Age in Love

by Jacqueline Vanhoutte

  In taking up the topic of Shakespearean superannuated male sexuality, this book builds not just on recent scholarship about the Post-Reformation public sphere, but also on emergent interest in premodern constructions of aging, as manifested by the slew of books and essays that have appeared on the subject in the last decade. Perhaps the question of how Elizabethan subjects represented the descent into “the vale of years” (Othello, 3.3.266) has remained unexplored until recently because, as Keith Thomas puts it, “of all divisions in human society, those based on age appear the most natural and the least subject to historical change.” Thomas goes on to argue that this appearance blinds us to the variant cultural meanings attached to aging. Tudor society was organized along the gerontocratic premise that old men should rule and young men should serve; at all levels, from parish to playhouse to palace, age and seniority helped determine rank.61 This arrangement reflected the common belief in older men’s superior powers of discernment and self-government.62 An extensive discourse, which drew on classical works like Cicero’s Cato Maior: De Senectute, elaborated on the gerontocratic ideal, legitimating the authority of elders by reference to their acquisition of the qualities necessary to governance, including “counsaile, wisedome, authoritie and pollicie.”63 Since good health and long life were considered the product of good judgment, moderation and self-regulation, Cicero argued, reaching a certain age constituted in and of itself a credential for authoritative office.64 Such beliefs explain the preponderance of elderly counselors in plays, like Hamlet’s Polonius or Coriolanus’s Meninius. Still, the benefits that older men enjoyed were contingent on their ability to retain control over themselves and over their material circumstances. The most privileged class had arrived at the first stage or onset of old age, sometimes described as the “green and spirited” old age, a category which overlaps with our notion of the middle-aged, and to which all of Shakespeare’s aging lovers, with the possible exception of Falstaff, belong.65 The positive valuations of the elderly were also offset by ancient prejudices inherited from the warrior societies of the past, which placed a high value on the physical abilities of hale male bodies.66 Such factors have led scholars like Thomas, Nina Taunton, Christopher Martin, Philip Collington, and Anthony Ellis to find that Tudor society was beset by a “paradox of old age,” in which the idealizing constructions of official discourses conflicted with actual practices, or with “gerontophobic” representations in poetry and drama.67

  Although they might appear gerontophobic, the satiric representations of lecherous older men that concern me in this book enforce behavior consistent with gerontocratic ideals.68 Considerations of age determined what constituted natural behavior, shaped perceptions about gender and sexuality, and influenced relations among individuals. Alexandra Shephard calls attention to this often ignored “generational dimension of patriarchy,” arguing that age was a key determinant of masculine status and privilege.69 As Shakespeare’s Rosalind reminds us, “boys and women” were considered “for the most part cattle of” the same “color.” Rosalind’s metaphor is revealing: “changeable, effeminate . . . inconstant,” lacking control over their bodies and the ability to regulate their emotions, boys were like women and domestic animals in requiring the supervision of adult males (As You Like It, 4.4.410–14). Under such conditions, full manhood was “a distinct phase in life,” not a condition enjoyed by all men at all times. One corollary is that “patriarchal imperatives . . . constituted attempts to discipline and order men as well as women.”70 The proscription on sex after a certain age protected the privileged category of the older man by defining appropriate conduct. Given that “the race and course of age is certayne,” men should observe a decorous progression: “For even as weakenes and infirmytie is incident to yonge Chyldren, a lustinynes and braverie to younge men, and a gravitye when they come to rype years; soe lykewyse the maturitye or rypenes of old age, hathe a certain speciall gifte, geeven and attrybuted to it by nature, which oughte not to bee neglected, but to bee taken in hys due tyme and season when it cometh.”71 For a mature man to take the role of the lover constituted an unnatural regression, which would return him to the effeminate condition of the boy, or reduce him to the state of a domesticated animal (sheep, asses, black rams, Barbary horses, and Bartholomew boar-pigs, to name a few relevant examples).72

  Having waited to attain the perfection of full manhood, older men had to guard against aspects of aging to maintain it. Aging was considered a cooling process, in which “the natural heat, which is the source of the body’s vitality, gradually diminished, consuming the natural moisture.”73 Insofar as this cooling meant that men—and women—became less subject to animal passions, it heightened their capacity for judgment and wisdom; according to the French physician Laurent Joubert, “youthful fury has run its course” in the old man, making him “wiser and more prudent.”74 Castiglione deems “old men” better equipped to transcend sensual desire and experience spiritual love than young men on similar grounds.75 According to Hamlet, even women might benefit from the cooling effects of aging; “at your age,” he tells Gertrude, “The hey-day of the blood is tame, it’s humble / And waits upon the judgment” (3.5.68–70). Although the attrition of vital heat helped cooler heads prevail, if left unchecked, it became a source of concern for men because it threatened to make them like women and children.76 Cicero, a major proponent of the virtues of aging, stresses the need to conserve “the memorie and reasonable parte of man, whyche is the mind,” comparing it to “a Lampe, if to muche oyle bee infused into it, burnethe not brightly . . . soe likewise the mind is a like dulled & blunted, when the body is either overcharged wyth syperabooundance and surfette.”77 Sexual “surfette” was treacherous because it expended vital heat in vain. Older men were sometimes believed incapable of engendering sons, one reason perhaps that the sonnet speaker emphasizes the futility of his desire in Sonnet 138.

  Although medical authorities disagreed about many aspects of senility, they agreed that sexual activity hastened its advent, a correlation conveyed through the word “dotage.”78 The destabilizing effects of erotic desire compounded that of advancing years, so that frequent sex might turn even young men old: “whoredome . . . dimmeth the sight, it impaireth the hearing . . . it exhausteth the marow, consumeth the radicall moysture and supplement of the body, it riveleth the face” and “induceth olde age.”79 Treatise after treatise urged men to delay senility by refraining from “immoderate venerie,” which “hastneth on old age and death.” For “an olde man to fall to carnal copulacion,” one treatise claimed, meant “he doth kill a man, for he doth kill him selfe.”80 Cicero counseled men who wished to age gracefully not to “go against nature” lest they precipitate their decrepitude or demise; “let us therefore bid adieu to al such youthly prankes,” he proposes, which belong to “lustye and greene headed Gallantes . . . agitated and pricked with the fervent heate of unadvised adolescencye.”81 When Shakespeare’s aging males play the parts of untutored youths or young gallants, their language echoes the philosophical and medical discourses that policed senescent sexuality.

  Superannuated lovers were an affront not just to nature, but also to society. Cicero supplements his allusions to natural cycles with theatrical metaphors, which signal a violation of social decorum, a refusal to “handle and playe” the “parte” appropriate to one’s age.82 Castiglione shares this preoccupation with age as a problem of decorum, devoting many passages to the question of how older men ought to behave. There is something unseemly about owning to sexual desire after the “young affects” had become “defunct,” as Shakespeare’s Othello acknowledges (Othello, 1.3.263–64). In his scene of judgment, Othello is primarily concerned with refuting implications of sexual incontinence, and for good reason.83 Premodern decorum insisted on rigid protocols of age-appropriate behavior. Aging men had to maintain what Thomas calls “a dignified exterior” at all times, which meant avoiding “sexual competition with younger men. Lust in the elderly was an infallible occasion for ridicule a
nd censure.”84 This condemnation recurs in all types of premodern works, from ballads, proverbs, epigrams, poems, and plays to scientific, philosophical, and moral treatises. The age limit beyond which carnal desires became suspect for men was low, moreover. Barthomolaeus Anglicus thought the proper time to father children was before age thirty-five, Sir Thomas Wyatt said his farewell to love before dying at age thirty-nine, and Petrarch placed himself at age forty in the tradition of the puer centum annorum, or the hundred-years-old boy, whose “most notable folly . . . was his desire to continue to have love affairs.”85 Since age was thought about in relative rather than absolute terms and sexual incontinence accelerated the processes of aging, the context of an active sexuality produced especially low chronological tresholds for categorizing men as old.

  Even the fear of being cuckolded—a defining emotion for many Shakespearean males, including the sonnet speaker, Othello, and Antony—reflects anxieties about age-related social judgments, since cuckoldry was an experience to which older men were prone.86 Joubert argues against the notion that old men could not bear sons to defend couples constituted of a young wife and an elderly husband from charges of cuckoldry and adultery. Although he notes that the wife’s reputation suffered in these situations, Joubert focuses on beliefs about the aging husband’s sexuality, the provoking offense.87 Mark Breitenberg views the premodern obsession with cuckolding as a sign of patriarchal “regulation and scrutiny of women’s sexuality.”88 This obsession also reflects a perceived need to regulate the behavior of aging males. By insisting that a young wife will turn to an age-appropriate lover, cuckolding scenarios imaginatively restore a natural, moral, and social order that the old husband’s lust has violated. Such scenarios are a mainstay of classical and medieval literature, where the senex amans is an old husband who arrogates (or tries to arrogate) a desirable young woman to himself, as Chaucer’s January does. Older husbands with young wives usurped a role that society had reserved for younger men—they did not restrict themselves to their proper “parte.” Long before Shakespeare’s aging speaker imagines himself playing the role of an “untutor’d youth” in an erotic triangle with an unchaste woman and a younger man, this behavior had been established as unacceptable, inviting all manner of retaliation, including the ridicule meted out in the fabliau tradition, the shaming enacted by charivaris, or the public disgrace that followed on accusations of cuckoldry.89

  Although Shakespeare’s theatrical representations of the senex amans diverge in telling ways from the traditional May-December marriage plot—Malvolio and Falstaff are bachelors, Claudius and Antony choose age-appropriate partners—they retain the emphasis on senescent male sexuality as a theatrical usurpation of youthful prerogative, a form of social transgression that incites public punishment.90 This censorious attitude reflects the gerontocratic orientation of premodern society. If old age “hath in it so greate aucthoritye, that it is muche more to bee esteemed and is farre moore woorthe, then all the vaine pleasures of headye and rashe Adolescency,” for an older man to behave like a young one amounts to a form of madness—a point taken up in some detail by Twelfth Night. Of course, some older men did give into “beastly, savage, and furious” lust, rather than give it up, as Cicero advised them to; actual behavior does not necessarily conform to prescriptive ideals, or there would be no need for such ideals.91 Under normal circumstances, however, these men had little reason to expect that their sexual activity would lead to rewards other than momentary pleasure and they had every reason to expect that it would bring disastrous consequences, ranging from diminished social status to failing health to premature death. The older man wishing to indulge in the “expense of spirit” did indeed bring “a waste of shame” on himself (Sonnet 129.1), as Falstaff, Malvolio, and Antony find out.

  The last two decades of Elizabeth’s reign suspended these normal circumstances for the most visible and privileged men in the country. Her courtiers’ abdication of conventional gender and generational roles had brought them what Hatton called the “singular blessings and benefits” normally associated with conformity to these roles—titles, land, high office, vast influence, great political authority.92 In a remarkable 1572 letter advising Hatton to diverge from traditional masculine behavior, the courtier Edmund Dyer urged his friend “to consider with whom you have to deal, and what we be towards her; who though she do descend very much in her sex as a woman, yet we may not forget her place, and the nature of it as our Sovereign.”93 Leicester and Hatton took advice like this to heart, compromising on their “place” first as men and then as older men—delaying or forgoing marriage or remarriage, failing to produce heirs, playing the role of the lover—to accommodate Elizabeth’s contradictory “place” as woman and sovereign.

  That this unorthodox strategy proved successful challenged what Charles Taylor calls “the social imaginary”: “the ways in which people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others . . . the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations.”94 Indeed, the singular virulence of anti-Leicestrian discourses—as D. C. Peck notes, “other counsellors were slandered but with nothing like the same enthusiasm, imagination, and perseverance”—suggests that the earl’s continued hold on Elizabeth provoked more public concern than did that of younger men like Ralegh or Essex.95 Like the man who dresses in women’s clothes, the older man who plays the merry gallant disturbs sanctioned hierarchies by descending from a privileged “place” to a less privileged one. Shakespeare’s sonnet speaker acknowledges as much when he places himself structurally on par with an unchaste woman. His self-awareness reminds us that deviance, viewed from a certain angle, can become defiance, and apparent futility a kind of triumph. Through its oscillations in meaning, Sonnet 138 executes a precarious balancing act, simultaneously condemning and celebrating its speaker’s unorthodox sexuality. As such, it forms the perfect introduction to Shakespeare’s fascination with the fraught figure of the old man in love, inspired in part by the Elizabethan court’s experimentation with gendered and generational roles.

  In highlighting the influence on Shakespeare of the “great Planets” who orbited the monarchical moon, this book supplements historicist readings of Shakespeare that focus on what Susan Frye calls “the power struggle for the meanings surrounding the queen’s female body.”96 This approach, which derives from the work of Stephen Greenblatt and Louis Montrose, has dominated accounts of the queen’s impact on literary phenomena for three decades and highlights the anxiety and resistance that Elizabeth I provoked in her male subjects. Montrose’s assertion that the queen’s “pervasive cultural presence” was a “condition” of the imaginative possibilities explored by Elizabethan writers remains an enabling one, on which I premise my argument.97 But I agree with Katherine Eggert that the new historical emphasis on masculine anxiety sometimes results in reductive readings, in which Elizabeth’s “queenly influence” is met with “either authorial resistance” (good) or “authorial capitulation” (bad).98 Elizabeth did not just cause “anxieties about male privilege up and down the line.”99 She also prompted some men to experiment with unconventional ways of extending their level of privilege. Like the Renaissance lyrics examined by Catherine Bates, the drama abounds in “figures who appear by choice to defy the period’s model of a phallic, masterly,” and rational “masculinity.”100 The fact that these characters expect their deviance to result in social, political, or even spiritual reward can be attributed to Elizabeth’s queenship, which unleashed radical possibilities that we have yet fully to investigate. The negative views of Elizabeth’s effect on the men around her prevail because of a critical preference for one kind of evidence over another: the scorn of the queen’s detractors over the praise of her panegyrists, the career of the Earl of Essex over that of the Earl of Leicester, Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream over his Antony and Cleopatra. Indeed, the high value that new historicists place on political dissidence often aligns their argumen
ts with the perspectives of the queen’s disgruntled male subjects at the risk of extending the “venerable tradition of misogyny” that Montrose identifies as a dominant mode of opposition to Elizabeth.101

  By returning men like Hatton and Leicester to their place in the story, I aim to highlight evidence of innovative cooperation between the queen and her male subjects instead. Judging by the characters I examine in this book, this cooperation sometimes strikes Shakespeare as a form of collusion and sometimes as a form of collaboration. A compromised figure, “age in love” is also a figure of compromise, valued by Shakespeare for the ability to find a midway between extremes. Shakespeare’s lusty old men are all go-betweens: the sonnet speaker has one foot in the theater and one in court, Falstaff one in court and one in the tavern, Antony one in Egypt and one in Rome. The nuanced perspective afforded by these characters enables Shakespeare to move beyond the extremes of praise and blame endemic to early modern (and modern) discourses about Elizabeth I, to consider instead the emotional and aesthetic responses that the queen inspired. Writing about A Midsummer Night’s Dream’s investment in art’s “utopian potential,” Hugh Grady contrasts the critical view of the play as “performing local and power-accommodating work in deference to the Queen” to his own. These are not mutually exclusive propositions; the same queen who prompted Shakespeare to “power-accommodating work” inspired his utopian fantasies.102 To go from Bottom to Antony, as I do in this book, is to chart the gradual elevation of the age-in-love figure in Shakespeare’s canon, an elevation that I argue reflects his growing appreciation of the Elizabethan court.