King of Cornwall and uncle of Tristan. King Mark is widower and has no children. He considers the orphan Tristan as his own son and successor. Tristan insists on a marriage between Mark and Isolde, an Irish princess.
Mark sent Tristan as his proxy to fetch his young bride, the Princess Iseult, from Ireland. Tristan and Iseult fall in love, and, with the help of a magic potion, proceed to have one of the stormiest love affairs in medieval literature. Mark suspects the affair and eventually his suspicions are confirmed. In some versions, he sends for Tristan to be hanged, and banishes Iseult to a leper colony. Tristan escapes the hanging and rescues Mark's bride from her confinement, later to be discovered by Mark. Mark eventually forgives them, with Iseult returning to Mark and Tristan leaving the country.
The story is cyclical with Mark suspecting Tristan and Iseult of adultery and then believing they were innocent. This happened again and again in the story. In the Beroul version, Tristan and Iseult are never in grave danger due to the narrator's declaration that he himself and God were on their side. King Mark, in the role of husband, is not portrayed as idealistic as other kings in Arthurian literature who were only portrayed in the role of king and not the personal role of husband.
Medieval authors' treatment of Mark varies widely. Some authors, like Malory (who draws on the Prose Tristan), go out of their way to make Mark into an irrational, sadistic man. Others, including both Thomas and Beroul, seem to have a sympathetic view of Mark as a conflicted, loving husband and uncle, "waver[ing] between his love for his wife and nephew and his appreciation of the barons' position [that Marc should punish the adulterers much more severely for their crimes]."4 In many ways, likewise, the portrayal of the lovers themselves differs from work to work, and often seems to be inversely related to Mark's goodness or lack thereof. Beroul, who creates a sympathetic Mark, makes the lovers almost malicious, seeming to delight in their ability to misdirect Mark whenever he becomes suspicious. By contrast, the Prose Tristan, the work on which Thomas Malory drew most heavily, creates a noble and sympathetic Tristan who is a perfect foil for his cruel and sadistic uncle. In regard to the Prose Tristan's Mark, Vinaver comments that "it is Tristan's duty, not his misfortune, to act as his rival and keep him in check . . . The tragic tale of unlawful
love yields its place to a romance of chivalry with its characteristically simple scale of values, its exaltation of chivalric virtues, and its condemnation of all that lies beyond the narrow boundaries of the 'adventurous kingdom.'" 5 The Prose Tristan's Mark falls unarguably on the "evil" end of this "simple scale of values," acting as a foil against whom the models of chivalry, Tristan and Lancelot, can be clearly delineated in their full heroic glory. No one version seems to be authoritative in its depictions of the major figures; the portrayal of both Mark and the lovers seems to be dependent entirely on the goals of individual writers.
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