"I would eat his heart" : Liebeshunger und Blutdurst in Shakespeares Much Ado About Nothing

Abstract

The article argues that the motif of hunger for love is aligned with blood thirst in Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, which negotiates the dark, violent underside of romance throughout its action as well as the rhetorics and imagination of the characters. With reference to early modern medical and religious discourses and their medieval tradition, the paper examines in particular the romantic topos of the exchange of hearts and proposes that Shakespeare plays with the demetaphorisation of this topos in a vision of heart cannibalism. The fairy tale »Mr Fox« and Dante’s Vita Nuova are discussed as relevant intertexts of Much Ado About Nothing, as their scenarios of cannibalism open the very spectrum from absolute romantic love to sexualised violence and destruction which underpins the action of Shakespeare’s play, too.