#four queens

Four Queens, corner of Fremont & 3rd St, 1986

Four Queens Find Lancelot Sleeping - Frank Cowper

A few weeks ago I was delighted when Pinterest randomly suggested this image for me:

(This painting is “Four Queens Find Lancelot Sleeping”, by Frank Cadogan Cowper.)

Not because I’m a particular fan of Cowper, but because of the evocative title and scene. This scenario was unfamiliar to me, and after tweeting that RuPaul’s Drag Race should do some reconstructions of this tableau, I decided to draw something based on it. 

So I was initially operating under the assumption that these queens were on an innocent forest stroll when they came upon Lancelot sleeping and that the above scene captured the moment when they became alarmed because he failed to wake up in response to normal speech. That’s also the assumption my pal Lilah was under when she remarked that the queens in my first (bad) sketch attempt looked oddly unconcerned.

Playing with the idea of how to visually demonstrate their concern, the next day I came up with this:

- which is still my favorite of this whole saga in spite of the fact that, I’m ashamed to say, the queen in purple is wearing a late 14th century hat with an early 14th century gown and the others  are dressed out of the 11th and 12th centuries (apart from the cell phones... and the fact that Lancelot’s armor is more Monty Python than any of the centuries in question).

Anyway, only then did I read about the whole thing on Wikipedia. And it turns out that this episode is taken from the Vulgate cycle via Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, and consists of Morgan le Fay, another recurring Arthurian-and-early-medieval-romance character Queen Sebile (elsewhere in literature Morgan’s lover), and two (or, in the Vulgate cycle, one, because apparently Malory preferred the number four?) nameless other enchantress-queens who find Lancelot having a nap in the forest, admire his beauty and get into an argument about which of them is most deserving of being his lover, and then kidnap him, take him back to ‘their’ castle, and wake him up to demand he choose one of them or stay imprisoned there until death in an extremely fucked-up twist on the Judgment of Paris.  Yikes. There’s a lot of tiresome women=magic=evil here, and it all seemed a bit dubious to me, especially if they were supposed to be the second through fifth most powerful sorceresses in the world.

But during my Wikipedia spiral, I also read about a peculiar outlier among surviving early medieval works in the Lancelot fandom - unusual because it is one of the few Lancelot works that doesn’t contain his adulterous love for Guinevere. Lanzelet is a late 12th century poem in which, rather than having an affair with the queen, Lancelot marries four different women consecutively (even though the others are all still alive). All the marriages are arguably opportunistic, or at least circumstantial, as they take place immediately after he kills the women’s male guardians in battle, and enables him to assume their titles and holdings (although he does settle down happily ever after in the end after an enchanted coat reveals his third wife to be the only perfectly faithful lady at the court of the Queen of Fairy). Perhaps this sequential polygamy reflects a cultural practice that was accepted in some time and place... but how did the ladies feel about it? Therefore...

Bomb Queen

-Real name:-

-A.k.a.: The Queen

-Publisher: Image

-Type: Human

-Afilliations: Four Queens, No Heroes.