Thanks largely, if not entirely, to Shakespeare, today's audiences can immediately recognize the promise of romance in any title with the names of two characters. “Before Romeo and Juliet, there was Tristan and Isolde,” sings the main slogan of the 2006 adaptation of the Celtic legend. But even if Tristan and Isolde had not felt the need to claim this authority by evoking the lovers' most famous Shakespearean successors (perhaps in an attempt to capitalize on the success of the similarly styled Romeo + Juliet a decade earlier) anyway, the audience would probably have made the association on their own. As it turns out, the film doesn't live up to the promise of its tagline, and audiences who look to the 2006 production for a traditional, if predictable and ultimately nascent, tragic love story won't be disappointed. Viewers who turn to Béroul's Le Roman de Tristan for a similar experience are unlikely to find the same satisfaction. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned"?Get the original essayDespite literary critic John Halverson's assertion that "in all its forms, the story of Tristan and Iseult is above all a love story,” Béroul’s adaptation largely avoids this classification, or at least any of its recognizable modern conventions (273). Readers who expect in Béroul the passionate confessions of eternal and tortured love exchanged between Tristan and Isolde of the big screen will not find much of the same between Tristan and Yseut de Béroul. Instead of tragically tortured star-crossed lovers, Béroul's readers find accidental and largely reluctant lovers, who calmly excuse and sometimes lament their love as the embarrassing result of an unfortunate mistake: the accidental consumption of a potion of love. the driving force behind Béroul's tale is notably absent from the film version, creating, I propose, the central distinction between these two adaptations. In the literary world, there is much talk about the role of the potion in Béroul's version and beyond. In her study of the legend's best-known early incarnations, including that of Beroul, Molly Robinson Kelly goes so far as to argue that the drinking of the potion is the most unifying and integral element of the legend, uniting its different texts as the “paradigmatic core”. around which all versions are centered (180). Kelly goes on to highlight the potion's importance throughout the literary tradition of the legend, calling it "the most archetypal moment in the legend" and insisting that the drinking of the potion replaces the lovers' first meeting as the first “pivotal moment” of the text (181, 182). Among so much scientific concern devoted to the role of the potion in the multiple versions of the legend, its total absence in the film adaptation can hardly be ignored. What this absence does for the film, however, is ultimately less interesting than what it reveals about Béroul's text. The removal of the love potion in the film simultaneously eliminates a confusing and highly controversial question about the validity of the lovers' romance. Freed from this complication, the film is free to soar toward the predictable heights of conventional Hollywood romance. Unlike the easily recognizable big-screen romance of Tristan and Isolde, Béroul's tale appears not as a love story, but as a story of destiny, in many ways closer to Greek tragedythan Shakespearean romance. Mired in the vague implications of the love potion, love in Béroul is not a driving force, but a simple symptom of the ironic twists of fate that propel the hero towards his tragic end.I.The love potion n is not just a pivot of the legend. in itself, but it also constitutes a crucial concern in the context of literary research surrounding the novel of Tristan, and Béroul's work is certainly no exception. In defining what the potion's absence means for the film - and, more importantly, what it sheds light on about its presence in Béroul - it may be helpful to first examine common interpretations of the potion such as it works in Le Roman de Tristan. Generally speaking, I see the potion serving two main functions that may overlap. First, the potion raises the question of the validity of the love between the tragic lovers. That is, the presence of the potion raises the question of how real or "true" a love generated by a potion can be. Second, the potion surfaces in response to the debate over lovers' complicity in adultery. Depending on one's position regarding the implications of the love potion, it can be used to absolve lovers of all blame. As Norris J. Lacy nicely summarizes: “The traditional view of Tristan and Isolde is that they are a young couple tragically sentenced to prison. illicit passion which none of them wants” (21). They are not tragic lovers who doom themselves by falling in love of their own accord. According to this point of view, they are rather accidental lovers who would not have fallen in love at all without the unfortunate intervention of the love potion. This reading is most likely to exonerate the couple, treating their love and resulting trysts not as acts of their own volition, but as the inevitable result of the potion over which they have no control . This provides an excuse for their conduct – in fact, it is an excuse that the couple themselves repeatedly turn to in an attempt to defend their actions, claiming that they cannot be held responsible for their illicit affair if their feelings are not their own and are simply the product of a romantic relationship. potion – absolving them of sin and reconciling the reader's and narrator's famous sympathy for the lovers despite their obvious moral transgressions. This reading is, I believe, best supported in Béroul's text, where the love between Tristan and Yseut is mentioned several times as an "error" and sometimes even a "misfortune", which implies that their relationship is not was not born from a real relationship. love and would not have happened at all without Brangain's fateful confusion with the love potion (44, 78). An alternative reading, however, sees the potion as a metaphor, thus rejecting the idea that the potion makes their love artificial. . Rather, this reading suggests that the potion's powers, because they are irresistible, make the love between Tristan and Yseut all the more real. In this reading, the potion functions as a metaphor for the intoxicating and inescapable powers of love. While this reading is certainly more palatable to readers looking for a traditional love story in Béroul that is recognizable by modern conventions, I see little support for it in the text. Even if one takes the Romantic approach of viewing accidental love as fate rather than a fabrication, Béroul still views love as secondary to fate, a mere symptom rather than a cause. Readers primarily concerned with the lovers' innocence tend to favor the first reading, while those whoconsider true love as their main concern often tend to gravitate towards the latter. By completely removing the presence of the love potion, the film adaptation avoids this complication, simply depicting Tristan and Isolde as a tragic couple whose love, as a tearful Isolde declares against the cinematic backdrop of a stormy Irish coast, is no less true simply because it cannot be. Even if the absence of the potion also eliminates any chance of forgiveness on the part of the lovers, their adultery is unlikely to arouse the same qualms among 21st-century audiences as Béroul's sympathetic portrayal of sinners may have aroused among the public of the 12th century. readers of the century. Ultimately, the absence of the love potion in the film is merely a useful means by which the storyline is simplified into a more palatable love story, in keeping with the conventions of the genre in Hollywood today. today. The film gets rid of this story element to eliminate some of the more uncomfortable, and decidedly unromantic, implications of the mystical origins of Tristan and Ysuet's love, conforming the story to the predictable modern romance promised in the tagline. Noting that the absence of the love potion transforms the tale into a conventional love story, it becomes clear that Béroul's commitment to the presence of this element signals a different reading. As Kelly argues: “When the lovers drink the potion, the legend transforms from a conventional romance into something radically new: a tale brought to life by the dark forces of magic and fate” (181). Although I do not agree that there is anything "radically new" in such a tale, I too maintain that Béroul offers a story of destiny rather than the one of love to which spectators of Tristan and Isolde would expect.II. Like most classic tales of twisted fate, Béroul's The Romance of Tristan relies heavily on irony, an element almost entirely absent from the film adaptation. Lacy makes much of Beroul's use of irony, citing it as the root of the "aesthetic distance between the reader and the story", a detachment that allows the reader "to intellectually appreciate the story without the criticize ethically” (22). . Although my reading has little concern for the ethical implications of the tale, the irony emphasized by Lacy creates a significant distance between the reader and the characters, as he explains: "Understanding Béroul's irony, we then look at the lovers with a detachment that the traditional attitude towards them does not allow. This distance prevents us from identifying with them. This inability to identify with Béroul's characters explains the unfamiliar characterization technique that Alan Fedrick, in the introduction to The Romance of Tristan, counts among the "strange features" of the text that alienate readers accustomed to the practices and conventions modern fiction (Frederick 14). Beginning with the exclusion of the potion, the film eliminates these ironic figures and episodes in an attempt to erase this distance and establish the modern conventions of characterization that audiences expect from a love story. Béroul, meanwhile, relies on ironic twists of fate that transform the film into unironic acts of love. As has already been discussed at length, the main action of Béroul's tale begins and is propelled by the accidental consumption of the love potion, a twist of fate, while the film version instead features two lovers who meet and fall in love organically, well. before this love is complicated by extenuating circumstances. In fact, while Béroul uses ironyto emphasize the role of fate rather than love, one of the film's only ironic episodes ultimately reinforces the validity and intentional nature of the love between Tristan and Isolde. In the film, upon first meeting Tristan, Isolde lies about his identity, giving him a false name. They fall in love and then break up, assuming they will never see each other again. When the King of Ireland later organizes a tournament in which he promises that his daughter, Isolde, will be the winner, Tristan has no idea that he is fighting for the hand of his beloved. At the time the discovery is made, to the great regret of both characters, Tristan has already promised Isolde to King Marke. Although the film makes it clear that Tristan would not have promised Isolde to the king if he had known it was her, there is no such implication in Béroul's version, in which Yseut was promised to the king although before she and Tristan fell in love. In the film, it is an ironic twist of fate that separates the partners, and not the one that initially unites them. In Beroul, love appears as an inconvenience, an obstacle to the transaction already agreed upon. While the film follows a conventional paradigm of introducing a series of obstacles to hinder the romantic relationship, Beroul sees love itself as the obstacle that stands in the way of the normal relationship. course of events. For this reason, Béroul's characters repeatedly reject and deny their love. While the film's Isolde brushes off declarations affirming the value of their love, swearing: "We both know this can't be the case." We have known this from the beginning. That doesn't mean it isn't true. This is the case,” his Beroulian counterpart claims the opposite, asserting that their love only exists “because of a drink that I drank and he drank.” Meanwhile, Tristan de Béroul echoes his lover, also denouncing their love as the mere result of the potion (79). Aside from the lovers' decidedly unromantic habit of literally denying their love for each other, Béroul's Tristan and Yseut don't even really suffer in the way we'd expect tragic lovers to do. As Halverson points out, Tristan and Ysuet's suffering is, like their love itself, "a casual affair, never elevated to the level of a theme and rarely even to the level of consciousness" (285). Similarly, Halverson and Lacy note that when the effects of the love potion wear off, neither character mourns the loss of their love. Instead, both characters immediately turn to pragmatic concerns of material loss, expressing only "a desire to regain the comfort and wealth of which passion deprived them" (Lacy 25). Halverson elaborates, noting that, unlike traditional lovers in distress due to "separation and fulfillment", Tristan and Yseut of Béroul endure their most conscious suffering not when they are separated, but in fact when they are together in the forest: "When the effects of the potion wear off, they are acutely aware of their own and each other's suffering, and the source of it is explicitly not one in the other but in their miserable way of life; their misery is that of separation from civilization” (285). While the film appeals to general audiences with a conventional love-centered plot detailing the struggles Tristan and Isolde endure for the sake of their love, in Beroul's Romance of Tristan the author and his characters repeatedly deal with the love as a secondary concern. deviates from Beroul's text again in its conclusion, and once again this divergence reflects the film's initial rejection of the love potion plot, illuminating Beroul's overwhelm of love,, 2006.