposed with Marie’s other lays. A great deal of the scholarly literature I have found on Marie de France fails to reconcile historical context with literary context; Kinoshita, however, overcomes this difficulty.

However, despite the possibility of a cross-lay application of her argument, she does not extend it beyond her reading of Equitan. Though her essay is brief, it would have been beneficial if she had explored the nature of kingship and adultery in Marie’s other lays, rather than forcing the reader to do so on their own. Such a measure would have not only served to expand Kinoshita’s argument, but also to enhance its credibility with further textual support.

For example, Kinoshita’s argument can be successfully applied to Le Fresne, which shares many plot parallels with Equitan. Like Equitan, Gurun is an unmarried feudal king engaged in an illicit love affair. In her essay entitled “I do, I do: medieval models of marriage and choice of partner’s in Marie de France’s ‘Le Fresne,” Dolliann Margaret Hurtig asserts that Gurun allows his passion for a socially unavailable woman to impede his dynastic duty of begetting a legitimate heir (Hurtig 5). Her argument bears striking similarity to that of Kinoshita. The two primary dissimilarities between Equitan and Gurun serve to reinforce Kinoshita’s argument by justifying Marie’s sympathy to Gurun and Le Fresne. First and foremost, Gurun is willing to shed his intemperate passion and marry a suitable woman, thus fulfilling his feudal role. Second, Gurun’s lover is essentially an unmarried concubine, not the wife of one of his vassals; for, as Kinoshita states in her essay; “wives are exchangeable, but husbands are not.” This statement, of course, can only be applied when combined with the simple moral Kinoshita identifies of “not harming others,” because in Marie’s lays husbands are surely interchangeable; Guigemar is an excellent example.

This simple moral can be applied to Bisclavret as well. Like the seneschal’s wife, lady Bisclavret is punished because she attempts not only to exchange husbands, but also to harm her husband.

Therefore, Sharon Kinoshita’s reading of Equitan opens new possibilities for critical readings of Marie’s other lays.  It is shrewdly grounded in the politics of feudal society and the context of Marie’s other lays; its biggest obstacle is its failure to expand on an excellent argument.  

Rebecca Harpine

University of Mary Washington