Love as Symptom in Beroul's Tristan: The Original Text and Its Film Version Kayla Kibbe College

Thanks largely, if not entirely, to Shakespeare, audiences today can immediately recognize the promise of a romance in any title featuring the names of two characters. “Before Romeo and Juliet, there was Tristan and Isolde,” croons the leading tagline of the 2006 adaptation of the Celtic legend. But even if Tristan & Isolde had not felt the need to make this heavy handed claim to authority by evoking the lovers’ more famed Shakespearean successors, (perhaps in an attempt to capitalize on the success of the similarly stylized Romeo + Juliet a decade earlier) audiences likely would have made the association on their own anyway. As it happens, the film does not belie the promises of its tagline, and audiences looking to the 2006 production for a traditional, if predictable and ultimately fledgling, tale of tragic romance will not be disappointed. Audience members turning to Beroul’s The Romance of Tristan for a similar experience, however, likely will not find the same satisfaction.

Despite literary critic John Halverson’s claim that “in all its forms, the story of Tristan and Iseult is above all a love story,” Beroul’s adaptation largely eschews this classification, or at least any of its recognizable modern conventions...