Take this plot: Two men kill another man, rape his bride, cut out her tongue and amputate her hands; her father kills the rapists, cooks them in a pie, and feeds them to their mother, whom he then kills before killing his own daughter for having been raped. Then he is killed and his killer is killed. A Hollywood horror movie? A modern video game? The invention of a depraved brain? No. This is the plot of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus. Violence as a motif in fiction has always been around. In Shakespeare as well as in Nursery Rhymes: babies fall out of trees, a little boy mutilates a dog, an old woman who lives in a shoe cruelly whips her starving children, blind mice are hacked up with carving knives, Cock Robin is murdered, and Jack smashes his skull. (Gottschall, Jonathan: The Storytelling Animal. Boston and New York: Mariner Books, 2013: 43-4 + 129-30)