Age in Love Read online

  “This compelling book deftly integrates issues of gender, age, history, and politics in its bold reevaluation of the Shakespeare canon. Vanhoutte’s argument insightfully qualifies, and sometimes overturns, new historicist paradigms of Elizabethan sexuality—both generally and literally defined.”

  —Douglas Bruster, Mody C. Boatright Regents Professor of American and English Literature, Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Texas at Austin

  “In this stunning appraisal of sexual senescence in Shakespeare’s plays, Jacqueline Vanhoutte shines a light on a figure who’s been hiding in plain sight: the aging male lover. Far from risible roués, characters such as Falstaff and Antony embody the politically potent but sexually quiescent men who hovered around Elizabeth in her final years. Beautifully written and hugely original, Age in Love pulls off that rarest of acts: adding a dimension to the highly defined profiles of some of Shakespeare’s best-known characters.”

  —Paul Menzer, professor and director of the Shakespeare and Performance graduate program at Mary Baldwin University

  “In clear and elegant prose this book builds a persuasive case for Shakespeare’s plays as deeply engaged with court history. Exposing the limits of New Historicist analysis, [it] offers a brilliant and groundbreaking methodology for producing historically informed literary analysis.”

  —Catherine Loomis, author of The Death of Elizabeth I: Remembering and Reconstructing the Virgin Queen

  Early Modern Cultural Studies

  Series Editors

  Carole Levin

  Marguerite A. Tassi

  Age in Love

  Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Court

  Jacqueline Vanhoutte

  University of Nebraska Press | Lincoln

  © 2019 by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska

  A short version of chapter 1 appeared in Explorations in Renaissance Culture 37 (2011): 51–70. An early draft of chapter 2 appeared in English Literary Renaissance 43.1 (2013): 86–127 (© 2013 by English Literary Renaissance Inc.). Thanks to these journals for their permission to reuse these materials.

  Cover designed by University of Nebraska Press; cover image Elizabeth I Dancing the Volta / © akg-images.

  All rights reserved

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Vanhoutte, Jacqueline, 1968– author.

  Title: Age in love: Shakespeare and the Elizabethan court / Jacqueline Vanhoutte.

  Description: Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019. | Series: Early modern cultural studies | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018051867

  ISBN 9781496207593 (cloth: alk. paper)

  ISBN 9781496214539 (epub)

  ISBN 9781496214546 (mobi)

  ISBN 9781496214553 (pdf)

  Subjects: LCSH: Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616—Political and social views. | Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616—Characters—Queens. | Elizabeth I, Queen of England, 1533–1603—Relations with courts and courtiers. | English literature—Early modern, 1500–1700—History and criticism. | Older men in literature. | Courts and courtiers in literature. | Great Britain—Court and courtiers—History—16th century.

  Classification: LCC PR3024 .V36 2019 | DDC 822.3/3—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018051867.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  To the memory of my beloved grandmother, Emma Dethier Vandenberghe (1914–2009). I have seen some majesty and I know it.

  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

  Illustrations

  1. Geoffrey Whitney, A Choice of Emblemes (1586)

  2. Portrait of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, by William Segar (1587)

  3. Discours de la Vie Abominable, Ruses, Trahisons . . . Desquelles a Usé et Use Journellement my Lorde de Lecestre (1585)

  4. Title page of Arthur Golding’s translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (1584)

  5. George Gascoigne, The Noble Arte of Venerie or Hunting (1575)

  6. Rainbow Portrait of Elizabeth I, attributed to Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger (1600–1602)

  Acknowledgments

  This book would not have been possible without the unfailing support and intellectual generosity of my husband, Alex Pettit. His confidence in my work sustains me when my own flags. Marrying him is the best career choice I made. I’m deeply grateful as well to John Coldewey, who introduced me to the joys of early drama and who passed away as I was finishing the manuscript. After all this time, I still write for him, my kind, witty, charming, and exacting first reader. My daughter Claire, who is fourteen, patiently put up with this book for the majority of her life. She brought me joy and much-needed relief. Carole Levin has been a model, a mentor, and an inspiration for my entire career. Her trailblazing scholarship paved the way for so many women in the field, including myself. I have also benefited greatly from Catherine Loomis’s learned comments, her wise counsel, and her vast knowledge of the period. I am grateful to Marguerite Tassi, Jo Carney Eldridge, and Alisa Plant for their faith in the book, and to the anonymous reviewers who have contributed important insights over the years. My chairs, David Holdeman and Robert Upchurch, encouraged and funded my research, as did others at the University of North Texas. Amanda Kellogg, Heidi Cephus, and Christa Reaves assisted me at various stages. Thanks are due as well to my friend and colleague Jeff Doty, with whom I discuss my ideas about Renaissance drama at length. Faith Lipori, Corey Marks, Amy Taylor, Nicole Smith, and Paul and Jacqueline Vanhoutte provided crucial emotional support. Miranda Wilson gave me important feedback and thirty-seven years of friendship—for this, much thanks. Paul Menzer and Doug Bruster kindly lent their support at the end. My work reflects conversations with numerous other friends, students, and colleagues, including the members of the Elizabeth I Society and the attendees of the Blackfriars Convention in Staunton. Thanks also to the two long-eared souls who spanieled me at the heels throughout the writing process, Emma and Cleopatra.

  Introduction

  I take the title of this book from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 138, a poem about an aging male speaker who, by virtue of his sexual entanglement with the dark lady, “vainly” performs the role of “some untutor’d youth” (138.2–5).1 As his theatrical metaphor indicates, the speaker views his desire for the lady as a violation of generational roles. The sonnet establishes equivalences between the speaker’s senescent sexuality and female sexual promiscuity by paralleling his lies about his age with the lady’s lies about her fidelity. The claim that these are transgressions of the same order may strike modern readers as disingenuous or hysterical. After all, in the era of Viagra, we tend to applaud aging men in the role of lovers: the sexual activity of our old men signals their transcendent virility, their triumphant conquest of time. In the era of the Virgin Queen, this was not the case. Lust was the proper purview of those of “strippling age,” a period roughly corresponding to adolescence and young adulthood, not those of “olde age,” which might begin as early as the forties or fifties.2 Instead of indulging in “days of love, desire, and vanitie,” as the sonnet speaker does, Sir Walter Ralegh believed that older men had to grow “to the perfection of [their] understanding.”3 Those who continued to conceive sexual desires as they aged defied social expectations regarding appropriate behavi
or, exposing themselves to the judgment of others. No wonder, then, that Shakespeare’s speaker “loves not t’ have years told” (138.12).4

  Although the gap in age between the sonnet speaker and his love objects is of obsessive concern in the sequence, coloring “almost every motive and action in the relationships to which the Sonnets refer,” critics have been largely silent about its implications.5 This silence is all the more striking given that Shakespeare’s decision to embrace the perspective of a lover whose “days are past the best” (138.6) is not an aberration. Rather, we might think about the poetic persona of the sonnets as a kind of signature, an overt admission on Shakespeare’s part of his enduring fascination with the amorous experiences of older men. The pattern that I am calling “age in love” pervades Shakespeare’s mature works, informing his experiments in all dramatic genres. Many of his most memorable characters—Bottom, Othello, Claudius, Falstaff, and Antony, to name a few—share with the sonnet speaker a tendency to flout generational decorum by assuming the role of the “young gallant” (Merry Wives of Windsor, 2.1.22). These superannuated lovers supplement their role-playing through costume changes: Bottom takes on an ass’s head, Malvolio dons his stockings and garters, Falstaff and Antony dress like women. 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 multiple categories by which early modern subjects conceived of identity. The ways in which these protean characters draw attention not just to gender distinctions (as do the androgynous heroines of the romantic comedies) but also to generic and generational ones make them flexible vehicles for a range of social, political, philosophical, and aesthetic inquiries. In the chapters that follow, I show that questions that 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—receive indelible expression through his artful deployment of the age-in-love trope.

  The courtliness in which Shakespeare cloaks this ancient trope matters: what drew him to the old man in love, I argue, is not just the timelessness of this figure but also its timeliness. Leslie A. Fiedler points out that “myths of old men in love” are “as ancient as the culture of what we call the West.”6 These myths took on a culturally specific cast in late Tudor England because of the composition of the Elizabethan court. While the accession of Elizabeth I in 1558 enabled the meteoric rise of some young men, including Robert Dudley (later Earl of Leicester), thereafter “new blood entered” the Elizabethan court “only when vacancies were created.”7 According to Keith Thomas, the “median age of Privy Counselors” at the Elizabethan court “was never less than fifty-one.”8 In 1588, when the court dramatist John Lyly first staged his influential Endymion, a play about aging courtiers, average life expectancy at birth was thirty-seven; those who made it to twenty-five might expect to live to their early fifties.9 Sir Christopher Hatton was forty-nine, the Earl of Leicester fifty-five, Sir Francis Walsingham fifty-six, and William Cecil, Lord Burghley sixty-nine at the time—all elderly men by early modern standards. Shakespeare’s pose as an aging lover in his most courtly work identifies him with the court’s “fairest creatures,” many of whom had failed in their aristocratic duty to produce biological “increase” (1.1).

  While Elizabeth followed precedent set by her male forebears in surrounding herself with older men, her expectations regarding their behavior were distinctive. As Hillary Clinton’s running mate Tim Kaine observed, traditionally the idea of the “strong man” does not include serving a “strong woman” in a supportive role.10 Elizabeth’s exceptional status as the female monarch of a patriarchal system, and her strategies for maintaining that status, required the men around her to make exceptions as well. None did so more spectacularly than her elder favorites, Leicester and Hatton. By parlaying their subservient brand of sexual charisma into political capital and social status, these two violated their culture’s gendered ideals, which insisted on sexual restraint and male dominance as crucial components of masculinity.11 Through the queen’s favor, Hatton, a member of the lesser gentry, rose to the position of lord chancellor of England, while Leicester, arguably descended from “a tribe of traitors,” became “the one man in England who . . . approached a king’s estate.”12 Although Castiglione’s proposition that “the thoughts and ways of sensual love are most unbecoming to a mature age” garnered wide agreement in the period, these men continued to perform the role of the lover regardless of age.13 Their deviations from gender and generational norms called attention to other deviations, like the failure to secure timely marriages or produce legitimate heirs, and helped render Hatton and Leicester subjects of unprecedented gossip and public scrutiny. In her groundbreaking study of contemporary responses to Elizabeth I, Carole Levin identifies rumors about the queen’s love affairs as signs of widespread discomfort with female rule—an argument that can be expanded to include responses to the queen’s alleged lovers, whose unorthodox behavior was sometimes difficult to reconcile with their dignified status as royal counselors.14 A rich cultural discourse, in a variety of media—rumors, images, unpublished and published poems and treatises, plays and performances—sprang up around these elder minions, making them celebrities avant la lettre.15 According to Michael L. Quinn, “the first requisite for celebrity is public notoriety,” which helps convert individuals into “representatives of the character traits most revered (or feared) by the community.”16 Hatton and, to a much greater extent still, Leicester came to play such a representative role, embodying communal fears, anxieties, and fantasies about the transformational powers of female rule.17 At a time when all politics were personal, the incessant chatter about these men was a form of political speech, a sign of people’s interest in state matters that were technically the purview of elites. That the Elizabethan regime was alert to the dangers of this phenomenon is evident from the fact that they passed new laws, criminalizing various forms of speech.18

  Despite the government’s best efforts, the collective conversation about the queen’s men found its way into print, where it assumed conventional patterns. Allusions to Ovid’s Circe framed sexual submission to Elizabeth as a form of male degeneration, for example, and references to bearbaitings, law courts, or hell and the Last Judgment expressed a desire to see the queen’s favorite men punished for their perceived transgressions. These satiric discourses generated distorted images of public figures with a tenuous connection to the men themselves. As the favorite target of contemporary invective, for example, Leicester acquired an unshakable reputation for lechery and drunkenness, even though his biographer assures us that the earl was an “abstemious man.”19 By making the debate about the queen’s eldest favorites audible again, I am able to show that theatrical representations of libidinous elderly courtiers drew on its characteristic tropes, thus shedding light on problems that have long vexed Shakespeare scholars, like the nature of the relationship between The Henriad and The Merry Wives of Windsor (chapter 2). I am also able to identify new sources for major characters, like Malvolio (chapter 3), forge connections among major works rarely discussed together, like Hamlet and Antony and Cleopatra (chapter 4), and propose new readings of these works. Ultimately, I demonstrate that Elizabeth I and her court shaped Shakespeare’s plays in unexpected and previously undocumented ways.

  The many references to lecherous older courtiers in plays offer one gauge of how the conduct at court conflicted with broader expectations regarding gender- and age-appropriate behavior. The publication of Endymion in 1591 launched a veritable vogue for the senex amans that lasted into the Jacobean period, with Thomas Middleton’s Revenger’s Tragedy (1607) and Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra (1608) marking the final wave of the phenomenon for my purposes. On stage, the “limited performances” of “old men lustful” openly alluded to the Elizabethan court; Lyly’s Cynthia, Shakespeare’s
Cleopatra, and Middleton’s Gloriana are all objects of senescent lust modeled on the queen’s public personae, for example.20 Surveying the preponderance of “old man’s venery,” one stage character explains that the behavior that was “rather an emblem of dispraise . . . in Monsieur’s days”—the days of Elizabeth’s last official suitor—had by the time of James’s accession grown to “a fashion.”21 As this metaphor indicates, the figure of “age in love” evokes forces of change and innovation for early moderns, however counterintuitive it might seem to us to embody such forces in randy old men. The timeframe for the phenomenon, meanwhile, identifies it with what historians refer to as the second reign of Elizabeth I, when the possibility of the queen marrying had vanished and the sexualized protocols of the court were therefore played out “vainly.”22 Under such conditions, the desire to “make the old fellow pay for’s lechery” gives dramatic expression to a range of controversial impulses.23 It is no accident that attacks on “treacherous, lecherous” older men (Hamlet 2.2.581) often double as gestures of independence from dominating and adulterating women in Renaissance plays.

  By offering sexualized portrayals of fictional characters that glanced at historical figures, the theatrical “fashion” for “old men’s venery” participated in the rise of “embodied writing” that Douglas Bruster argues transformed society in the final decades of Elizabeth’s reign, ushering in an early modern version of the public sphere.24 Depictions of “old men lustful” offered cover for political commentary, adapting to artistic and polemical purpose a rhetorical strategy favored by Tudor dissidents, who preferred to take aim at the queen’s counselors rather than at the queen herself.25 This strategy of indirection is particularly effective against a female ruler (or, as the 2016 American election showed, a would-be female ruler) because it reduces her to an object of masculine discourse and manipulation, thus enforcing rhetorically the patriarchal norms that she violates politically. To cite a pertinent example, the widely circulated Catholic pamphlet known as Leicester’s Commonwealth (1584) relied on such tactics in its seminal (an irresistible word, under the circumstances) representation of Leicester as an oversexed old man. Although its authors, a group of anonymous Catholic expatriates, objected to policies that the queen had approved, they limit direct attacks to Leicester and his henchmen.