‘To se hem play, hyt was fayr game’: Playing & dancing in Thomas Chestre’s Sir Launfal

Abstract

In this article, I approach premodern dance through the lens of cultural game theory. Specifically, I examine how the Middle English Sir Launfal (c.1400) is transformed by Thomas Chestre into a narrative about games. Chestre’s ludic additions have been met with criticism for how they disrupt the plot of Marie de France’s twelfth-century Lanval. While the games interrupt narrative progression, the ludic additions allow Chestre to consider the porousness between game worlds and the official world. Chestre’s ludic additions are not merely digressive. I demonstrate how the two longest ludic additions—the joust with Sir Valentine and the dance with Guinevere—share a structural pattern. I argue that the poem’s joust and dance games realise the more serious social implications inherent in playing games as the poet shows the consequences of Launfal’s unsportsmanlike behaviour.

Introduction

Thomas Chestre’s adaptation of Sir Launfal (c.1400) is a Middle English romance about playing games.¹ Chestre’s games expand on his sources, Marie de France’s twelfth-century French Lanval, the Old French Graelent, and the early fourteenth-century Middle English Sir Landevale (Bliss 1960, 1–2, 24–31; Laskaya and Salisbury 2001b, 201–2).² Nearly doubling the length of his sources, Chestre expands the role that games play while maintaining most of the existing narrative structure.³ Chestre follows the same narrative moments as his sources: Launfal, who has recently fallen into financial ruin, meets and begins a love affair with the fairy queen Tryamour. In exchange for continuing the love affair and providing limitless wealth, she makes him promise to keep her and their relationship secret. Launfal then breaks this promise when Guinevere makes unwanted advances toward him. An offended Guinevere reports the insult to Arthur, who imprisons Launfal under the threat of death. At the last minute, Tryamour saves Launfal. Chestre’s additions, Stephen Guy-Bray asserts, ‘draw attention to the problems of forming and, especially, of maintaining a masculine and knightly identity’ (Guy-Bray 2008, 33). Here, I explore how Chestre problematizes Launfal’s identity through the two ludic additions. In expanding the narrative, Chestre gives more attention to Launfal’s changing attitude while playing games.⁴

The poet gestures that games will be an integral theme by adding ludic episodes, including a tournament, a joust, and a dance. A.C. Spearing reads the game additions as participating in ‘wish-fulfillment’ or ‘a child’s fantasy of persecution and reward’ (Spearing 1993, 98, 108).⁵ Literary critics including James Weldon (2000), Stephen Guy-Bray (2008), and James T. Stewart (2015) have further nuanced the tournament games. These readings focus on the joust with the knight Sir Valentine and the tournament at Caerleon, while neglecting Chestre’s inclusion of a third game: the dance with Guinevere. They privilege the masculine coded, violent games of chivalry—jousts, melees, and tournaments. They imagine dancing to be either something knights do between violent interactions with one another or as part of their childhood pastimes. This privileging of military games erases social dance games from an analysis of chivalric spaces and culture. Before exploring women’s positions in combat (both war and play), Nigel Saul sidelines dance to ‘the fantasy world of the romances’ where ‘it was the regular convention for men to dance in submissive attendance on their womenfolk, and the romances, as we have seen, had their roots in real-life social predicaments’ (Saul 2011, 270). For Saul and other scholars of chivalry, dance is inconsequential. For Chestre and his Launfal, the dance—like the joust—is a serious game.

Chestre explicitly imagines participation in the joust and the dance as playing games. In this essay, I focus on the joust and dance because of their structural parallels. The two games begin with someone wanting to play with Launfal—with all players entering the game space sharing the same attitude toward play. The games abruptly end when the titular knight’s attitude sours. I argue that Chestre presents Launfal as an inept and apathetic player through this repeated structure. Chestre’s presentation of parallel games then observes how hyper-emotional, unsportsmanlike play is not only dangerous within the confines of a game (the joust or the dance) but also threatens one’s standing in the official world of the court.⁶ Chestre presents a romance world where the boundary between the game world and the official world becomes ever more porous.

Games operate within a certain space separate from—but often determined by and sharing consequences with—the official world. In their book on game design, Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals, Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman name the demarcated playground within the official world as the ‘magic circle’ (2004).⁷ Their concept of the magic circle depends on multiple features.⁸ Two of these features inform my reading of Sir Launfal: (1) that games are ‘temporary worlds’ dictated by either ‘rules’ or ‘play,’ and (2) that game players enter a magic circle with a lusory attitude or ‘a real commitment to decide to play a game’ (Salen and Zimmerman 2004, 96–7). I use these two features to structure my readings of the games in Sir Launfal. In the first section, I compare the structural similarities between Chestre’s two games. While these are two different types of games, Chestre represents them as structurally parallel. The joust and dance follow the same pattern: someone (Sir Valentine or Guinevere) desires to play a game with Launfal, they play, Launfal emotionally unravels, and he concludes the game with an outburst. Chestre draws parallels between the competitive jousting game and the social dance game that showcase the porousness of the game spaces. Games have consequences in the official world. Just as one may win renown for doing well in a tournament, a player can also develop a negative reputation that remains with them beyond the game space. In the second section of the essay, I explore these violent, unsportsmanlike outbursts as a notable shift in Launfal’s attitude toward the game and the other players. Chestre’s additions to Sir Launfal elucidate the importance of shared approaches and outlooks—what I will call lusory attitudes borrowing the concept from Bernard Suits (2005) and Jesper Juul’s (2010) work—when playing games, whether those games be oriented toward goals, experience, or social management. A lusory attitude is an agreement that a game will be played in a specific way with player-accepted rules and goals. I argue that Chestre presents the dangers of Launfal’s shift in lusory attitude within the familiar games to his social status in the official world.⁹ Approaching this shift through the lens of cultural game theory reveals the significance of dance as a game and the seriousness of games in Chestre’s medieval England.

Rules and the structure of games in Sir Launfal

Chestre’s ludic additions (the joust and the dance) consist of popular games in late medieval Europe that often coincide within the romance genre.¹⁰ In Le Roman de la Rose, Guillaume de Lorris describes an unnamed Arthurian knight who has recently been successful at a tournament dancing with the allegorical figure Largeice (Largesse), or Generosity (1965–70, 1173–88).¹¹ In his fourteenth-century poem, Le Dit dou Lyon, Guillaume de Machaut similarly writes:

S’en y avoit qui renoier

Le jouster, ne le tournoier,

Le dancier, ne le caroler

Ne pooient, ne le baler.

[There were some who would reject the jousting and the tourneying, so they could not dance, neither the carole nor the baler] (Machaut 1911, 2:1621–24; trans. mine).

Guillaume de Machaut’s approach is more regimented: the unspecified participants who will not play the military games cannot participate in dances. Robert Mullally claims, ‘No one could possibly believe that jousts and tournaments were components of any dance. What is surprising in this quotation is that [Guillaume de Machaut] is saying that there were those who could not perform danses, caroles or bals’ (Mullally 2011, 53). These pastimes (the tournament games and dances) in romance and during tournaments are more intertwined than Mullally credits. In the Tournament at Chauvency, Jacques Bretel shares a similar sentiment claiming, ‘Anyone short of courage had better stay well clear’ of the all-day joust while also implying that if they do not joust then they are not welcome to later dance (Bretel 2020, 64). On the prevalence of dance entering the narratives of thirteenth-century French romances, Christopher Page comments:

The emergence of carolling as a festive activity for young men during full courts and tournaments, reflected in thirteenth-century narratives, might therefore be interpreted as an opening of masculine, martial decorum towards the festive culture of urban centres. (Page 1989, 92).

I propose further developing Page’s claim here: that not only is it a sign of shifting ‘masculine, martial decorum’ but that the expanding presence of dance in these romances observes a shifting, more fluid view of masculinity as it relates to both traditionally martial games (like the joust) and dance games.¹²

Middle English writers, including Thomas Malory, John Lydgate, and Geoffrey Chaucer, tend to dial down the descriptions of festivities, often including dance and games as two items in a catalogue of festive actions. Chestre, on the other hand, narrates the two together not as an itemised list of activities but through a mirroring episodic structure. In Chestre’s romance, not only can the knight who does not joust also not dance, but the jouster who is unsportsmanlike will also prove to be a dancer without discipline.¹³ While not as explicit as Machaut’s or Bretel’s comments on who could participate in the activities, Chestre implicitly creates a succession between the two game episodes by having Launfal first win a joust before entering a dance. Furthermore, Launfal demonstrates unsportsmanlike behaviour in both episodes. Chestre uses these moments to experiment with the potential of games in romance narratives. On Chestre’s genre ‘experiments,’ Gania Barlow posits that Sir Launfal’s ‘disjunctures work productively to create a narrative that calls attention to inherent assumptions and illogic in the genre’s authorizing conventions’ (Barlow 2016, 184). Such experimentation with narrative disjunctures or breaks, Barlow claims, operates as a ‘metapoetic commentary’ on genre conventions (Barlow 2016, 168). Building from this reading, Sir Launfal’s disjunctures or narrative breaks that contain games present opportunities for Chestre to experiment with player behaviour during the activities.

Chestre’s identification of the dance and the joust as games implies that they possess certain parameters. In the popular imagination, the joust clearly aligns with this concept of the game in its presentation as a premodern contact sport (akin to American football or hockey) with a quantifiable outcome. Premodern social dancing may initially feel more like freeform play, but this pastime has tight rules governing movement. In Homo Ludens, Johan Huizinga goes as far as to claim dance was ‘pure play’ or ‘a particular and particularly perfect form of playing’ (Huizinga 1950 [1938], 173, 164, 165). His reading of dance as a more freeform play act is not entirely unfounded but is misleading. Dances had rules. In the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, jousting had clearly recorded binding rules and outcomes for specific participants while dancing on the outset is seemingly more approachable for shifting participants, or at least not recorded in the same way as a social practice. While the rules (and specific choreographies) of the dance bound the movements of the dancers, dances lacked quantifiable goal posts (i.e., points indicating winning or losing) that make the joust a more closed game. Dance, however, also presented a closed off game world with rules that had social consequences within and beyond the game space.

The ways to ‘win’ at jousting or be successful at the dance become more codified as the games grew and maintained popularity. By the sixteenth century, English scoring and rules for jousting had concretised into a complex diagramming system of score cheques (Ffoulkes 1912; Anglo 1961, 1988; Fallows 2010). Chestre’s audience also thought of dance as a game with particular social rules. While no English dance choreography or treatise survives prior to the sixteenth century, here I read Chestre’s dance game through the ‘rules’ for dance found in medieval pastoral care texts and the Italian humanist Guglielmo Ebreo of Pesaro’s fifteenth-century treatise De Pratica Seu Art Tripudii (‘On the Practice or Art of Dancing’). Chestre did not know Guglielmo Ebreo’s text. In the absence of late fourteenth- or fifteenth-century English dance manuals, Guglielmo Ebreo’s De Pratica taken with English and French pastoral care texts provide a framework for understanding the game parameters of Sir Launfal’s dance. At the start of both the joust and the dance, Chestre establishes that these are games being played within certain—seemingly pre-established—parameters, their rules, and who is able to participate in them.

Chestre intertwines the joust parameters within his introduction to the giant challenger Sir Valentine.¹⁴ Sir Valentine hears about Launfal’s success during the Caerleon tournament and declares:

But he myȝte wyth Launfal pleye

In þe feld, betwene ham tweye

To justy oþer to fyȝte

[He might with Launfal play, to joust or to fight in the field, just between them two] (514–16).¹⁵

The giant makes explicit the game’s desired parameters. He must play a specific game (a joust) within a demarcated space (the field). Sir Valentine further closes participation from outside of the game by explicitly limiting the players to ‘between them two’, i.e., Launfal and Valentine. Chestre did not need to outline the specific rules because his late medieval English audience would have known them. The absence of explicit rules means that modern readers must seek the potential rules for Launfal’s joust with Valentine from beyond the text.

While English jousting treatises do not survive prior to the sixteenth century, fifteenth-century ordinances and continental sources elucidate Chestre’s scoring system. Against Valentine, Launfal shatters a lance, loses his helmet, and loses his shield before wounding his opponent. According to Launfal’s negative responses, the modern reader assumes that the knight is losing. Historic scoring of these items further reinforces this notion. In his reading of the joust with Valentine, Weldon (2000) cites Lord John Tiptoft’s—Earl of Worcester and Constable of England—Ordinances for Justes of Peace Royal (1466) that the ‘Pryze shalbe lost’ (prize shall be lost) can result in a knight ‘who so vnhelmith him selfe ij tymes’ (whosoever unhelms himself twice) (Rühl 1986, 91).¹⁶ Alternatively, Tiptoft notes: ‘he that or who so hittethe iij tymes in the Sight of the healme shall have the pryze’ (he that or whosoever hits the opponent three times at the site of the helmet shall have the prize) (Rühl 1986, 91). Tiptoft’s rules account for Launfal’s loss of his helmet (575) but not the loss of the shield (590). Contemporary continental treatises assist in accounting for how the knight’s loss of his shield may have been scored and why his attitude also turned negative after its loss. In Lo Cavaller, Ponç de Menaguerra notes a rule that ‘irreparable damage to, or loss of, [a knight’s] shield’ is ‘the equivalent of 4 lance broken’ (Fallows 2010, 219).¹⁷ While Chestre does not define the localized rules of the joust, historical documentation does not favour Launfal’s performance.

Much like his foregrounding of the expectations for the game in Sir Valentine’s introduction, the poet presents the parameters of the dance in his reintroduction of Queen Guinevere.¹⁸ Guinevere openly expresses her expectations to dance with the knight while seeing the dance in action. While in a tower above the dance space, Guinevere watches Launfal already at play, leading a dance ‘vpon þe grene’ (upon the lawn) (640). Like the jousting field, the ‘green’ or lawn serves as a specifically designed magic circle. She tells the women with her that:

I se [...] daunce large Launfalle;

To hym þan wyll y go [...]

I wyll go & wyte hys wylle:

[I see generous Launfal dance. To him, I will go ... I will go and learn his will] (647–48; 653).

The repetition of ‘I wyll go’ foregrounds her movement toward the knight with a certain eagerness to ‘wyte’ (learn) his will.¹⁹ Unlike Valentine, she does not join the dance alone; the women with her in the tower follow her entrance into the game. This movement parallels sermon exempla where a ‘uetula’ (an older woman) lead an ‘iuuencula’ (a younger woman) into dances on feast days (Bromyard 1522, 419r).²⁰ The fourteenth-century Dominican writer John Bromyard even notes the practice’s parallel with an ‘antiquus miles’ (an old man) leading an ‘iuuenem’ (a young man) into ‘pugne’ (battle) (Bromyard 1522, 419r). He refers to young women being led into ‘choreas & spectacula’ (carole dances and spectacles) as similarly entering ‘spiritualis pugne’ (spiritual battle) (Bromyard 1522, 419r). Bromyard rhetorically codes ‘choreas’ (carole dances) as a military-like endeavour more serious than game or ludus, but the relationship is comparable to the games in Launfal. Guinevere leads the women into a game, not unlike previous games of conflict, with a particular prize in mind: Launfal.

Not all pastoral care material viewed dance in military terms. Some, such as John of Erfurt’s thirteenth-century Summa de Poenitentia, even explicitly refer to dances as games: ‘Games [ludi] are caroles [coree], which are customarily danced during banquets, the gesture of actors [gesticulaciones hystrionum] and the playing of instruments [instrumentorum organicorum]’ (Oxford, Oriel College, MS 38, fol. 102v; trans. Page 1989, 193–94). Unlike jousting, premodern dancing does not have a codified scoring system that determines prizes or winners. Just because one’s choreography was not scored does not mean that these dances lacked specialised rules of entry or goals. While Chestre presents a more open playground that allows for a more porous entry into the game itself, it is notable who obtains entry into the game space. The queen and her accompanying ladies are not just any onlookers desiring to and entering into the game. Women were particularly beholden to certain rules of dress and appearance during dance games. As Christopher Page observes in confessor handbooks (particularly, Cambridge, Peterhouse College MS 217) and sermon exempla (Birmingham, Cadbury Research Library, MS 433, formerly MS 6/iii/19), young women’s participation in such dances was often part of courting in the marriage market (Page 1989, 120–25). On rules for aristocratic male dancers, Guglielmo Ebreo notes the importance of being ‘temperate [continenti], honourable [honesti] and reverent [reverenti]’ (Ebreo 1993, 120–21).²¹ Guglielmo warns:

For it happens that some men, believing themselves a little expert in the dance, take it upon themselves, in a dishonourable, dissolute, and corrupt spirit, to be presumptuous and rash beyond measure. These are the ones who turn this most worthy art into something vile and shameful, chiefly because they are not well-instructed, mannerly, or modest in their speech (Ebreo 1993, 121, 123).

Dancing then, when understood as a game, adds on rules for courtesy. Dancing, like jousting, requires technical knowledge and specific clothing as well as a shared—or at least, respectful—attitude toward playing the game. Between Guglielmo’s De Practica and the pastoral care materials, it is not clear how a player wins the dance, but one can lose.

While Sir Launfal’s dance is more open to participants than the jousts, the poet does give details on how the game is being played that both isolate the space from the official world of the Arthurian court and set expectations on how to win. The queen and her ladies join the knights in dancing (658–59). The group expands as the women create and enter the spaces between the dancing knights—with Guinevere walking to the front of the dance and stepping between Gawain and Launfal (661–62). Guinevere effectively takes Launfal as her dance partner. Launfal does not explicitly object to the women’s entry into the space or flee after their arrival as he does in the French Lanval. Rather, he continues dancing. Chestre describes how the dancers are heterogeneously organized and that the dancers are all moving in the same manner (664). The phrase ‘alle yn same’ (all in the same way) ambiguously signals both the same ‘daunce’ choreography and the same attitude towards the game (664). The ‘lady and a knyȝt’ create a silhouette effect, an effect that is realised across the dancers they lead (666). This silhouette effect is similar to Seeta Chaganti’s notion of premodern dance’s ‘virtuality’—‘the medieval awareness of virtual supplements around, ahead of, and behind the body in choreographed motion’ (Chaganti 2018, 7). The line focuses on two figures, but their movement mirrors those of every knight and lady dancing. The line anonymises the knight and lady; however, the dance leaders (Launfal and Guinevere) have a similar effect on the dancers. Launfal was the initial dance leader. Guinevere’s entry and placement places her alongside him. From these two dancers, the knights and ladies dance ‘alle yn same’ (all in the same way) (664). Launfal and Guinevere set the pace, tempo, and movement of the social dance. They set into motion the rest of the company. For a moment, the dancers are in harmony. While dancing harmoniously, the aims of their play—their lusory attitudes—seemingly run parallel as the knights and the ladies enjoy their game.

The seriousness of shared games

Players enter game spaces with lusory attitudes. This shared attitude toward the game for theorist Bernard Suits means that players ‘voluntarily’ tolerate the rules and potential outcomes for the shared experience of playing a game (Suits 2005, 54–55). When considering multiplayer video games, Jesper Juul expands lusory attitudes into the following taxonomy of three considerations:

1) The goal orientation consideration. You want to win.

2) The game experience consideration. You want the game to be fun and you know that this entails making sure there is uncertainty about the outcome. You may play a little badly in a multiplayer game in order to keep the game interesting.

3) The social management consideration. When playing with other players, you desire management of the social situation. You know the outcome of the game may make certain players sad or happy. You know the outcome of the game may influence your social standing and the social dynamic of the group (Juul 2010, 126–127).

Juul’s considerations extend to player interactions not only concerning the agreed upon rules but also with each other’s shared (or competing) interests in the game. When playing with other players, their shared lusory attitude becomes a consensual agreement that a particular game will be played under specific rules with clear, accepted—if not branching—outcomes. In this section, I consider how Chestre creates these consensual attitudes through the language of game and uses Launfal’s negative shift as a warning of, in Juul’s taxonomy, shifting considerations for the purpose of play.

Chestre plays with the consensual aspects of games by using the term ‘play’ in three ways: to joust, to dance, and to have consensual sex. Prior to the Sir Valentine episode, the poet describes Launfal and Tryamour’s first evening together as ‘play’: ‘For play lytyll þey sclepte þat nyȝte’ (Because of their play, they slept little that night) (349). For Chestre, ‘play’ signals a consensual agreement to participate in a shared activity while also provoking Launfal’s sexual performance. Launfal and Tryamour’s ‘play’ leads to their ongoing relationship and Launfal’s promise to not tell anyone in the official world if he wishes to continue having consensual ‘play’ (352–65). When Sir Valentine invites Launfal to joust, he challenges the knight’s manhood. The giant provocatively claims that jousting against him will ‘kepe hys harneys from þe ruste—/ And elles hys manhod schende’ (keep his harness from rusting or else shame his manhood) (527–28). When Launfal accepts the giant’s challenge to joust, the knight consents to play the joust. In both cases, the named participants enter an agreed upon ‘play’ activity. Chestre repeats this pattern during the dance, but like the joust, Launfal’s negative change in perspective not only disrupts the game but also breaks the consensual attitude about the game. In other words, Launfal’s souring attitude marks a break away from shared expected outcomes. Launfal’s negative shift in attitude ultimately collapses the two game spaces—forcing consequences in, and a return to, the official world. In both episodes, Launfal unravels when things do not happen as he expects and subsequently has an outburst. Chestre names Launfal’s shame as the turning point.

Chestre directly connects playing games with shared lusory attitudes within his rhyming of game. He uses ‘game’ four times throughout the romance. Twice the poet pairs ‘game’ with ‘same’ to emphasize a shared consideration:

At þe feste we wold han be yn same,

And yhadde solas & game,

[At the feast, we would have been together and had joy and made merry] (406–7)

and

To daunce þey wente, alle yn same:

To se hem play, hyt was fayr game,

[They went to dance, all in the same way: to see them play, it was a fair game] (664–65).

In both cases (the feast during the tournament at Caerleon and the dance), the ‘same’ reinforces a shared play experience. The expectations are pleasantly met as the games are described as either accompanying solace or as fair. Chestre’s other two ‘game’ rhymes pair the activity with ‘shame’:

Syr Valentyn logh, & hadde good game:

Hadde Launfal neuer so moche schame

[Sir Valentine laughed and had good cheer: Launfal had never experienced so much shame] (577–78)

and

I spak to Launfal, yn my game,

And he besofte me of schame,

[I spoke to Launfal, in my game, and he besought me shamefully] (715–16).

Both pairings signal a break—often caused by Launfal’s changing or misunderstanding expectations of the game.

Chestre establishes the game/shame rhyme beginning with Launfal’s diverging attitudes midway through his joust with Valentine. After Valentine knocks off Launfal’s helmet, Chestre pauses the action to observe the two differing outlooks (575). Launfal loses both his headgear and his joy in the game being played. Weldon reads this moment as the knight’s temporary loss of identity: ‘if Launfal loses the tournament because he is unhelmed, he cannot gain the tournament fame so integral to Chestre’s plot’ (Weldon 2000, 115). The moment is disorienting, leading to two different reactions. Valentine laughs and ‘hadde good game’ while Launfal ‘neuer so moche schame / Beforhond, yn no fyȝt’ (had never before experienced so much shame in a fight) (577–79). Valentine’s pleasant reaction plays with the multivalence of ‘game’ in Middle English. The two knights are playing a game, but ‘game’ also signals ‘joy’ or ‘pleasure.’²² Valentine’s laugh is often read as rude behaviour; however, his laughing being paired with ‘good game’ allows for a more multivalent reading of his response to the game as exhilaration.²³ Scholarly readings of Valentine’s relationship both to the game and Launfal have often been based on conflict. This is in part due to Chestre characterising Valentine’s desire to play with Launfal as a ‘greet enuye’ (great envy) (506). Bliss glosses Valentine’s ‘enuye’ as animosity or hostility (Bliss 1960, 136).²⁴ The Middle English ‘enuye’ may also demonstrate eagerness or enthusiasm or even a ‘desire to equal another in achievement or excellence.’²⁵ Valentine’s laugh, then, may not just concern Launfal’s hurt feelings, but that he is getting what he so eagerly hoped or envied for at the start of the episode: to joust against Launfal.

His exhilaration then contrasts Launfal’s disappointment. Launfal’s ‘schame’ codes his embarrassment. This shift in headspace happens after he takes a blow, and his helmet physically flies off. The knight’s shame reflects his mediocrity in the moment; no prior fight—like the games in Caerleon—has been against a named assailant that posed any real threat. Valentine is fairly and skilfully winning the joust—he is a giant opponent with impeccable aim to remove Launfal’s helmet and shield. Launfal—who seemingly is not playing for the experience but playing to win—no longer enjoys the game because he is losing.²⁶ His hyperbolic shame contrasts Valentine’s ‘good game’ shared in the couplet rhyme. As a result, Launfal’s attitude sours and his play turns violent. Launfal ends the game by violently killing Valentine:

Syr Valentyne he smot so þere

Þat hors & man boþe deed were,

Gronyng wyth grysly wounde

[He struck Sir Valentine so hard there that both horse and man were dead, groaning with grisly wound] (598–600).

The repetition of ‘smot’ reframes how the two jousters’ attitudes manifest while playing against the other. When Valentine ‘smot,’ he only removes Launfal’s shield—similar to when he only knocks off the knight’s helmet. Both are careful and skilful hits considering Valentine’s size. In contrast, when Launfal ‘smot’ Valentine, it is not just with precision but aggression. An audible ‘gronyng’ (groaning) haunts the end of the joust as Valentine’s laughter and good game cease.

Launfal’s killing of Valentine in a poem at the turn of the fifteenth century would not have been entirely unusual, but it would still have been shocking. The horror of the grisly wound and death brings the game to an abrupt end. Timothy D. O’Brien reads the moment less as Launfal winning, but rather ‘a rather unassertive, even self-destructive character “lucks out.”’ (O’Brien 1990, 43). Death and injury were not uncommon during jousts or martial military games (Keen 1984, 87–88). As the game evolved to become more technical and resembled a certain pageantry in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the risk of death and injury seemingly decreased from the sport’s high medieval origins (Keen 1984, 205–6). Records are not exhaustive in England. When documenting the fifteenth-century Iberian Pass of Honour of Suero de Quiñones, Noel Fallows notes the use of rhetorical formulas for describing various injuries, or ‘revés’ (‘reversals of fortune’) (2010, 235–37). Fallows breaks down the percentage of these occurrences of injury: 7.5% of those recorded in the source (2010, 235–36). Fallows builds a convincing case through the source that:

The sundry contusions, concussions and dislocations suffered by the jousters discussed in this book certainly demonstrate that these were the men who put the pain in Spain, but they also underscore that by the second half of the fifteenth century jousting was not nearly as dangerous or simplistic as has been thought (2010, 237).

Valentine’s striking and removing Launfal’s helm and shield demonstrate the knight’s precision and technical skill at the sport. Launfal’s killing Valentine displays a lack of discipline and skill contrasting the giant’s careful precision. This contrast in skill corresponds with their differing attitudes about the game: Valentine’s good ‘game’ and Launfal’s warped view on play. Launfal’s goal to win subsumes the consensual and technical rules of the late medieval joust—the stable parameters that not only have other players agreed upon but that would also keep them safe.

Chestre repeats both the game/shame and game/same rhymes when discussing the dance. During the dance, he describes the harmony of the dancers: ‘To daunce þey wente, alle yn same: / To se hem play, hyt was fayr game’ (They went to dance, all in the same way: to see them play, it was a fair game) (664–65). As previously noted, the lines reflect and revibrate through the imagined choreography of the dancers: from the knight and the lady, the steps, tempo, and motion are determined. The line also observes the dancers’ shared experience. Just as Valentine’s ludic attitude is summarized by him having a ‘good game,’ their shared ludic experience is a ‘fayr game.’ Chestre further emphasizes the shared mood in his description of the women joining the knights:

And wente hem doun anoonryȝtes,

Ham to pley among þe knyȝtes,

Well stylle, wythouten stryf

[And well intentioned and without strife, they immediately went to play among the knights] (658–60).

The women go to ‘play’ with the knights ‘well intentioned and without strife’ (658–60). From the onset of their entrance into the dance, the poet conveys the women’s attitude—including Guinevere’s—as paralleling Valentine’s play for the experience and a step toward Juul’s social management consideration (Juul 2010, 126–27).

As with the joust, Chestre again establishes the play consideration of the other named player (Guinevere) during the dance game. Her consideration contradicts Launfal’s dancing for the experience. Guinevere not only wants the experience of playing with Launfal but desires to ‘wyte’ (learn) his will while dancing with him (653). All is ‘fayr game’ until Launfal again feels shame when the desired outcomes of the game are revealed to be at odds. Paralleling his violent outburst against Valentine, Launfal rudely responds to Guinevere as the dance ‘began to slake,’ and she propositions him to be her ‘lemman’ (lover) (673–81):

I haue loued a fayryr woman

Þan þou euer leydest þyn ey vpon

Þys seuen yer & more!

Hyr loþlokste mayde, wythoute wene,

Myȝte bet be a quene

Þan þou, yn all þy lyue!

[I have loved a fairer woman than you have ever laid your eyes upon for these seven years and more! Her most unpleasant maid, without doubt, would make a better queen than you in all of your life] (694–99).

Launfal becomes so ‘sore aschamed’ (sorely ashamed) that he snaps—acting in the ‘presumptuous and rash’ manner that Guglielmo Ebreo warns against in his treatise (691).²⁷ Turning down Guinevere’s advances would have been enough. Launfal could deflect Guinevere’s advances without the outburst—much like Gawain does with the lady at Hautdesert in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Launfal crosses the line when he claims that he both ‘loved a more beautiful woman’ and that his lover’s ‘most unpleasant maid would make a better queen.’ These two insults dissolve the boundary of game space and the official world of the court.

Chestre realizes this dissolve in his last use of the game/shame rhyme while Guinevere reports the insults to Arthur. She tells Arthur, ‘I spak to Launfal, yn my game, / And he besofte me of schame, / My lemman forto be’ (I spoke to Launfal, in my game, and shamefully he asked to be my lover) (715–17). While Guinevere lies about who propositioned whom, Arthur is more upset that Launfal would claim another woman—let alone that woman’s ‘lodlokest mayde’ (most unpleasant maid)—is more beautiful than his queen (761–68). Arthur, who himself has also just returned home from a hunting game, calls for Launfal ‘to be hongeþ & todrawe’ (to be hung and drawn) (709; 726). The king’s demand for justice repeats Valentine’s friends’—the lords of Atillie—exact demands after Launfal killed Valentine.²⁸ This repetition stresses the tension between one’s in-game actions and the consequences of these actions beyond the game. The knight’s consequences are further realized with the end of his ‘play’ with Tryamour as her gifts transform and disappear (728–43). Launfal’s behaviour within the dance space creates consequences beyond the game’s porous boundaries. His misreading and missteps of the other dancer’s expected outcome for the game result in confusion, shame, and social injury. His in-game ‘schame,’ when in contrast with the aims of other players, breaks the consensual agreements of the poem’s play and game structures.

Conclusion: Premodern dance in a ludic century

Launfal’s playing games continues indefinitely into the future. Chestre ends Sir Launfal with one last ludic addition:

Ho þat wyll þer axsy justus,

To kepe hys armes fro þe rustus,

In turnement oþer fyȝt,

Dar he neuer forþer gon;

Þer he may fynde justes anoon

Wyth Syr Launfal þe knyȝt.

[He who will ask to joust or to fight in tournaments there—to keep his arms from the rust—need never to go further, because there he may quickly find jousting games with the knight Sir Launfal] (1027–32).

Launfal won’t stop jousting. The moment repeats the sentiment of his game with Valentine, that jousting will ‘keep his arms from the rust.’ Laskaya and Salisbury comment on this ‘echo’ to ‘suggest the possibility that Launfal has replaced Valentyne in the scheme of things as the one who tests mortal men’ (Laskaya and Salisbury 2001b, 1027–28). Notably absent from this last glimpse at Launfal is the knight’s participation in future dances. Did the unexpected turn and consequences of the dance with Guinevere turn him off from future dance events? Was the outcome (i.e., the trial) too embarrassing for him to return to dancing in green spaces? Chestre imagines Launfal’s future as focused on the masculine game—the one that ended so violently the last time the knight jousted. I want to conclude by considering these continuous jousts as an extension of Chestre’s ludic additions—not that playing games is exceptional but rather habitual. For Launfal (and future players), the joust becomes this repetitive game to be played and experienced.

Games are serious and omnipresent. In our own ‘ludic century’ where games (sports, video games, board games, etc.) are nearly unavoidable social encounters or pastimes, playing has become habitual (McCormick 2015, 215; Zimmerman 2013). In a similar way, Seeta Chaganti and Jennifer Nevile find that dance in the premodern world was ‘habitual’ and ‘ever-present’ (Chaganti 2018, 4–6; Nevile 2008, 2). On engaging with premodern dance, Chaganti challenges us to ‘ask how informed practices of dance spectatorship and participation might inflect other acts of response, decoding, and interpretation, particularly those aimed at the poetry with which the dance coexists’ (Chaganti 2018, 5). Like premodern dance, our approaches to premodern games would benefit from this inquiry. What might a critical engagement with the porousness of premodern and our own contemporary ludic cultures—where gaming is/was ubiquitous—reveal about games? Launfal’s infinite jousts ruminate across time, player, and spectator just as the lines between player and spectator are blurred as video games are played and streamed in living rooms, on platforms such as Twitch and YouTube, and on mobile devices. Thinking about games not only as disjunctures or narrative interruptions but as habitual invites serious avenues for inquiry and investigation of the relationships between players, spectators, and the games that they play. In this ludic century, as in Middle English romance, games are not childish, unserious, or trivial detours that disrupt the motion of ordinary life. They present reflections and interpretations of social interactions. They also offer additional refuge or opportunity for social interactions.

For romanciers like Chestre, games can offer a site of experimentation. The inclusion of games in narratives—including dancing and jousting—challenges the structural and porous boundaries between life in-game and in the official world. Media theorist Patrick Jagoda asserts that, ‘[video] games operate as experiments insofar as they combine a stable foundation of starting conditions, rules, and objectives on the one hand with the contingency and possibility of play on the other’ (2020, 28). Jagoda’s approach to video games as experiments initially offering stability before branching into worlds of uncertainty is compatible with the game structures of medieval romance. This approach to games as experimentation also opens a new avenue to expand theoretical approaches to games in medieval literature. Kimberly K. Bell (2015), Betsy McCormick (2015), Nora Corrigan (2015), Karla Mallette (2022), and Jenny Adams (2006) have recently explored the role of play across premodern texts. Bell, in particular, reads the chanson d’aventure Somer Soneday as didactic through the interlacing of two familiar games for the poem’s fourteenth-century aristocratic audience: the deer drive and wheel of fortune (Bell 2015, 169–70; 178–79). Poets, like Chestre, similarly structure the objectives of the knight’s adventures and games—interlacing familiar and timely games in ways that may be surprising to the text’s audience.²⁹ The familiarity of the games themselves offers some stability but underscores the chance of branching possible outcomes, or even winners.

Approaching premodern dance through the lens of cultural game theory and in conversation with both modern and premodern games opens up the possibility of creatively engaging with moments in medieval texts that have previously been critiqued for their monotony, or reduced to mere disruptions. Parallels abound between how fifteenth-century readers entered the worlds of romance as ‘entertainment’ in a way not dissimilar from modern ‘readers’ entering the playgrounds of video games or interactive media. We may consider how playing the 1998 arcade game ‘Dance, Dance, Revolution’, or its various spin-offs, offers a bridge between spectator and player. Unlike their medieval predecessors, these games do offer a scoring system but one that rewards repetition, knowledge of steps, and replication of what is on the screen. The player mimics the motion and timing of the dancing silhouette presented by the game. Approaching not only premodern games but ‘generic’ dance descriptions in premodern texts through a similar lens—one that situates games as both pastime and serious social affair—can highlight both the habitual nature of these activities and how their poets (or romanciers) experiment in these game spaces. The late medieval romance text, like modern interactive media, functions as a playground within the realm of the ludic. Chestre’s Sir Launfal is but one of these texts that challenges the reader to participate in its ludic additions as they enter into repetitively structured games within an imaginative narrative space.