Orsino’s continuance in the “old tune” has made his courtship “fat and fulsome” (5.1.108–9) to Olivia, a metaphor that links his failed suit with the past, and with the music that he claims, in his famous first line, as “food for love” (1.1.1). The count never enters without a retinue of musicians, to a soundtrack designed to generate feelings of loss, longing, and melancholy by contrasting an “inadequate present” to an “idealized past.”132 Orsino prefers these “old and antique song[s]” over the “light airs” of “these most brisk and giddy-paced times” (2.4.3–6) because they dally “with the innocence of love / like the old age” (2.4.47–48). Orsino’s songs feed a love for an “old age” that he both represents and recreates on stage. As Boym points out, music “is the permanent accompaniment of nostalgia—its ineffable charm . . . makes the nostalgic teary-eyed and tongue-tied and often clouds critical reflection on the subject.”133 Shakespeare’s musical refashioning of his “whoreson round man” suspends “critical reflection” in this manner, encouraging audiences to indulge affective and aesthetic responses instead. The conjunction of “innocence” with “the old age” revises the trope of the “old boy” along nostalgic lines, making the aging lover a figure for a desire shared by all those past the first age. Hearing and recalling the “antique” tunes played at the count’s request, an audience member may even revisit the time when he himself was “a little tine boy” (epilogue, 1), bringing these individual memories to bear on the play’s representation of a collective past. Orsino makes a utopia out of this past, imagined longingly as a refuge from the present, a place where “free maids . . . weave their thread with bone,” sit “ in the sun,” and “chaunt” all day long (2.4.43–49). In love of old, with a love for old songs, Orsino acquires the patina of an antique, consistent with his self-identification as Endymion, the aging hero of an old play about an aging court.
A glamorous version of the senex amans, Orsino embodies a powerful longing for an earlier Elizabethan moment, when artists collaborated with aristocrats in generating the rich court culture that haunted Shakespeare throughout his career. As we saw in previous chapters, Leicester had been the premier patron in this former age, his generosity the munificent force that drove the flowering of the arts and letters in Elizabethan England. A great innovator, he also had a reputation for loving antiquities, and patronized both antiquarians and historians. Eager to secure an afterlife for his efforts, Leicester had tried to keep Kenilworth “exactly as it had been in July 1575. . . . the deliberate fossilization of the castle and its picture collection suggests a desire to create a lasting memorial to the revels of 1575.”134 Goran Stanivuković proposes that the chivalric Orsino represents a lost “masculine ideal,” of the sort popularized by the medieval romances alluded to in the retrospective Kenilworth entertainments.135 We might glimpse in Orsino’s interactions with Cesario and Feste a “memorial” to another lost ideal, especially relevant to the theatrical artists who brought Twelfth Night to the stage. Orsino behaves like a gracious patron, recalling aspects of Leicester’s legacy not remembered in the satiric tradition, including his generous support of musicians, artists, actors, and fools, or his attempts to conserve the “reliques” of earlier times. Viola honors Orsino’s reputation as a discerning patron by presenting herself as a performer who can “sing / And speak to him in many sorts of music” (1.2.57–58). It’s hard not see in her trajectory a reflection of the now aging playwright’s youthful dreams and hopes, which needs must have involved establishing a level of intimacy with the great. If Leicester exerted an uncommon pull on Shakespeare’s memory, it was not only because the earl was ridiculous, as satirists proposed. “One remembers best what is colored by emotion,” Boym explains, and that emotion can be either negative or positive.136 Where anger and resentment fueled most contemporary representations of the queen’s dead favorites, Twelfth Night draws on other emotions as well, including pity, loss, longing, and affection.
A decade after Endymion appeared in print Shakespeare revisits the aging Elizabethan court to find that its revels have now ended. He returns home to “the unrealized dreams of the past and visions of the future that became obsolete,” acknowledging his artistic dependency on the fantasies fostered by the court in its heyday.137 Not only does the autumnal Twelfth Night embrace the fantastical elements of the new comedy derided by Jonson, but it embraces them as “old,” identifying itself, and by extension its writer, with the aging court that Jonson targeted.
Perhaps the best evidence that Shakespeare found pity in his heart for the faded and fading stars of the old regime is the final treatment he reserves for Olivia and Orsino. Neither of them achieves the rejuvenation of an Endymion. But if Orsino and Olivia are not restored to their youths, Shakespeare restores them, by the artificial means of his twin youths, to versions of themselves. In their loving union with Orsino and Olivia, Viola and Sebastian set about redeeming the Elizabethan past. The elevation of the meritorious twins in Twelfth Night balances the failure of Malvolio’s fantasy, reendowing the dream of eroticized social mobility with a utopian resonance. The humbled Olivia is able to partner without diluting her sovereignty, since she secures Sebastian’s compliance to her rule before she marries him (4.1.63–64).138 And the castigated Orsino is allowed a marriage with his “fancy’s queen” (5.1.388) which is founded on male amity and thus bypasses the problem of his indecorous, age-defying erotic desire.139 By these magical means, Illyria attains the renewal that eluded Elizium. Orsino’s retreat into a compensatory fantasy fulfills the promise made in the epilogue of 1 Henry IV. And Shakespeare conclusively shows Jonson that comedies about “a Duke . . . in love with a Countess” could be “near and familiarly allied to the time.”
Twelfth Night finds in the experience of lost enchantment an aesthetic magic of its own. The Sonnets take up where this play leaves off, embracing the impulse to identify with the aging lover. The fate from which Viola saves Orsino haunts the sonnet speaker, who is also in love with “antique” forms and whose “besetting sin” is also “self-love” (62.1).140 In Endymion, Lyly identified sonnet-writing as an activity likely to induce age-inappropriate behavior. His hero, after devoting the “prime of his youth” to “devising sonnets” ends up “having waxed old and not knowing it”: “how could my curled hairs . . . be turned to grey and my strong body to a dying weakness?” (1.2.64–65, 5.1.74–76). It might be said of Shakespeare’s sonnet speaker that he has waxed old, and knows it, but devises sonnets nonetheless—devises sonnets, in fact, about the “dying weakness” of aging bodies. The nostalgic atmosphere of the sequence, its famous sense of generic and cultural belatedness, owes much to its invocation of an aging court. By the time Shakespeare picked up his “antique pen” (19.10), the fashion for sonnets had, along with the queen’s two eldest favorites, died away. In their evocation of “the rich proud cost of outworn buried age” (64.2), the sonnets betray an ongoing imaginative engagement with these bygone “great princes’ favorites” (25.5). The aging speaker posits a homology between himself and the favorites, grounded in what the sequence describes as a vain form of sexuality—at once futile and arrogant, biologically sterile but imaginatively reproductive.
In a sequence initially committed to persuading “fairest creatures” (1.1) to adopt the reproductive habits of the rose, Shakespeare offers royal favorites at first by way of contrast, since they are “But as the marigold at the sun’s eye, / And in themselves their pride lies buried, / For at a frown they in their glory die” (25.5–9). “Those who are in favor with their stars” can, as Leicester and Hatton did, boast of “public honour and proud titles” (25.1–2), but they die childless. The sequence’s frequent antitheses of youth and age trade in the Endymion effect, associated with the queen’s men, by reproducing in the space of a line or two the deep devastation of having waxed old without knowing it. Struck by how quickly “Sap” is “check’d with frost and lusty leaves quite gone” (5.7), the speaker pleads with the young man to reproduce before “forty winter
s shall besiege thy brow, / And dig deep trenches in thy beauty’s field” (2.1–2). The anxiety about procreation is linked to the court through military and heraldic metaphors, which construe aging as the attenuation of aristocratic identity, the gradual reduction of “youth’s proud livery” to “a tott’red weed of small worth” (2.4–5). A few sonnets hold the “mortal moon” who “hath her eclipse endured” (107.5) to account. Sonnet 7, for example, uses an epic simile to compare the young man to a monarchical sun, to whom all pay “homage” (3) at first,
But when from highmost pitch, with weary car
Like feeble age he reeleth from the day,
The eyes (‘fore duteous) now converted are
From his low tract and look another way:
So thou, thyself outgoing in thy noon,
Unlook’d on diest unless thou get a son. (7.8–14)
The pun on son links the young man’s failure to reproduce to the decline of the sun’s “sacred majesty” (7.4). Shakespeare was struck by this aspect of the Elizabethan court. “The Phoenix and the Turtle,” a poem about the relationship between Elizabeth and an unidentified courtier, also characterizes the love between the “Turtle and his queen” as beautiful but sterile, “leaving no posterity” because of their “married chastity” (31, 62).
The sonnet sequence retains a conventional emphasis on the waste, vanity, and futility of the age-in-love trope throughout, an apparent indictment of the court this figure evokes. But the advice so liberally bestowed on the young man in the procreation sonnets comes from a failure, for, like the queen’s favorites or the old boys in Twelfth Night, the speaker has been a poor manager of his own “youthful sap”(15.7). And if in Sonnet 138 he initially experiences the persistence of sexual desire into old age as a form of categorical degradation, the speaker embraces by the sonnet’s end the deviant idea that faults can be flattering. By adopting the adulterating viewpoint of this “decrepit” speaker (37.1), Shakespeare returns the category of age to the central place it occupies in Castiglione’s account of the distinction between lust and love. Because the sonnet speaker is “no longer youthful,” his struggles to leave “sensual desire behind” take on a desperate cast. And yet few readers find this aging lover to be a “senseless fool” like Malvolio.141 The conventions of the sonnet work toward the unconventional end of empathy with the figure of “age in love,” charged now with the poetic search for nonbiological modes of perpetuation and immortality.
As he ceases to advocate for conventional forms of procreation, the speaker’s “barren rhyme” (16.4) begins to transform into “pow’rful rhyme” that outlives “the gilded monuments of princes” (55.2). In the process, the “wrackful siege of batt’ring days” (65.6) becomes less an obstacle to than a source of beauty. Time itself is an artist who etches faces, a rival of and therefore also a figure for, the sonneteer. As indelible as “the lines and wrinkles” (63.4), or the “parallels” that Time sets in “beauty’s brow” (60.10), the speaker’s “black lines” (63.13) paint his age far more memorably than the young man’s youth. In Sonnet 73, he turns the gaze on himself and discovers there the fairest creature of them all. The sonnet evokes the lingering beauty of “the twilight of such day / As after sunset fadeth in the west,” arguing that it makes “love more strong” to love that which one “must leave ere long” (73.5–6; 13–14). Like the “great favorites’” who have “spread” their “fair leaves” to the sun, the speaker admits to “yellow leaves, or none, or few” that appear at first to signal his barrenness (73.2). By reminding the readers of the “quires” of “yellow leaves” in their hand, however, where the sonnets still sing, the first quatrain testifies to the speaker’s successful transcendence of his own mortality—a transcendence secured not despite his aging but because of it. Christopher Martin argues that Shakespeare’s sequence celebrates youth at the expense of age by opposing beauty to age.142 But the speaker’s sense of aesthetics, preoccupied at first with salvaging beauty from the ravages inflicted by time, shifts over time to accommodate the idea of beauty worn—even enhanced—by those ravages. The “bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang” (73.4) are more, not less, lovely for being “rn’wd” (to use the original spelling) and for thus containing the promise of both death and renewal. In its concluding phoenix-like image of the loving speaker as a “glowing . . . fire,” who “on the ashes of his youth doth lie . . . Consumed with that which it was nourished by” (73.8–12), Sonnet 73 represents “age in love” not as a figure of ridicule, but as a figure of tragic beauty.
As he grew old along with his monarch, Shakespeare returned compulsively and with ever greater complexity to the topic of aging male sexuality. An extended meditation on the subject, the sonnets follow the great favorites in exploiting the speaker’s unorthodox erotic experiences to secure his unparalleled status. The phoenix is the epitome of beauty because it is immortal and unique, the reason Elizabeth I chose it as an emblem. The sequence’s search for timeless beauty paradoxically ends in the elevation of timeworn beauty; what we remember, finally, is not the “fair,” “kind,” “true,” and anodyne young man, but the magnificent and highly individual ruin he occasions. “Beauty spent and done” (“A Lover’s Complaint,” 11) is beauty still. In making “age in love” a vessel for his peculiar aesthetics of ruin, the Virgin Queen’s most observant male subject showed he had learned a thing or two about how to convert limitations into greatness, transgression into transcendence. These are lessons that he carried into Antony and Cleopatra (1608), a play about an aging queen and the “noble ruin of her magic” (3.10.18).
4
Antony
Early seventeenth-century tragedies that express their concern with personal monarchy in gendered terms—those that insist on Elizabeth I’s reign as a context—often include virulent representations of sexually active and lubricious older men. The two plays that Steven Mullaney claims address the conundrum of Elizabeth’s aging body are cases in point. Both Hamlet (1600–1601) and The Revenger’s Tragedy (1607) feature young men who vie with despised elders for the favors of a regal woman.1 That both premiered at the Globe would have underscored this shared pattern of cross-generational triangulation. In a repertory situation, an actor’s past roles shape reception of new ones, a phenomenon enhanced by the association of actors with certain types, like that of the aging lover or the revenger.2 Richard Burbage, who pioneered the role of Hamlet, likely appeared as Vindice, while Middleton’s “royal villain” (3.5.146) may have been played by John Lowin, the actor who had played Hamlet’s “treacherous, lecherous, kindless villain” (2.2.581) in 1603. Claudius poisons his older brother to gain access to Gertrude’s bed and to the throne of Denmark. By translating his sexual service to Gertrude into a crown, he lives out the darkest fantasies of Elizabethan England, succeeding where the Leicester of anticourt polemic had failed. Claudius’s analogue in The Revenger’s Tragedy is also a “royal lecher” of “silver years” with a penchant for poisoning, who presides over a court given over to “Dutch lust, fulsome lust” and “Drunken procreation” (1.1.1, 1.2.11, 1.3.56–57). Given that his topic is “the transgression of aging sexuality,” Mullaney’s focus on the female characters to the exclusion of these male representatives of “marrowless age” (Revenger’s Tragedy, 1.1.5) is a little strange.3 Neither Hamlet nor The Revenger’s Tragedy construes generational violations as the exclusive purview of female characters.4
On the contrary, Middleton premises his play on a savage contempt for superannuated male sexuality. If Hamlet sometimes shifts “contaminating agency from Claudius to the female body” of his queen, as Janet Adelman argues, The Revenger’s Tragedy identifies the aging male body as a primary source of cultural contamination.5 Middleton borrows from medical discourses that condemned “intemperate and riotous living” in older men, inviting us to share in a pervasive disgust with his “old, cool duke” who is “as slack in tongue as in performance” (1.2.74–75).6 Clutching the skull of his dead lover, Vindice vents in his op
ening soliloquy a murderous rage against this “dry” figure of “grey-haired adultery,” a “parched and juiceless luxur” with “spendthrift veins,” who has “scarce blood enough to live upon” but who nonetheless “riot[s] it like a son and heir” ( 1.1.8–11). One of several “exc’llent characters” drawn from court satire (1.1.5), the Duke indulges the excesses that medical authorities argued hastened aging. Immersed in “sensuall lustes and voluptuous appetites,” neither he nor Claudius manages “the pageaunte . . . of their age” according to socially approved protocols.7 Such “old men lustful,” Vindice maintains, relying on the conventional theatrical metaphor, “do show like young men, angry, eager, violent, / Outbid like their limited performances. / Oh, ‘ware an old man hot and vicious: / ‘Age, as in gold, in lust is covetous’” (1.1.34–37). From his abstract personification of “Age . . . in lust” to his biting references to role-playing and generational cross-dressing, the terms of Vindice’s denunciation are familiar: he confounds dramatic and sexual “performance” to express outrage with the categorical violations that the Duke commits. The Duke helpfully endorses Vindice’s judgment, describing himself as being in his “old days . . . a youth in lust,” and acknowledging “Age hot” to be “like a monster” (2.3.126–129).
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