Courtly Love

So at this point I am starting to find courtly love rather disappointing. Yes it is pretty, but rather formal. At first when I was reading Sylvia's lines, before I read the footnotes, I was interpreting her pet name for Valentine of "servant" as some sort of teasing mind game that an intelligent woman might play with a guy when she doesn't have something more serious to keep her occupied like getting into Harvard Medical School or arranging all of the paper work for her summer internship with NOW. I interpreted it at a sort of status game - "I'm the master you are the servant" (followed by subtle maniacal chortling) but at the same time a code for "shh my dad is watching, but every time I say this word I've kissed you in my mind" - the sort role playing that makes her kittenish enough for Valentine to put up with the letter gag and her cryptic and slightly twisted sense of humor. But then I read the footnote, and it says that for a lady to call a man a "servant" was "a term from the courtly love tradition."

Well, from what I recall about courtly love it was not necessarily supposed to be a requited or actualized thing. Like Dante spends years worshiping Beatrice until one day Mrs. Dante decides to put cyanide in his bolognese. The next day Beatrice goes out and buys a new pink dress and matching shoes. At dinner that night while her husband is reading the obituary section of the paper and she scrutinizes her manicure he says, "Did you know that dead guy wrote a poem about you?" And she responds "Oh really, that's nice dear...we've got cheesecake in the fridge...um, I sent in an application with my CV, transcripts, and letters of rec last week to the University. I have to take some prereqs for the MBA so you won't see me on Tuesday and Thursday nights." Mrs. Dante takes the same course online from the prison computer lab. They are both happy that they didn't have to take medieval literature. But I digress.

Courtly love seems a bit twisted. You show all your fine manners, but you do not verbalize your true feelings, except in subtleties. Sylvia does not call Sir Turio "servant" even though he is behaving towards her in the same courtly fashion. She is lightly teasing with both of them, but Turio clearly senses her favoritism to Valentine - yet bizzarely this favoritism is so blatant that she continues to use the same "servant" banter with Proteus, her favorite's friend, which seems to create an awkward moment where she has to leave the room (according to the new cut) and somehow you get the feeling that poor fickle Proteus got caught in the crossfire thinking "she called me servant - hmmm - maybe she likes me" and Valentine hasn't taken the opportunity to say "Oh, yeah that "servant" thing - Dude, that wasn't for you - that's our game." So, yeah, I'm trying to resolve my issues with courtly love, and how to play it, and medieval lit and stuff.