'The More He is of Worshyp the More Shall Be My Worshyp To Have Ado With Him': Jousting With Scott Hess About Malory

The Round Table 'The More He is of Worshyp the More Shall Be My Worshyp To Have Ado With Him': Jousting With Scott Hess About Malory Judging from Scott Hess's piece, 'Jousting in the Classroom: On Teaching Malory' (Arthuriana 9.1: 133-38), his students in a section ofDerek Pearsall's Harvard course, 'The Story ofArthur,' found reading Malory about as entertaining as a stay inTarquin's dungeon. I also teach Malory, and most ofmy students claim to enjoy it. Maybe they are being polite, but maybe that is not the whole story. How can Hess help students see the richness and variety of Malory's world when he doesn't see it himself? According to Hess, 'Malory's situations are like narrative bread machines, in which you pour in all the right ingredients and see the results emerge in predictable and uniformly shaped loaves' (136). Hess's students enacted a 'cerebral version' (133) of Malorian jousting. Each of a pair of participants received a 'card containing the name of a character from Malory and a typical situation or set of instructions [including insttuctions about whether to divulge his identity] and motivations__ In case... the encounter couldn't be worked out verbally, each character was also provided with a 'power rating' [from one to ten]...to decide the results ofany combats that might occur' (134). Our identities and our power ratings were equivalent' (135). Hess admits 'this situation didn't allow for entirely realistic encounters and so didn't exactly replicate Malory' (134). But in otder for him to be cotrect that stable power-differentials 'decided the outcome ofalmost every encounter' (135) in Malorian jousts as well as in 'cerebral' classroom jousts and that, although the identity of the classroom jousters had to be found out, 'the reader... knows exactly who's who, and from that basis exactly what is going to happen' (135) when two knights meet and joust in the Morte Darthur, three principles must hold. First, the reader virtually always knows who is jousting with whom in the Morte Darthur. Second, the Morte Darthur gives almost every knight, in effect, a stable 'power rating' that can be measured against the power ratings of almost everyone he jousts with, a rating that readers know in advance. Third, such power ratings determine the outcomes ofalmost all Malorian jousts. All three principles are false. Perhaps the most dramatic case of an unknown jouster is the mysterious knight who 'begyled usali wyth [his] coverde shylde' (571.12)1 and whose post-joust identification as Lancelot comes as a surprise to readers as well as to the other knights. Other cases include the reader's discovery, following a pair of jousts, that one of the participants was Breunis Sanee Pité (614.10—11). Earlier, the reader learns only after witnessing jousts with Kehydius and with Tristram that the 'lykely knyght' (481.29) jousting with them was Lamorak. There are also jousts such as those between La Cote Male Taile and, respectively, Plaine de Force, Plaine de arthuriana io. i (2000) 127 128ARTHURIANA Amours, and Plenorius (472:141F), where, although readers know both jousters' names in advance, one jouster is a new character. Obviously, this is not knowledge of'who's who' that would enable readers to predict outcomes. The second principle also fails. Few knights have anything like stable, linearlyordered 'power ratings' in Malory. Readers are told that Lancelot is the best and that Lancelot, Tristram, and Lamorak are the top three; there are also suggestions that Palomides ranks fourth (see 715.26-30). There are small-scale explicit comparisons among some other knights, for example that Gareth is the best ofthe Orkney brothers (696.12-13). But most knights have no explicit comparative rating that would support rank-ordering against almost all other knights they joust with. A die-hard believer in 'power ratings' might try to compute them from results of Malorian jousts and tournaments. I doubt this would yield stable linear rankings, and if it did, there would have to be fractions in Hess's 'one to ten' scale to give each of the (far more than ten) knights a unique power rating. This method would certainly not...