SUMMERS, KAREN CRADY, Ph.D. Reading Incest - The University ...

60
country. But the incest—the worst form of cupidity—that precipitated the fall of
Camelot was committed by the king who became known to legend as the best and most
chivalrous of all Christian kings. Nevertheless, in the end this good king failed, and the
failure can be traced back to incest. Arthur is more like Gower’s tyrannical kings, with
their undisciplined, dangerous passions, than the “moost renomed Crysten kyng, first and
chyef of the thre best Crysten, and worthy” (Malory 3) of all Britain.
The excess of passion in Confessio Amantis results from the loss of self-control
by the characters in the tales, a point Gower drives home repeatedly through the
organizational frame of the seven deadly sins. Malory, like Gower, differentiates true
love and lechery—cupidity and charity:
Therefore, lyke as winter resure dothe allway arace and deface grene summer, so
faryth hit by unstable love in man and woman, for in many persones there ys no
stabilite: for we may se all day, for a little blaste of wyntres rasure, anone we shall
deface and lay aparte trew love, for lytyll or nowght, that coste muche thynge.
Thys ys no wysdome nother no stabylite, but hit ys fyeblenes of nature and grete
disworshyp . . . But nowadays men can nat love sevennyght but they muste have
all their desires. That love may nat endure by reson, for where they beythe sone
accorded and hasty, heete sone keelyth. And right so faryth the love nowadays,
sone hote sone colde. There ys no stabylyte. But the olde love was nat so. For
men and women coude love togydirs seven yerys, and no lycoures lustis was
betwixte them, and than was love trouthe and faythefulnes. (648)
True love is slow and lasting, while lechery is quick and hot and burns itself out quickly.
Yet the passage seems to praise true love as virtuous even if adulterous; it is hasty ‘love’
that is disparaged. The knightly lover should keep the “middle way; that is, love
moderately because moderate love increases the honor of the knight and of his lady”