Then take thy way, said La Beale Isoud, unto the court of King
             Arthur, and there recommend me unto Queen Guenever, and tell her
             that I send her word that there be within this land but four
             lovers, that is, Sir Launcelot du Lake and Queen Guenever, and
             Sir Tristram de Liones and Queen Isoud.[1]
             Isoud's words to her rejected and defeated lover Sir Palamides emphasize
             the centrality of romantic love to Malory's vision of the Arthurian legend,
             and the significance of the tales of the two pairs of doomed lovers:
             Lancelot and Guenever, and Tristram and Isoud. The tale of Launcelot and
             Guenever is one of the great elements of Malory's treatment of the story of
             King Arthur, and a central contribution to the literary tradition of
             Courtly Love. The story has its roots in Anglo-Norman and French stories
             of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and becomes an integrated part of
             the Arthurian canon by the fourteenth century. The story of Tristram and
             Isoud is older and has been seen as the prototype for the Courtly Love
             story; it too became absorbed into the Arthurian cycle in the fourteenth
             century, and, with the tale of Launcelot, was included in the Morte
             d'Arthur by Sir Thomas Malory in the fifteenth century. The main part of
             the tale of Tristram and Isoud is found in Books VIII-XII of the Morte
             d'Arthur, that of Lancelot and Guenever in Book XIX-XX. The names of all
             four protagonists appear in differing forms in the literature; that used
             here is the form found in the modern English version of Malory's Morte
             The ideal of Courtly Love, developed through epic and lyric poetry in
             the twelfth century, was of the centrality of the lovers' passion, and of a
             relationship of dependence between the male lover and the female object of
             his adoration which paralleled the dependence of a feudal vassal upon his
             lord. The love itself possesse...