This chapter’s final turn will examine where the play locates the responsibility for the care of older people. Though The Old Law’s overt idealization of intergenerational piety
initially seems to place this responsibility with the adult children, I argue that the play subtly points to the community and state as the actors most responsible for the care of
older people who can no longer independently support themselves.99 Moreover, I suggest that Middleton and collaborators imagine, in a limited and ultimately rescinded way, the notion of mass retirement as an entitlement based on one’s citizenship in a country, going beyond the means-tested logic of the poor law pensions or the ad hoc types of pensions
awarded to people like Edmund Spenser.100
Initially, the play seems preoccupied by the idealization of intergenerational devotion. Cleanthes’s loyalty to his father bears out the conventional Biblical injunction to honour one’s parents that is rehearsed again and again in the contemporary literature that aims to increase expressions of filial piety towards the aged. As Steven R. Smith writes, “The Fifth Commandment to honor parents and all persons in authority or of great age was taken seriously, reinforced by sermons, catechisms, and domestic manuals” (“Age of Transition” 195). Cleanthes’s dialogue upon the first entrance of his father reinforces the son’s proper performance of his duty: “Ay, here’s the ground / Whereon my filial
faculties must build / An edifice of honour or of shame / To all mankind” (1.1.334–37). The ensuing scene of intergenerational harmony among Leonides, Cleanthes, and
99
Bromham asserts the importance of filial piety in the play (“Contemporary Significance”), and his argument is summarized by Taunton as follows: “duty to political regimes is above both family and law, but as Bromham convincingly argues, this imperative is reversed in The Old Law, where a son’s (and daughter’s) duty to a father is shown to be paramount (Bromham, 1984, 334)” (Fictions 137). I argue that though filial piety definitely serves as a means by which the play rejects absolutism, the play is also interested in what duty the state has toward its subjects, not solely what duties children and subjects have towards their parents and state.
100
These types of pensions were not linked to old age as they are now but were awarded as a “regular stipend, but may not be for doing anything; clerical benefices, sinecures, and scholarships seem to illustrate it” (Gilbert 28). Thank you to Nina Budabin-McQuown for reminding me of Spenser’s pension.
Cleanthes’s wife, Hippolita, contrasts markedly with the previous scene, in which the bad son Simonides betrays his own parents. Leonides continues to elevate filial ties by
praising his daughter-in-law Hippolita effusively to Cleanthes: I tell thee; there’s few men
Have such a child; I must thank thee for her. That the stronger tie of wedlock should do more Than Nature in her nearest ligaments
Of blood and propagation! I should ne’er Have begot such a daughter of my own. A daughter-in-law! Law were above nature Were there more such children. (1.1.368–75)
Leonides couches his praise of his daughter-in-law in her ability to naturalize their relationship—by demonstrating her capability to treat Leonides with filial devotion she has proved herself as a natural daughter. As Taunton writes, these lines
promot[e] familial duties by suggesting that qualities of compassion and care may be inheritable, but the laws of society, especially with regard to marriage, may perfect nature in creating an environment combining what is most beneficent in nature with what is most valued in society so that a woman who is not a blood relative can possess more qualities and perform more good actions than a child. (Fictions 145)
Cleanthes urgently reminds Leonides that praising her loyalty will not save his life, to which Leonides responds,
In the search of means to save my forfeit life, And knew the wise and sound preservations That she found out, you would redouble all My wonder in your love to her
. . .
She counsels me to fly my severe country, Turn all into treasure, and there build up My decaying fortunes in a safer soil,
Where Epire’s law cannot claim me. (1.1.377–381, 386–89)
Cleanthes agrees that they should flee and adds that “Every country where we breathe will be our own, / Or better soil” (1.1.394–95). Up until this point the family’s
dependence upon immediate kin for survival seems absolute: the only solution is for the family to leave Epire and its genocidal laws.
At this point, however, Leonides rejects the plan concocted by his children to save him and expands the definition of the filial relationship beyond the nuclear family,
locating it instead in his relationship with his country. The playwrights now introduce the second childhood commonplace, operating here in a more sympathetic way than it
usually does, as surveyed in this dissertation’s introduction. Leonides argues against disobeying the new law in order to save his life:
I must not shame my country for the law. This country here hath bred me, brought me up, And shall I now refuse a grave in her?
Ne’er sleep so sweetly in their nurse’s cradle As in their natural mother’s. (1.1.402–407)
Though the conflict between loyalties in The Old Law is often read as a response to James’s absolutist and paternalist portrayal of himself as ruler by divine right and father to the country,101 here Leonides does not identify the Duke, specifically, as the parental figure. Instead, the second childhood trope is carried out via an appeal to nascent early modern nationalism, as Leonides’s description of the motherland draws on the trope of the earth as a womb for one’s burial after death.102
Despite the characters’ performance of filial devotion, Leonides actually asserts the primacy of the citizen’s relationship with the state by figuring one’s country as a mother who is expected to nurture her children.103 In doing so, Leonides establishes a
101
For Swapan Chakravorty, the play furthers Middleton’s concern with “the conflict between patriarchal and absolutist ideals, which King James sought to unite on a common familial premise . . . . The anomaly in this demand is problematized in Old Law by having a prince command his subjects to slay their natural parents” (118–19).
102
Ralf Hertel argues that at the turn of the seventeenth century, a sense of “national consciousness” was emergent in England, and that people began to identify not solely on the grounds of guild identity or religious identity, but rather as part of “a different kind of collective identity that emerged and worked as a unifying force regardless of profession or belief: an identity that was based on being English” (8). On the earth as womb metaphor, see also Quintus in Titus Andronicus, who calls the pit into which he has fallen, and that also contains Bassanius’s corpse, a “swallowing womb” (2.3.239).
103 Taunton points out that though Hippolita proves she can step into the role of filial piety as daughter-in-
law, the same is not true for Leonides and his relationship to his country:
While the divine institution of marriage can improve upon the offices of nature in providing a man and his father with a wife and daughter-in-law of perfect virtue, it is not, by analogy, possible for the old to prefer a stepmother over and above a mother. The old are not able to find solace in an
precedent in the play for older characters to claim the right to receive something from one’s country in exchange for their service as citizens. Middleton uses the second childhood trope to bypass the immediate family in order to create a larger parent-child relationship between nation/country and citizen. By extension, the parent country holds the ultimate responsibility to care for its children/citizens. By invoking the second childhood metaphor, Leonides reiterates the symbiotic relationship between citizen and country, and gives that relationship precedence over the solutions offered by his children. This is the first instance in the play of one of the older characters pointing out the
limitations of filial piety as a strategy of old age care, and turning instead to the concept of collective community responsibility for the sustenance of the older generation. Leonides refuses to leave, for to leave would be to acquiesce to the state’s refusal of its proper role of caregiving for its older citizens. The state’s new law only allows for the ablebodied old to be recognized as valued citizens, not old people who are in a state of dependency or second childhood. Leonides turns the government’s assertion of its right to intervene in the lives of its older citizens against itself. The old citizens respond to the law by insisting on the state’s responsibility to mother its people.
The degree to which filial piety, so frequently drawn on in prescriptive writing, actually served as public policy when it came to supporting old people has been a matter of debate. Peter Laslett argues that in early modern England intergenerational households
adopted country because their motherland, the soil on which they were born, bred and brought up, however imperfect, must also be the soil in which they are buried. (145)
were not the norm and that adult children were rarely the primary means of support for their parents:
No doubt most daughters and some sons did conduct themselves so as to assure the comfort and security of their aging parents as far as they could, but we have found it difficult to confirm that they would return home for that purpose from their jobs or their holdings in other localities. Movement of failing fathers and mothers into the households of their married offspring undoubtedly occurred, but it was decidedly not a universal pattern in the evidence we have so far surveyed. Nor does it seem to have gone on at the request of the parents themselves, certainly not at their command. (“The History of Aging” 177)104
Cleanthes is enacting the heroic version of something that was not necessarily a given in early modern English society. It is possible that Cleanthes and Hippolita’s care for Leonides registered as a rebuke to the English system in which adult children were not seen as immediately responsible for the care of their parents. But it is also possible that the play does not locate intergenerational piety as the sole, or even most desirable, solution to the question of who is responsible for supporting people in their old age.
Other older male characters also suggest that the state has obligations to care for them in exchange for their earlier service to the country. Creon, a former soldier,
104 Though, as Laslett writes, “The famous Elizabethan Poor Law of 1601 specifically confined
responsibility for the relief of the elderly to their children alone,” and not more distant kin, he clarifies that “it must not be overlooked that the legal duty of a child to assist his parents never seems to have been construed as an obligation to receive or to maintain him or her in the household” (“The History of Aging” 177, 179).
criticizes the law by noting that it breaches a contract that exists between those who did the state service earlier in their lives:
A fine law; if this hold, white heads will be cheap, And many watchmen’s places will be vacant. Forty of ’em I know my seniors,
That did due deeds of darkness too—their country Has watched ’em a good turn for’t, and ta’en ’em Napping now. (1.1.208–13)105
Creon’s description of his peers’ service shows the state’s betrayal of proper
reciprocity—their former service as watchmen is not being appropriately compensated in their old age. Men were exempted from military service at age sixty (Thomas, “Age and Authority” 237), and Margaret Pelling and Richard M. Smith suggest that these kinds of exemptions set up expectations for more formal pension schemes later, that “the effect of the existence in the early modern period of a precise age beyond which males were ineligible for military service may have impinged on popular appreciation of age as well as creating administrative precedents for retirement and pensions” (5).
The older characters assert that collective provision for care in their old age is an entitlement earned through earlier service to the country (as expressed by Creon) and is
105 Schotland gestures to responsibility of the state as well: “Just as children should be grateful to their
parents, the state should be grateful to elders when they are no longer productive. . . . Creon is a prototype of the old soldier neglected by the state because he can no longer bear arms—someone who would have been supported with an ample pension in More’s Utopia” (168). Age-related exemptions from compulsory service were common in the period; Pelling and Smith list various Statutes and their age exemptions, some of which excluded sixty-year-old men and forty-year-old women from work (5).
the expression of an ideological bond between citizen and state (as claimed by Leonides). David Thomson argues that community support in old age was considered to be a right in the early modern period, and rejects the notion that the welfare state, in which the country bears responsibility for support of its members who cannot fully support themselves, is something that only emerges in later historical periods. Rather, he argues that early modern people relied on “the assurance given to individuals that in times of major life crisis they could, and indeed should, look to the collectivity for support” (175). Thomson points out that the more formalized “literature of rights” to community support that would eventually develop could only come into being because these expectations had precedence in early modern English custom. He argues that the “notion of a right to welfare assistance from the community, not the family” existed long before the arguments of Thomas Paine, who eventually “wrote of a universal right to an old age pension from age 50 (full pensions to be paid from age 60)” (175). Thomson suggests that the arguments of Paine and “Others in the eighteenth century [who] wrote of the right to poor relief or state pensions” were only possible because they were “attempts to formalize a right which already existed in practice” (175). To focus only on the
importance of filial piety and filial care for parents in The Old Law obscures how the play articulates a pre-existing social contract regarding the right to collective provision for the aged that predates twentieth-century public pensions schemes or formal periods of retirement.