ABSTRACT
Before addressing what love has to do and to do with it in Shakespeare’s play, I want to consider what makes a question such as Tina Turner’s intelligible in the first place. As a speech act, this song is a critical ‘intervention’: a disruptive response to a narrative that precedes and exceeds it. Exactly what the question challenges is unimportant-for its rhetorical effectiveness depends not on the particular discourse it targets but, rather, on our recognition of the strategic use of the word ‘love’ with regard to it. In other words, what matters is not the matter, but the form imposed on it ‘in the name of love’.
