Constructing and distracting the erotic self: medical lore and love insanity in Romeo and Juliet and The Two Noble Kinsmen.

The chapter investigates the intersections between medical discourse on erotic love and its theatrical appropriation in early modern England. Lovesickness and greensickness, in particular, are focused as two diseases often staged by dramatists with varying degrees of gender and class overtones. In this context of theatrical and medical intediscursiveness, two plays are examined as case studies for their special focus on a Renaissance version of traditional amor hereos and greensickness: Romeo and Juliet and The Two Noble Kinsmen. While appropriating current notions on these amorous maladies, they offer a peculiar double-talk on the consequences of the destabilizing drive of love, either directly or indirectly foregrounding a fear of social de-individualization due to excessive passion, as a symptom of the surfacing eroticized self. This topic is dealt with within the context of both hetero- and homoeroticism.