In medieval French literature, the conventional plot of courtly love focuses on the figure of the queen. As the highest ranking woman in the land, she is the natural feminine object of male heterosexual desire--a desire heightened by the social and symbolic distance that sets her apart as unapproachable and forbidding.2 In stories of an adulterous queen, the king often cuts a poor figure. Cuckolded by a member of his household, he remains inexplicably passive (like Arthur) or resorts to behavior unbecoming to his station (like Marc, crouching in a tree to spy on Iseut's assignation with Tristan). Marie de France's Equitan, on the other hand, tells the story of an adulterous king enmeshed in an affair with his seneschal's wife. Though the lady initially resists the king's advances, she eventually gives in; the two then plot to dispose of her husband so they may marry. In a turnabout of fair play, the seneschal discovers their disloyalty, and they are scalded to death in the hot bath intended for him. Now historically, men's extramarital affairs were so routine that the very phrase "adulterous king" sounds nonsensical. Chroniclers show surprise not when a ruler took a mistress but rather when he did not.3 Why, then, does Marie de France imagine such a bad end for these particular lovers, when elsewhere in the Lais she shows sympathy for adulterous wives (as in Yonec) and for unmarried lovers (as in Lanval or Milun)? The simple answer is found in the moral Marie appends to the tale: "He who plans evil for another may have that evil rebound back on him" "Tels purcace le mal d'autrui / Dunt tuz li mals revert sur lui" (309-10).4 A more textured answer concerns the lai's representation of the complex interplay between courtly forms and the responsibilities of kingship. Redistributing the roles of husband, wife, and unmarried lover, Equitan interrogates the function of kingship, situating it at the nexus of lord-vassal relations

    As a discourse, courtly love derived its power from its striking inversion of the gender hierarchies governing the high middle ages. In feudal society, noblewomen were pawns in the feudal politics of lineage, the dynastic capital whose circulation concretized the homosocial relations between fathers, husbands, brothers and sons. Despite the church's insistence that marriage required the consent of both partners, in marriage "the wife was subject to the power of her husband, woman's sovereign.'"5 The conventions of courtly love, on the other hand, purported to invert this gendered hierarchy of power, elevating woman from her subordinate role, making her into an object of service, adoration and desire.6 Quintessentially, the domna is a lady of high feudal rank; invested with a power that both mimics and redoubles that of the feudal lord, she exercises complete control over her lover. In Chrétien de Troyes's Le Chevalier de la Charrete, Lancelot willingly humiliates himself at the tournament of Nouaz because Guenevere has secretly instructed him to do his "worst." Valorizing a violent passion at odds with the aristocracy's carefully-crafted politics of marriage (in his De arte honesti amandi, Andreas Capellanus represents Marie, countess of Champagne, going so far as to declare the two incompatible), courtly love seems to gather a range of attitudes and practices subversive of feudal society.

    But the young man's love service to his lady was also, as Georges Duby points out, a homosocial game that strongly reinforced the status quo: "in this military society, was courtly love not, in reality, love between men? ... in serving the prince's wife, it was the love of the prince which the young wished to gain, by applying themselves, by bending, by bowing down. At the same time as they served to prop up the morality of marriage, the rules of courtly love reinforced the rules of the ethics of vassalage."7 Far from subverting feudal society, the young knight's homage to his lady powerfully enacted and confirmed its hierarchical norms, training him in the feudal values of submission, fidelity, and self-forgetfulness.8 The lord who "allowed his wife to be placed at the centre of the competition, in an illusory, and ludic situation of primacy and power" understood that courtly ritual provided a means of managing the political as well as erotic desires of his vassals. For the king in particular, ideologies of chivalry and courtly love helped mobilize male desire to political ends, which in the late twelfth century meant "the rebirth of the state."9

    Courtly love serves this political function, however, only as long as the king remains on the sidelines of this dangerous game of discipline and desire. Even when the king is ineffectual (like Arthur), vaguely ridiculous (like Marc), or simply absent (like Henry II in the face of Bernart de Ventadour's lyric homage to Queen Eleanor10), the erotic tension surrounding the queen reproduces the centralizing attraction exerted by the monarchical state. When the lover is the king, on the other hand, the obsessional passion that defines the courtly lover turns destructive. In Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the

    The strange case of Philip, Fulk and Bertrade, like the fictional example of Uther, Gorlois and Ygerne, turns on the king's deployment of power in his determined pursuit of political or sexual goals. Equitan, in contrast, narrates the raw assertion of royal power through the discourse of courtly love. At the outset, the two are distinct and mutually exclusive. When Equitan first falls in love with the lady, he acknowledges the fundamental contradiction between erotic passion and feudal responsibility: "If I love her, I'm doing wrong; she's the wife of my seneschal. I owe him the same faith and love that I want him to give me" "E si jo l'aim, jeo ferai mal: / Ceo est la femme al seneschal; / Garder li dei amur e fei / Si cum jeo voil k'il face a mei" (71-74).15 The relationship between the king and his seneschal is unequal but it is mutually binding; in order to command his vassal's allegiance, Equitan must conduct himself as a

    For a king, however, the danger inherent in an illicit affair is uncoupled from the threat of direct political reprisal. Where the amorous vassal playing the dangerous game of courting his overlord's wife must temper his ardor with circumspection and moderation, Equitan experiences no such constraints. From his vantage point atop the feudal pyramid, he yields to the seduction of courtly discourse, casting aside all feudal scruple: "What a waste of a beautiful woman if she did not love and take a lover! What would happen to her courtoisie if she didn't love a sweetheart? There isn't a man in the world who wouldn't be much better for it" "Si bele dame tant mar fus, / S'ele n'amast e dru n'eüst! / Que devendreit sa curteisie, / S'ele n'amast de druërie? / Suz ciel n'ad humme, s'el l'amast, / Ki durement n'en amendast" (79-84). In the quick transition between his original compunction at the thought of pursuing his vassal's wife to this justificatory rhetoric of mutual self-improvement, Equitan has rationalized away all political responsibilities and concerns, plunging headlong into the alternate reality of courtesy and love.

    The lady, on the other hand, inhabits a world devoid of such courtly banter. Like Laudine in Chrétien de Troyes's Le Chevalier au Lion, she is surprised by this discourse of love: "My lord," she says, "I must have some time to think; this is so new to me, I have no idea what to say" "Sire ... / De ceo m'estuet aveir respit; / A ceste primiere feiee / N'en sui jeo mie cunseillee" (117-20).16 For the wife of the king's seneschal, what Equitan proposes is no game: the discrepancy in their power and status is not a mere detail that can be pretended away: "You're a king of high nobility, and I'm not at all of such fortune that you should single me out to have a love affair with. If you get what you want from me, I have no doubt about it: you'll soon get tired of me, and I'll be far worse off than before" "Vus estes reis de grant noblesce; / Ne sui mie de teu richesce / Qu'a mei vus deiez arester / De druërie de n'amer. / S'aviëz fait vostre talent, / Jeo sai de veir, ne dut nïent, / Tost m'avri‰z entrelaissiee, / J'en sereie mut empeiriee" (121-28).17 In fact, she has her own ideology of love, one based not on the submission of one partner to the other but on parity: "If I should love you and satisfy your desire, love wouldn't be equally shared between us. Because you're a powerful king and my husband is your vassal, I'm sure you believe your rank entitles you to my love. Love is unworthy if it is not equal" "Se issi fust que vus amasse / E vostre requeste otreiasse, / Ne sereit pas uël partie / Entre nus deus la druërie. / Pur ceo que estes reis puissaunz / E mis sire est de vus tenaunz, / Quidereiez a mun espeir / Le dangier de l'amur aveir / Amur n'est pruz se n'est egals" (117-37). The conventional tropes of courtly love, she seems to understand, invert but preserve the inequalities that put her at the king's mercy. The love she proposes instead is more truly subversive, outside and unstructured by feudal hierarchies of power.

    For the king, however, the appeal of courtly love is inseparable from the thrill of the submission demanded of the courtly lover. The lady's tiresome

    Finally, worn down by his insistence, seduced by the prospect of holding a king in thrall, or perhaps simply mindful of the consequences of saying no, the lady gives in and becomes Equitan's mistress. The language Marie uses to narrate their affair suggests a kind of secret marriage; it is also lexically marked by a vocabulary of reciprocal exchange, as if the lady's ideology of love had prevailed: "They took each other by exchanging rings and promised themselves to each other. They kept their promises and loved each other well" "Par lur anels s'entresaisirent, / Lur fiaunces s'entreplevirent, / Bien les tiendrent, mut s'entramerent" (181-83; emphasis added).18 Their trysts draw Equitan away from the public functions of kingship: "When they were to speak together the king informed his followers that he wanted to be bled privately. The doors of his chamber were closed, and no one was so daring, if the king didn't summon him, that he would ever enter there" "Quant ensemble durent parler, / Li reis feseit dire a sa gent / Que seignez iert priveement. / Li us des chambres furent close; / Ne troveissez humme si os, / Si li reis pur lui n'enveiast, / Ja une feiz dedenz entrast" (188-94). If the affairs of the kingdom are tended to nonetheless, it is because another exchange has taken place as well; as Equitan takes his pleasure with the seneschal's wife, the seneschal takes the king's place at court, performing the public functions of kingship: "Meanwhile, the seneschal held court and heard pleas and complaints" "Li seneschals la curt teneit, / les plaiz e les clamurs oieit" (195-96). From the beginning of the lai, Equitan had shown himself willing to delegate affairs of state in order to devote himself to the hunt and other pastimes: the seneschal "took care of his land for him, governed and administered it" "Tute sa tere li gardout / E mainteneit e justisait" (23-24). Now, with the seneschal discharging the king's public functions and Equitan closeting himself with the seneschal's wife, the exchange seems complete.

    There is one responsibility, however, that cannot be fulfilled by proxy: the begetting of an heir to continue the royal line. In the twelfth century, as hereditary succession emerged as a prime factor in political stability, dynastic

    When Philip I conceived his desire for Bertrade de Montfort, neither his marriage to Berthe of Frisia nor hers to Fulk of Anjou prevented him from marrying the countess and making her his queen. In Equitan, on the other hand, the king and his mistress resort to the horrible if logical expedient of plotting the seneschal's death, cooking up a plan to scald him in the bath.21 When the seneschal momentarily leaves the room, Equitan draws the lady into his bed so that when her unsuspecting husband returns, he finds the two locked in an embrace: "There he discovered the king and his own wife lying in each other's arms" "Le rei e sa femme ad trovez / U il gisent, entr'acolez" (291-92). Having caught his wife and her lover in flagrante delicto, the seneschal--ccording to medieval customary law--is entitled to slay them.22 But the seneschal is denied the satisfaction--or spared the trauma--of regicide. At the sight of his seneschal, Equitan jumps into the scalding bath; in leaping to his own death, the king both avenges his wronged vassal and extinguishes the lineage that his excessive devotion to love had already so jeopardized. At this, the seneschal pitches his wayward wife into the boiling vat as well. In an equitable turn of poetic justice, the lovers die in a strategy of their own devising, consumed by a heat commensurate with the passion that burned them.23

    The real lesson of Equitan is located less in the moral Marie so conspicuously appends to her tale ("Tels purcace le mal d'autrui / Dunt tuz li mals

    In Marie de France's Fresne and Eliduc, the scenario of one man caught between two women produces tales of serial polygamy, in which secular lords repudiate their first wives in order to take new, more desirable brides. Moreover, in direct contrast to the twelfth-century church's increasing insistence on the indissolubility of marriage, Marie conspicuously represents abbesses, archbishops, and arguably even God as complicit in the protagonists' audacious marital politics.26 Equitan, on the other hand, takes place in a world in which repudiation and remarriage no longer seem viable options. In an astoundingly cynical turn, it is the king's implied respect for the principle of the indissolubility of marriage that leads him to plot the seneschal's murder. The difference has to do, at least in part, with the feudal politics of gender. Eliduc is allowed to trade up, exchanging Guildeluëc, a well-born wife of good family ("de haute gent, de grant parage" [10]), for Guilliadun, who is of royal birth ("fille ert a rei e a reïne" [16]). Unlike Bertrade de Montfort, the lady in Equitan is allowed no such privilege: wives are exchangeable, but husbands are not. Her attempt to scale the feudal ladder brings both her and her royal lover to a bad end.

    Literary representations of adulterous queens, Peggy McCracken has argued, form part of a medieval debate around the changing functions of queenship: the queen's influence in government, her biological role in dynastic succession, the importance of her chastity in the court's ritual and symbolic structures.27 Equitan, I suggest, performs a similar function around the question of medieval kingship. The king errs not in seducing the seneschal's wife but in surrendering so completely to his courtly fantasy that he jeopardizes his succession and provokes the discontent of his barons. At first, Equitan seems to instantiate Erich Köhler's reading of chivalry as an ideological strategy meant

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