Manly men... fainting?

For a bunch of what I assume would be manly men, there was a lot of swooning taking place in Le Morte Darthur. It seems as if as soon as one of them gets upset about something their fellow knights said or did, they are on the floor, unconscious. Looking back a hundred years or so to Chaucer, though, in The Knight's Tale specifically, I remembered how Arcita and Palamon faint like nobody's business when it comes to a girl they both love but have never spoken to (Yay for odd medieval conventions of courtly love! Which also come into play a little in Malory's work - Arthur's sudden love for Guenivere and her table). Nevertheless, looking forward a hundred and some odd years to Shakespeare, one does not see men fainting on stage (at least, not very often). Malory's work seems to serve as a bridge between medieval and Renaissance literature, especially when it comes to developing ideas of masculinity in the two eras. A modern audience sees Arthur and his knights as the epitome of knightly grandeur and manliness, or at least I know I do. So when Arthur fainted about five times because of emotional distress in the two sections we read, I found myself a little disenchanted with some of the myths surrounding him (even with my suspension of disbelief).