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Overview
The title Age in Love is taken from Shakespeare's sonnet 138, a poem about an aging male speaker who, by virtue of his entanglement with the dark lady, "vainly" performs the role of "some untutor'd youth." Jacqueline Vanhoutte argues that this pattern of "age in love" pervades Shakespeare's mature works, informing his experiments in all the dramatic genres. Bottom, Malvolio, Claudius, Falstaff, and Antony all share with the sonnet speaker a tendency to flout generational decorum by assuming the role of the lover, normally reserved in Renaissance culture for young men. Hybrids and upstarts, cross-dressers and shape-shifters, comic butts and tragic heroes--Shakespeare's old-men-in-love turn in boundary-blurring performances that probe the gendered and generational categories by which early modern subjects conceived of identity.
In Age in Love Vanhoutte shows that questions we have come to regard as quintessentially Shakespearean--about the limits of social mobility, the nature of political authority, the transformative powers of the theater, the vagaries of human memory, or the possibility of secular immortality--come to indelible expression through Shakespeare's artful deployment of the "age in love" trope. Age in Love contributes to the ongoing debate about the emergence of a Tudor public sphere, building on the current interest in premodern constructions of aging and ultimately demonstrating that the Elizabethan court shaped Shakespeare's plays in unexpected and previously undocumented ways.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781496207593 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Nebraska |
| Publication date: | 06/01/2019 |
| Series: | Early Modern Cultural Studies |
| Pages: | 306 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d) |
About the Author
Jacqueline Vanhoutte is a professor of English and University Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of North Texas. She is the author of Strange Communion: Motherland and Masculinity in Tudor Plays, Pamphlets, and Politics and coauthor, with Laurel Amtower, of A Companion to Chaucer and His Contemporaries.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Endymion at the Aging Court
The modern critical focus on Elizabeth I's superannuated sexuality produces the odd impression that she had grown old alone; until the last decade of her reign, however, her most important courtiers and councillors were near contemporaries. The sense of misrecognition that comes with aging is central to the court dramatist John Lyly's Endymion, first performed for the fifty-five-year-old Elizabeth I in 1588. Its hero awakes from a forty-year sleep mystified by his own transformation: "that this should be my body I doubt; for how could my curled locks be turned to grey hairs and my strong body to a dying weakness, having waxed old and not knowing it?" Endymion's predicament — he is literally unconscious of his own aging — heightens the common phenomenon of "having waxed old" unawares, in a way that must have resonated with courtiers who had grown gray in the queen's service. Endymion continues to play the lover long after the role has ceased to be appropriate, moreover, a behavior that makes him the theatrical equivalent of mutton dressed as lamb. As this cliché suggests, those who fail to calibrate their actions and clothing to their age invariably invite ridicule, even if age-appropriate behavior and costume vary from culture to culture. For a variety of reasons — court protocols were set when everyone involved was young and the queen may have retained her sexual charisma into the 1580s and 1590s — Elizabeth's favorites found themselves assuming the indecorous role of the old man in love as the sixteenth century waned. Men like Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, and Sir Christopher Hatton thus drew unprecedented attention to the question of senescent male sexuality, and the widely held prejudices about age and sexuality described in the introduction of this book came to color perceptions of Elizabeth's court.
From the beginning of her reign, the queen had construed her relationship to her subjects in eroticized terms. Hannah Betts explains that the cult of Elizabeth was not a "performance confined to its star player"; instead, it "invited, indeed depended upon, a supporting cast of subjects, each defining himself as suitor to his monarch." In this political drama, favorites like Leicester and Hatton modeled ideal reactions to the queen's presence, affirming her power through public displays of their own susceptibility to it. Leicester was represented, for example, as the holly bush Deep Desire, "furnished on every side with sharpe pricking leaves to prove the restlesse prickes of his privie thoughts," in George Gascoigne's description of the 1575 Kenilworth entertainments, which was reprinted in 1587. The connotations of the word "pricke" left little doubt as to the nature of the deep desires that moved the elegant earl. The only Englishman whom Elizabeth considered marrying, Dudley had publicly assumed the role of her lover in 1559, and he sustained it, with a few notable lapses, for nearly three decades until his death in 1588. He performed the role with singular verve and to singular effect, accumulating the lands, titles, monopolies, and offices that transformed him, the fifth son of an executed traitor, into one of the most powerful men in the country.
Although favorites like Leicester and Hatton shared the traditional ambitions of the ruling class, their innovative approach to upward mobility outraged many contemporaries. The perception that these men deviated from normative standards of masculinity became more pronounced as they got older. In 1588, when a twenty-five-year-old man might expect to live to his late forties or early fifties, both Hatton and Leicester had entered the period of life known as green old age, which was considered most suited to governmental office. According to Cicero, aging well involved being delivered "out of the yoke of ... sensuall lustes and voluptuous appetites," which made the "unripe administracion of unskillful yong men" hazardous to commonwealths. Older men were better equipped to govern than young ones because "prudence and pollicye" were the hallmarks of "old age" and because old age "dothe not esteeme nor care" for the "bestiall pleasures, and voluptuousness of the bodye" that move youth. Since sexual desire was such a degrading experience for older men, the continued commitment of the queen's courtiers to the lover's role rekindled anxieties expressed earlier in the reign by John Knox, namely that "where women reigne or be in authoritie" men experience "suche a metamorphosis and change ... as poetes do seyn was made of the companyons of Ulisses." For early moderns "unmanly degeneration" involved "a distinct hierarchy of descent from man to woman to beast," a trajectory dramatically enacted by the slippage of an older man from his position of supreme privilege on the scale of earthly beings. These views explain the renewed allure of certain Ovidian figures as the Elizabethan age waned. Late sixteenth-century representations of "age in love" refer to Circe and Diana, charismatic goddesses associated with the transfiguration of men into animals, or Circe's niece Medea, the witch who turned the "furrowed wrincles" of Aeson into "yong and lustie flesh." That these myths circulated in a printed translation by Leicester's protégé Arthur Golding, which was dedicated to the earl and bore his device of the bear and ragged staff on the title page, may have abetted the identification of mythic figures with court personalities. While testifying to Elizabeth's enduring attractiveness, these allusions to Ovid also record misgivings about the transformational nature of her powers.
Opposition tracts like the anonymous pamphlet known as Leicester's Commonwealth (1584) and Cardinal William Allen's Admonition to the Nobility and People of England and Ireland (1588) certainly played on such motifs in their depiction of Elizabeth's relationship to her courtiers. Insofar as these works seek to appeal to "all true Englishmen," they cite not just their own "holie intentions" but a range of "just groundes" for resistance to the Elizabethan government. Borrowing from the regime's own arsenal of tools, dissident writers sought to conjure something like a court of public opinion, defined in opposition to the royal court. Descriptions of the "unspeakable and incredible variety of luste" indulged at court become one impetus to judgment, encouraging "all the worlde, and namely our owne nation and people"— not just fellow Catholics — to "judge" Elizabeth's "desertes." In their efforts to discredit the queen, these tracts single out her greatest favorite, depicting Leicester as an elderly Lothario whose "carnal beastliness" surpasses that of Emperor Heliogabalus (infamous, not coincidentally, for cross-dressing). Elizabeth's attachment to this allegedly ignoble creature shows by implication her failure in exercising good judgment and meeting standards of good rule. Contemporaries were quick to get these implications; one pro-government pamphlet terms the slanders about Leicester "seditious" and reminds Elizabeth's "subjectes" that they had no such "authoritie over her, as to bee judges of her just or unjust dealing, much lesse to make themselves correctors, or executors of justice against her upon their owne judgement, and at their owne pleasure."
Although the attempts by exiled Catholic dissidents to have Leicester "called publicly to trial" failed to produce the hoped-for regime change, their portrayal of the earl nevertheless struck a chord. By the late 1580s, the topic of Leicester's sexual and political activities had become something of a "flash-point," popular and provocative enough to incite attempts at government censorship. Lyly's depiction of Endymion as an overreaching lover who fails to recognize the advent of old age borrows from this controversy. As Sara Deats notes, Endymion identifies "love with deformity"; in one case, a male character's love-induced "sleep results in senescence, in the other, bestiality." Since senescent male sexuality registered as a form of bestiality, the two are in fact versions of the same degrading experience. By indulging in behavior appropriate to youths, Elizabeth's aging favorites showed the "certain deformity" that Castiglione argues is a primary "source of the laughable." The controversies surrounding these men inform Lyly's representation of Endymion as a "poor gentleman," who has developed "grey hairs," "wrinkled cheeks," and "decayed limbs" while in Cynthia's "service" (4.3.78–80), and whose fidelity and love are called into question by the malice of slanderers. While age does not diminish the queen's appeal in Endymion, her attractiveness risks placing men around her in positions unbecoming to their years, in a way that recalls yet another Ovidian figure, Tithonus, Aurora's aging lover. Lyly offers Elizabeth's courtiers, confronted with an extraordinary crisis ofpublicity, a choice: they can emulate his protagonist, who learns to sublimate his passion for Cynthia. Or they can, like Corsites and Sir Tophas, reject the Neoplatonic solution and persist in "thinking that all that suits young men suits [them]." In his treatment of Sir Tophas, Lyly adapts the satiric elements of the age-in-love trope to theatrical purpose, presenting superannuated male sexuality as a form of generational cross-dressing. The acerbity of Lyly's satire offers one measure of how high anxieties on the subject ran at the court of the Elizabeth I. Its influential nature — in the wake of Endymion's publication in 1591, a horde of lusty old men took over the public stages — reveals that calling royal favorites to "accompt" did not just appeal to a minority of Catholic propagandists.
That age was a loaded topic in the late 1580s and in the 1590s is hardly news: critics — especially male critics — have long claimed Elizabeth's aging mortal body strained her royal image. According to Steven Mullaney, for example, the eroticized discourses that shaped the queen's relationship to her subjects faltered when confronted with "the conundrum of the aging female body, with its over-determined registers of sexuality and death." French ambassador André Hurault de Maisse's description of the sixty-five-year-old queen, in which he details her gaudy clothes, yellowed teeth, and wrinkled throat or bosom, has become a critical set piece, guaranteed to reproduce in modern readers the "contempt" that Louis Montrose claims characterized Elizabethan reactions to the queen's aging. The "theme of mundus scenescit" did pervade late Elizabethan political culture; however, even the most derogatory references to aging planets did not isolate Elizabeth for criticism. Cardinal Allen asserts that most English men "will never adore the sun setting, nor folow the declininge fortune of so filthie, wicked and illiberall a Creature." But he also takes to task those "base and dishonorable" men who do "adore the sun setting," the "infamous amorous Apostats and heretikes" surrounding the queen, whose "insatiable covetousnes and concupiscence" has "made lamentable havoke, waste, and destruction." According to Allen, the Elizabethan "courte" is "a trappe" where for some "thirtie years together" the queen has through her "damnable and detestable arte ... intangle[d] in sinne" gentlemen and nobles alike, giving England the reputation for "effeminate dastardie." Construing Elizabeth as a modern-day Circe, Allen testifies to her enduring power to cast spells: she holds her noblemen, her councillors and "the verie parliament itself" in "a wonderfull thralldo[m]." The exiled cardinal does not show contempt for Elizabeth so much as fear — an important distinction, since contempt poses a far greater threat to authority than fear, as the queen herself realized. Allen designates as the proper object of contempt those men entrapped by the queen who, Endymion-like, have remained frozen in their position of amorous adoration for years. Such men, the cardinal's allusions to the mythic sorceress contend, are not really men at all.
In 1588, when Allen's tract and Lyly's Endymion first appeared, Elizabeth had ruled for thirty years. Despite divergent perspectives, the queen's detractor and her panegyrist present the survival of her charisma as a sign of her supernatural power over men. What one calls defect, the other casts as perfection; Allen's Circe becomes Lyly's Cynthia. Perhaps the late Elizabethan moon cult, which Endymion popularized, emerged in response to contaminating images of the aging court like Allen's. Although Philippa Berry finds planetary imagery "unproblematic" because it does not "focus attention on the gender of the monarch," this imagery can evoke aging processes. If Sir Walter Ralegh's Ocean to Cynthia presents Elizabeth as "eternally youthful," for example, the Tithonus-like speaker is subjected simultaneously "to his own old age and to the agelessness that he beholds." Lyly's planetary allegory offers an alternative version of these themes. Far from denying that Cynthia is in the "latter minute of her age," Endymion paradoxically adduces her "ripe years" as evidence that "time cannot touch" her (1.1.60, 67). Montrose and Mullaney might find in Cynthia the dramatic equivalent of the paint that Elizabeth allegedly used to disguise her wrinkles. But it matters that Lyly's praise depends on acknowledging, not on suppressing, the queen's age. In this regard, Endymion reflects Elizabeth's own rhetorical strategies more comprehensively than do modern portraits of her as a ludicrous old woman, whose "verbal, visual, and sartorial rhetoric" vainly attempted to project a youthful image.
Arguments that the queen's rhetoric could overcome neither her "inevitable natural aging" nor the "cultural perceptions regarding the impact of time and age upon a monarch who was an unmarried woman" are compelling because they blame the late Elizabethan malaise on the queen's aging body, thus endorsing our own "cultural perceptions regarding the impact of time and age." We tend to view aging as a problem for women, specifically. This perception influenced Shekhar Kapur's decision to cast the thirty-seven-year-old Cate Blanchett as Elizabeth in the recent movie on the "Golden Age" (2007), opposite Clive Owen's forty-something Sir Walter Ralegh. By rectifying the age imbalance, the director suppressed the troubling evidence that much younger men like Ralegh addressed the fifty-five-year-old queen as their "true fantasy's mistress." New historicists and historians often handle the difficulty that Elizabeth's age poses in a different way, assuring us that love is not love but disguised ambition. "Later Elizabethan royal panegyric" was "pervaded by a distinctly cynical air," they claim, while praise of the queen's beauty was a "fiction," which became "harder to sustain" as the years passed. The dominant scholarly view on late Elizabethan sexual politics preserves a modern sense of decorum by proposing that the typical male courtier swore that he was made of truth, and lied, so that his queen might think herself an untutored youth. The reluctance to allow the possibility that Elizabeth remained attractive, and that her courtiers remained attracted, thus reveals far more about modern "embarrassment" and "discomfort at the thought of the aging Elizabeth flirting" than about the dynamics of the Elizabethan court, or the perceptions of Tudor subjects on the matter.
As we saw in the introduction, premodern authorities emphasized the incompatibility of senescence with male, rather than with female, sexuality. Medical handbooks did advise older people generally to refrain from sexual activity. But in humoral theory aging was a cooling process that was more traumatic for men, whose superior heat distinguished them from women, than for women, who were naturally cold. According to some models, menopause had a drying effect on women, moreover, which meant that older women gained in heat and became more like men, a theory that helped explain Elizabeth's continued vitality. Wherewomen's status was confirmed or even ameliorated by the changes that age wrought, men risked losing theirs. Accordingly, treatises describe aging as an exclusively male problem: they advise men who wish to "waxe yonge again" to avoid "overmuch venery" and other carnal excesses in order to conserve the "naturall hete" that distinguished them from their inferiors. Not only did lecherous old men risk categorical degradation, they also violated social decorum; according to Castiglione, such "senseless fools" deserve "with perpetual infamy to be numbered among the unreasoning animals." Although this is rarely noted, Pietro Bembo devises his scheme of Neoplatonic love to help old men retain their masculine status by "check[ing] the perversity of sense with the bridle of reason." "The Courtier may be permitted to love sensually while he is young," Bembo argues, "but if later, in more mature years, he chances to conceive such an amorous desire" without sublimating it he "deserve[s] more blame than compassion." Old men who conceived sexual desire — and mental susceptibility was sufficient cause — demoted themselves to the status of boys, who found the ladder of love "hard to travel"; women, for whom it was "impossible"; or "unreasoning animals."
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Endymion at the Aging Court
2. Falstaff among the Minions of the Moon
3. Remembering Old Boys in Twelfth Night
4. Antony
Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
Index