The Once and Future King

Link: Wikipedia here, The Once and Future King, by T H White, 1958, Collins publishing, and here, for the Wikipedia on Lancelot

Entry: While reading Canto V, I was really interested in the pairs of lovers who had succumbed to their lusty desires. I was especially interested in the mention of Lancelot (and Guinevere), particularly because I have recently read The Once and Future King and had a background with them. The parallels between Lancelot and Guinevere and Francesca and Paolo made me think about  what Dante could have been hinting at with this allusion, and what T H White could have thinking about when he wrote The Once and Future King. In The Once and Future King, which was obviously published long after the Comedy, focused on Lancelot's betrayal of not only himself and his sacred vow as a knight, but he also betrayed his best friend and king, Arthur. Lancelot's tale clearly existed before the Comedy, and the original version that Dantes used was based on the prose text Le Chevalier de la Charrette, by Chrétien de Troyes, where Lancelot was King Arthur's most powerful and trusted knight.

Obviously, Arthur and Lancelot were very close, and trusted each other with everything, so when Lancelot betrays Arthur by falling in love with, and sleeping with his wife, the queen, it was the worst thing Lancelot could have done. This betrayal of self, duty, and mind is paralleled in Canto V, when Francesca tells Dante that she, like Guinevere, had been married. She had been married to Paolo's brother, to whom their adultery would mean the ultimate betrayal. I imagine this is how Arthur must have felt, because he and Lancelot were practically brothers anyway. 

The reference to Lancelot and Guinevere in Canto V made me wonder if T H White had used the Inferno as a reference while writing The Once and Future King because in the book, White mentions that their affair was the cause of Arthur's ultimate downfall. It would be interesting if White used Francesca's story as a background for Lancelot and Guinevere's storyline in The Once and Future King. It's interesting that there was a twelfth century poem (written in the 1170s) about Lancelot and Guinevere, then the Inferno mentions them as a reflection of Francesca and Paolo, then in 1485, Sir Thomas Mallory wrote Le Morte d'Arthur, which became the basis of White's The Once and Future King. I have not read Mallory's work, but it would be an interesting study to see how the tale of Lancelot morphed over time, and if it was changed at all by Dante's inclusion of it in Canto V. I'd have to go back and re-read it, but I think White used the Comedy and Francesca and Paolo's demise to influence the way he crafted Lancelot and Guinevere's story.