Dagonet
Sir Dagonet is King Arthur's fool, attested across five chapters of Le Morte d'Arthur.
Sir Dagonet is King Arthur's fool, attested across five chapters of Le Morte d'Arthur. He functions as a figure of comic relief whose encounters with more formidable knights serve to expose the pretensions of others -- particularly King Mark of Cornwall.
When the damosel Maledisant taunts La Cote Male Taile for his poor jousting, she measures him against the lowest possible standard: "thou canst not sit no knight, nor withstand him one buffet, but if it were Sir Dagonet" (Le Morte d'Arthur, Book IX, Chapter III). Dagonet thus serves as the benchmark of martial inadequacy, the knight whom even the weakest should be able to defeat.
Yet Dagonet is not entirely passive. When Sir Tristram, maddened and running naked, encounters Dagonet's party, Dagonet and his squires are beaten by the naked madman, prompting Dagonet to ride to King Mark with a warning: "beware, King Mark, that thou come not about that well in the forest, for there is a fool naked, and that fool and I fool met together, and he had almost slain me" (Le Morte d'Arthur, Book IX, Chapter XVIII). The exchange of fool meeting fool produces one of the text's moments of accidental honesty.
In a later sequence, six knights send Dagonet to joust with King Mark as a deliberate humiliation. Dagonet declares with misplaced confidence: "shew me the knight, and I trow I shall bear him down" (Le Morte d'Arthur, Book X, Chapter XII), before being put forth to charge at the king. The joke works because King Mark refuses to engage even Dagonet, exposing his cowardice. When a stronger knight then arrives and smites Dagonet "so sore that he bare him over his horse's tail, and nigh he had broken his neck" (Le Morte d'Arthur, Book X, Chapter XIII), the comedy turns violent. The entire sequence concludes with communal laughter: "There was great laughing and japing at King Mark and at Sir Dagonet" (Le Morte d'Arthur, Book X, Chapter XX).
The nine citations distribute across five chapters, and they reveal Dagonet functioning in two distinct ways within Malory's narrative. In the Tristram episodes (Book IX), Dagonet encounters genuine danger -- the naked madman who nearly kills him -- and responds with a rare moment of self-awareness, acknowledging himself as "fool" meeting "fool." In the King Mark episodes (Book X), Dagonet becomes a tool wielded by other knights to expose Mark's cowardice. The six knights who send him to joust know that if Mark will not fight even the court fool, his dishonour is complete.
What distinguishes Dagonet from a simple joke figure is the pairing with King Mark. Malory repeatedly uses Dagonet as a mirror for Mark: both are inadequate by knightly standards, but Dagonet is honest about his limitations while Mark is not. The "great laughing and japing" directed at both of them simultaneously collapses the distinction between the fool who knows he is a fool and the king who does not.
Appears in: Beings, Entities in Le Morte d'Arthur, British Tradition