What becomes of the broken-hearted: King Lear and the Dissociation of Sensibility

Summary

In A Dictionary of English Folklore, Jacqueline Simpson and Steve Roud cite William of Newburgh’s account of the case of an active corpse which surfaced in Alnwick (Northumberland) in 1196. This corpse emerged nightly from its grave to roam the streets, corrupting the air with ‘pestiferous breath’ and bringing plague. Two men dug up the corpse and found it closer to the earth’s surface than expected. They hit the corpse with a spade and from the wound gushed ‘such a stream of blood that it might have been taken for a leech (sanguisuga) filled with the blood of many people’. So they tore the heart out, dragged the body away, and burnt it, thus, according to folklore, putting an end to the plague. Simpson and Roud cite this story as evidence of a specifically English folklore of vampires. There is some distance to be travelled from the twelfth century imagination of the heart to the twenty-first century imagination of television dramas like Casualty and Buffy the Vampire-slayer, but such poetics of the heart suggest powerful social illusions at work in representations linking the body and its disturbed spirits to corpses, death and the soul. Television hospital dramas such as BBC’s Casualty provide a contemporary rhetoric of symptoms and cardiac treatments through apparently realist representations of medical treatments, even if such representations are largely a stage for emotional dramatizations of the heart.