In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, what are some of the flaws exhibited by Gawain and the other members of the court (including the king) before...

In the famous medieval poem Sir Gawain and the
Green Knight, King Arthur and the members of his court exhibit a number of
common human flaws before the Green Knight makes his appearance.  These flaws include
the following (as found in the Marie Boroff
translation):

• The king and his courtiers seem
  somewhat immature. They delight in partying and seem to have forgotten the need for
  humility and for true Christian devotion. Little wonder, then, that they are immediately
  described, in the Boroff translation, as “bold boys”
  (21).


• The king and his courtiers seem to have forgotten
  the true purpose and meaning of Christmas, which should ideally be a time of offering
  thanks to God for the birth of Christ. Instead, they seem to think of it as a time of
  self-indulgent celebration, as when the poet
  says,

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. . . the feast was in force full fifteen
days,

With all the meat and the mirth that men could
devise.
(44-45)

• Admittedly
  Arthur and his courtiers do attend religious services during this period (63-65), but
  the attention devoted to religious worship is minimal compared to the attention devoted
  to having a good time in all the most worldly senses of the term
  (37-70).


• The court is described in ways that associate
  it, and especially the queen, with luxury (72-80).


• There
  may be some irony in the description of Guenevere as a “Fair queen, without a flaw”
  (81); certainly readers who knew the later history of Guenevere as an adulteress would
  be likely to find this description ironic.


• Arthur himself
  is described in ways that make him sound immature (“So light was his lordly heart, and a
  little boyish” [85; see also 89]).


• More significantly,
  Arthur is associated explicitly with pride (that is, self-centeredness, the root of all
  sin according to Christians): “a point of pride pricked him in heart”
  (90).

In short, Arthur and his court seem to be
in true need of the lessons the Green Knight eventually teaches, especially the lessons
of humility, maturity, and the true meaning of Christmas and the Christian
religion.

Certainly Gawain learns, by the end of the poem,
that the elaborately false humility he displays when the Green Knight first appears
(354-61) is nothing like the genuine humility he feels by the end of the
work.