The Custom of the Castle: From Malory to Macbeth (review)

Reviews y^ spilling wine all over herself, or in the thieves w h o poison each other so as not to have to share their gold. Battle scenes and ambushes where every member of the enemy force is killed may also recall the heroic cantare, as do some unnaturally quick changes of mind. Here a character agrees to do the exact opposite of what he previously wanted, just because he is asked to. Some of the Christian values are cheerfully barbarian, as when a ruler orders any of his people w h o do not have themselves baptised within three days to be put to the gallows. The translator chooses, above all, a strong populist rhythm, for the rendering of these imaginative, rough-hewn dramas. A good deal of the Renaissanceflourishcomes through into the English. At p. 164 and p. 256 a couple of speech credits (elsewhere italicized) seem to have crept into the spoken text ('An Angel appears and speaks thus to Anthony'; 'The friend, named Eustorgius, says'). Another translator might have chosen to avoid word-order inversions such as '...have you of your senses taken leave?' or 'Most certainly deserve to tortured be', but the stylistic effect is not unpleasing in this semi-liturgical context. Bruce Merry University of Kuwait Ross, Charles, The Custom of the Castle: From Malory to Macbeth, Berkeley Angeles/London, University of California Press, 1997; cloth; pp. xvii, 205. R.R.P. $US35.00; £28.00. This book is concerned with a number of medieval and Renaissance treatments of the strangeritualsand ordeals thrust upon knights and ladies who, perforce, may seek hospitality or refuge in unfamiliar castles. As such it is a particular refinement of a more widely found motif or topos—that of testing the stranger/guest w h o has come into one's house. The present particular version is that best described as 'the custom of the castle', a motif first conceived by Chretien de Toyes in the twelfth century but, perhaps, a natural consequence of 'a radical change in vocabulary during the 1020s, according to Georges Duby, as new divisions of power were established in France [where] the heart of the new social unit was the castrum, or castle' (p.130). Thus this monograph deems the castle's ethic to spring from the fact that, in Duby's words, 'it was both the seat of justice and the base of a potentially oppressive power,... to protect... to command, and, if necessary, punish' (France in the Middle Ages, 1987, p.56). Within this social framing, one that functioned/flourished at its most dauntingly powerful until the invention of gunpowder, Ross has chosen to explore with some subtlety various strange ordeals and evil challenges in Western European literature and to show how they are not mere fanciful tests 200 Reviews of a hero or quirkish manifestations of (misconstrued) courtly ideology. The text is somewhat skeletal, due to the fact that much of it had been published in three recent articles on, respectively, Malory, Boiardo and Ariosto. But it is also the case that Ross has chosen to concentrate on single scenes from epic and romance and to show, both progressively and in conclusion, h o w their nuanced narratives reflect real social limits of order, violence, justice, civility and political conformity. Thefirstof these exempla which raise a broad array of moral and political issues is taken from Malory's Morte Darthur. It comprises a meticulous dissection of the account of the events at the Weeping Castle—a translation and 'reduction' of the thirteenth-century prose Tristan —telling of what befalls Tristan and Iseult, after a love potion has induced his passion for her. In a loose sequence, or consequence, illicit love making puts them in dire peril: 'So then they sailedtillby fortune, they came nigh a castle that hight Pluere'. These events and their consequences are set against an account of the role of 'laws and customs' in fifteenth-century England, Ross in comparison citing Sir John Fortescue on customary law and its growing complexity. This point is then neatly related to the wonderful intricacy of Tristram's discussions with Breunor, lord of the Weeping Castle, suggesting to us 'the verbal dueling...