Always the Black Knight

Always The Black Knight is a short 1970 science fiction novel by Lee Hoffman, published in paperback by Avon.
Plot
The cynical middle-aged Kyning is a performer in a third-rate troupe of traveling historical reenactors who specialize in public displays of medieval swordplay and jousting. A former romantic who as a youth abandoned a wealthy family and a promising academic career on Earth to join the pageant, Kyning is now thoroughly disillusioned; the troupe is threadbare and mismanaged by the sleazy, drug-dealing Danforth, and Kyning's young idealistic squire reminds him unpleasantly of himself at the same age.
During a performance on the backwater planet Elva, Kyning (who always plays the villainous Black Knight to Danforth's heroic White) is badly injured when a worn-out mechanical horse he is riding fails. Awakening in a hospital some weeks later, he learns that the pageant has already departed, abandoning him.
Elva is a comfortable but somewhat odd society, not oppressive but nonetheless highly ordered and bureaucratized. A benign but ineffectual administrator informs Kyning that the planet conducts no trade, no passenger travel, and that berths on visiting spacecraft are difficult to come by. He offers Kyning Elvan citizenship and job training, which the latter - with no other options - reluctantly accepts.
Assigned as a roommate to a young port officer named Chai Riker, Kyning quickly discovers that the Elvan populace is kept in a state of zombielike emotional suppression by a constant (voluntary, but unaware) intake of aqapa, a beverage that contains a powerful tranquilizer. The entire society is essentially sleepwalking; there is no romantic love, no ambition, no creativity - Elvan culture consists wholly of hobbies such as stamp collecting and hesitant imitations of second-rate imported performances, such as Kyning's pageant.
Kyning's job training turns out to be little but makework; he uses the ample free time it allows him to investigate, discovering that the original Elvan colonists had hoped to purge their society of violence by essentially anesthetizing themselves for several generations in order to prevent themselves from transmitting their own antisocial impulses to their children. However, the society had simply coasted along in its new state, the drugs added automatically to the aqapa and subliminal adverts urging Elvans to consume it to TV broadcasts by the master computer programmed by the founding generation.
Under Kyning's influence, Riker eventually breaks from his conditioning and goes on to draw in a dozen members of his social circle, who begin to be enraptured by the well-educated Kyning's personal library of medieval romances, discovering conflict and romantic love. Kyning himself begins to form a tentative relationship with an odd, thoughtful girl he nicknames Dulcinea. Riker, meanwhile, begins to grow megalomaniacal and violent; the abrupt release from decades spent under sedation leaves him dangerously unbalanced, a situation not helped by the adulation of his circle and the alcohol, weapons and other contraband he begins smuggling in from off-planet through the connections offered by his job.
As the small group of newly-awakened Elvans begins to formulate a hesitant plan to seize and reprogram the master computer, freeing the planet, Riker grows increasingly monomaniacal. Organizing his band of followers into a fanatical sword-wielding militia, he trains them in fencing while his personality deteriorates into frightening mood swings. During one of these he threatens Kyning's life; during another, he rapes his own girlfriend, causing her to commit suicide. The enraged Kyning turns on him and is about to kill him, but faced with Riker's pathetic pleading he instead merely orders him to leave Elva at once.
The next morning, the humiliated and furious Riker leads his band in a coup d'etat, seizing the master computer building without a struggle (Elva having no security forces of any kind, save an orbital minefield), and declares himself planetary emperor. Kyning finds himself duty-bound to intervene, as well as the only one able to; taking advantage of Riker's pride, immaturity, and overblown sense of theatrics, he challenges the self-styled autocrat to a duel. The younger and talented Riker has the initial advantage, wounding Kyning severely, but is ultimately overcome by the latter's greater experience and killed. Kyning drifts off into unconsciousness in Dulcinea's arms, relieved to have saved Elva from the fruits of his own interference, while wondering at his always being cast as the villain...

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