Like the second act of Into the Woods, The Road to Camlann is all about the second law of thermodynamics. Nothing gold can stay. Heroes get old and fail and die, and, Arthurian myth being as fatalist in its way as Greek tragedies, the seeds of those failures and deaths were planted years ago and have taken all this time to grow to maturity. Long-hidden misdeeds are revealed; dormant feuds are rekindled; and the fellowship of the Round Table which once drew the greatest knights in the realm together will now be splintered apart. Think of it as King Arthur: Civil War.
Arthur's illegitimate incestuous son/half-nephew Mordred is his downfall. Coming to Camelot like a snake to the garden, he sets to manipulating everyone around him to expose the most widely-known secret in Britain: that Arthur's queen Guinevere has been cheating on him with his most loyal knight Sir Lancelot for years.
(Sidetrack: Just how loyal is he? The legend insists he's the truest knight in Christendom, shy of his own illegitimate son Galahad, but I fail to see how anyone can be considered loyal to his superior when he's boinking said superior's wife. Perhaps Lancelot and Guinevere's affair is meant to be solely emotional? I have to lean in that direction, if only because every other time in the Arthurian legends someone has a one-night stand, pregnancy is the inevitable result. Then again, Arthur's one sordid night with Morgan La Fey produced Mordred, but his long marriage to Guinevere fails to yield a single progeny. Perhaps poor Guinevere is just barren.)
I like a happy ending, so this tale of people's own stupidity and misunderstandings leading to death and ruin doesn't do much for me.
No comments:
Post a Comment