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Since the majority of the texts discussed in this dissertation are dramatic, it is important to address what stage conventions existed for representing old age. As in the

prescriptive literature, depictions of old age in early modern drama are also built on convention, the familiar theatrical devices used to signal old age to an audience. These include specific types of “posture and gait, makeup, costume, and strongly symbolic props such as staffs. Changing of hair and beard were particularly effective means of showing aging in men” (Phelan 166n92). Nightcaps, the wearing of which was associated with old or ill men, could also convey a character’s age (Herford and Simpson 8n145). The performance techniques that signaled old age were celebrated when performed by accomplished players; Ben Jonson wrote an epitaph for a boy player who specialized in old man roles, the conceit of which blames his death on his superior performance of old age, which misled the fates into thinking he was old and taking his life prematurely (Gibbons, “Representation of Ageing” 48).

Theatrical portrayals of older people are also informed by the generic types inherited from early modern drama’s progenitors. The template for these characters derives from the Roman comedies of Plautus and Terence, such as the senex iratus of the New Comedy tradition, who serves as an obstacle to the younger generation:

What normally happens is that a young man wants a young woman, that his desire is resisted by some opposition, usually paternal, and that near the end of the play some twist in the plot enables the hero to have his will. . . . At the beginning of the play the obstructing characters are in charge of the play’s society, and the audience recognizes that they are usurpers. At the end of the play the device in the

plot that brings hero and heroine together causes a new society to crystallize around the hero. (Frye 163)11

As Maurice Charney writes, the senex is “generally wealthy and was strongly opposed to his son’s interests, which [are] focused on raising the cash needed to buy the freedom of a beautiful young girl enslaved to a pimp and then to marry her” (49). The senex characters “tend to be garrulous and long-winded” (62) and conspire against the younger generation. Nina Taunton notes that “Plautus makes his old men the authors of the misfortunes of the young. They are present and active, but do not leave the various stereotypical moulds of the senex figure” (Fictions 14). The conventionality of intergenerational antagonism in comic plots, and the normative ascendency of the younger generation, can be read as a ritual banishment or disciplining of the experience of old age itself, a notion that will be taken up further in chapter four on The Old Law.

Frequently, the older male character threatens the younger male protagonist by competing with him for the sexual attention of younger female characters. This senex amans, or “the pantalone character of the commedia dell’arte,” is “the proverbial old man who marries a young wife and is thought to be impotent and sexually feeble” (Charney

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Karl Zender notes the transmission of the blocking older character in Shakespeare’s romantic comedies, such as The Two Gentlemen of Verona, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and As You Like It (10). Steven R. Smith argues that dramatic literature depicted older characters in a progressively more negative way: “While the dramatists of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries depicted old age in a variety of conditions, by the late seventeenth century, drama focused almost exclusively on the negative features. Restoration comedies were full of old men and old women who were generally bewildered and victimized by younger characters. Seemingly, old people were associated with the discarded values of the past, and the glorification of youth reflected the Restoration era’s rebellion against the earlier constricting morality” (“Age of Transition” 197).

100). Older characters that display such behavior are mocked as the “foolish old man in love” (Ellis 3). In real life, the practice of intergenerational marriages was controversial but not uncommon, and Margaret Pelling has suggested that its stigma derives from its association with the practices of self-preservation used by the poor, who would contract second marriages with large age gaps in order to share resources:

It is usually assumed that disparate marriages of this kind were disliked by church and state and subject to popular disapproval. It is possible, however, that during the period in question, the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, they were tolerated among the poor, both by the poor themselves and by authority; and that the association of such unions with the poorer classes and their circumstances might be one reason why they came to be so disliked at the end of the seventeenth century. (76)

Smith points to Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy to show how

intergenerational marriage is stigmatized due to perceived humoral incompatibility. Because old age is associated with “impotency, a possible result of the coldness and dryness of old men’s bodies,” Burton argues against unequal marriage: “Because this was such a frequent problem for old men and because of the difficulties which it could cause, Burton warned old men not to marry young wives” (“Early Stuart England” 131).

However, humoral incompatibility is also used as an argument in favour of marriage to younger women, which could also be imagined as a panacea against aging. As Ellis points out, the notion that “physical contact with young virgins could actually renew the vigor of old men” also circulated in advice manuals and has scriptural precedence in 1

Kings: 1–4, in which the dying King David is brought a young virgin to supplement his lack of heat (24).

As with the portrayal of old age in the prescriptive literature, the degree to which one can extrapolate reliable information about the early modern experience of old age from these stereotypes, tropes, and theatrical conventions has been questioned. The concern here is how to tell when the drama is relying on stage convention and when it may be reflective of real lived experience. Hallett Smith writes, “It is worth asking whether old age in Shakespeare depends more upon stage conventions than upon observations of real life or proverb lore or ballads or treatises of the learned” (240). For instance, Combe and Schmader warn against drawing conclusions regarding people’s lives from comedic elders in this period’s drama, arguing that “the genre of comedy is a metalanguage system that empties the signifier of the elder of its historical reality and meaning as a language object. In the place of that political reality, comedy supplies an ideological signification for the elder—a signification that more often than not has little to do with the facts of the aging process” (“Naturalizing Myths” 192). These scholars are pessimistic regarding the effect of comic tropes on an audience, suggesting that a “thin veneer of humor and sentimentality puts a happy and benevolent sheen over the ageist (and often sexist and classist) brutality extant at a deeper level of these dramas” (192). However, it is possible to read older characters for both the stereotypes they rehearse and also for the moments when the operation of the stereotype is interrupted or complicated. The theatre also offers the potential to interrupt received notions of aging, as some older characters flout the received conventions of old age. Early modern drama often nuances the generic function of older characters. For instance, though the characters of Lucre and

Hoard in Thomas Middleton’s ATrick to Catch the Old One are fairly uncomplicated misers, intent upon their function as the blocking agents who prevent the young male protagonist from achieving his financial emancipation and sexual desire, Middleton offers something considerably more complex in his representation of the socially- imposed nature of old age in The Old Law, as will be discussed further in chapter four.

Though the influence of fairly one-dimensional comedic characters can certainly be found in the older characters of early modern drama, the early modern stage also offers a much more nuanced vision of the social role of old age. The works discussed in this dissertation show that the causes and effects of the aging process cannot be reduced to any one explanatory model, such as the various Ages of Man schemes, the theory of the humors, or the measurement of one’s calendar age (which requires the reliable record- keeping of one’s birth date). The works show how old age is constructed within a

relationship: the relationships between family members and the relationships between older people and their state or community. These works reveal the influence of familial and intergenerational conflict on old age, the idealizing use of older characters as

paragons of ethical and national stability, and they explore how old age (constructed as a state of wonder, decrepitude, inspiration, isolation, poverty, powerlessness, and wisdom or ignorance) is imposed upon the older characters by others. They also dramatize the consequences experienced by the older characters who resist socially normative aging.