- Arthur’s court jester, Dagonet, dances in the hall. Tristram approaches him, harp in hand, and asks him why he is getting down with his bad self.
- Flashback: Arthur and Sir Lancelot went riding one day and discovered an abandoned baby in an eagle’s nest, with a ruby necklace around its neck. Which is, you know, not exactly an everyday occurrence.
- Arthur gives the baby to Guinevere to raise, which she does until the child dies of an illness. She asks Arthur to give a tournament with the child’s necklace as a prize.
- Arthur asks Guinevere what happened to the diamonds Lancelot gave her from the last tournament, and she lies, saying that they slipped from her hands accidentally when she was leaning out over the river as Elaine’s funeral barge passed by.
- Arthur declares the joust, but before he can preside over it, one of his servants stumbles into the hall, totally mutilated and disfigured.
- The servant explains that his injuries were given to him by a man calling himself the Red Knight. This man has founded a Round Table in the north in which, he claims, the knights are truer than Arthur’s because they acknowledge their darker side.
- Arthur decides to travel with some of his men to challenge the Red Knight. He leaves Lancelot in charge of the tournament.
- Arthur notices that Lancelot's being a bit awkward about fulfilling his command, so Lancelot if he's noticed a decline in character in his knights. (Um, Shmoop sure has.)
- The “Tournament of Lost Innocence” takes place on a rainy day. It does not go well. Knights break the rules, curse Arthur and the dead child, and yield like cowards to Sir Tristram, newly arrived from his marriage to Isolt the White Hands. So yeah, decline in character for sure.
- Lancelot presents the prize to Tristram with all the enthusiasm of a wet blanket. Tristram declares his “Queen of Beauty” not present, causing the ladies to murmur about his lack of courtesy to them.
- At the after-party, knights and ladies mix and mingle with desperation. Guinevere, disappointed in the joust and Tristram, breaks up the party early. Bad night all around.
- The next morning, Tristram encounters Dagonet dancing before the empty hall, and asks him why he dances without music. And we're back to the present.
- To help, Tristram plays a song on his harp, but Dagonet stops dancing.
- Dagonet says he would rather dance to the music in his head than to Tristram’s music with his wife, which is “broken” because of his affair with the other Isolt, Queen of Cornwall.
- Tristram accuses Dagonet of letting vanity go to his head after he was made Arthur’s fool, and dry up all his jokes. He calls Dagonet a filthy swine. Real nice.
- Dagonet responds that he is a swine, washed in the mud of experience, and that he knows of a Pagan harper who could make swine and all animals dance around him. So there.
- Tristram remarks that the same Pagan harper could harp his wife out of hell, to which Dagonet responds that Tristram harps people down to hell.
- Dagonet calls Arthur his “brother fool,” since he thinks he can make “figs out of thistles, silks from bristles." In other words, that he can make noble knights out of bestial men.
- Tristram ditches Camelot and heads for Cornwall, pursuing the vision of Queen Isolt. Once a cheater, always a cheater?
- He pauses to rest in a bower where he and Queen Isolt once hid from King Mark.
- He dreams that he walks on the beach between his wife and his lover. Awkward beach getaway for three? He shows them the ruby necklace and they struggle over it, breaking it. This is some seriously Freudian stuff right here.
- As Tristram dreams, Arthur reaches the castle of the Red Knight, who is drunk. As the drunken man hurls at him, his weight causes him to fall from his horse.
- Arthur’s men storm the bridge and slaughter everyone in the castle, including women and children. Then they burn it to the ground. What was that he was saying about a decline in character?
- Meanwhile, Tristram arrives at the chamber of Queen Isolt, who knows from his steps that he is not Mark, and announces her relief.
- She speaks of her hatred for Mark, and denies that she is “his,” since he does not even have the courage to fight Tristram for her.
- When she asks Tristram what woman he kneeled to last, he answers with Guinevere’s name. He declares Isolt’s beauty more soft and gracious to him than hers.
- Isolt speaks of how Tristram overcame her reluctance to commit adultery by telling her of Guinevere’s affair with Lancelot. He argued that it was no sin to betray a man like Mark when Guinevere betrayed as noble a man as Arthur. Yeah, because that's totally how wrongdoing works.
- Isolt asks Tristram if the sight of her dead body washing up at his feet would have robbed him of joy in his wedding to Isolt of the White Hands.
- Tristram responds that he only loved his new wife’s name, because it was his lover’s. He tells her not to worry about the other Isolt—she'll just become a nun.
- When Tristram commends Isolt to God when she is old and past desire, she takes offense. She wants Tristram to lie to her, to say he will love her even when she is old.
- But vows are too constraining for our not-so-noble Tristram, so he declines the request.
- He remembers the time he swore a vow to Arthur, who seemed as a god to him then. All those fancy vows made all the knights feel greater than they really were, and enabled Arthur to do larger-than-life deeds.
- But through Guinevere’s infidelity, the knights came to realize that Arthur was human and had no right to be asking for their loyalty, and that he could not make men pure or keep them from uttering the truth as they saw it. People are people after all.
- Tristram calls his love for Queen Isolt all the greater because it's given freely. He doesn't do it for any other reason than love itself.
- When Isolt asks what Tristram would do if, following the same logic, she took another lover, Tristram ignores the question. He calls for wine and airily promises to love her “to the death and out beyond into the dream to come.”
- Tristram gives Isolt the ruby he has won for her. He bends down to kiss it on her neck. Which is when…
- … Mark appears out of the darkness and cleaves Tristram through the head, killing him. Yikes.
- Back in Camelot, Arthur climbs the stairway in his hall to find Guinevere’s room dark. A sobbing voice near his feet in the darkness announces itself as Dagonet, who says he will never again make Arthur smile.