The vale of years: Early modern aging, gender, and Shakespearean tragedy.

摘要

Criticism has shown that race, gender, and class are primarily social constructs that often delimit the terms of conflict in drama, but it has rarely considered age in the same way. Therefore we have not developed the culturally specific tools for discussing age as we discuss other categories of difference. Age may have been neglected because everyone ages--aging has, perhaps, been regarded as a leveling phenomenon rather than as one that generates anxiety, discrimination, and strife. While age differs from race in being a time-based category, it is just as likely to be used to divide people; in Chaucer's words, "youthe and elde is often at debaat." Such debate was likely to favor youth. Only by considering the frequently negative connotations of aging can we fully recognize age as a critical issue.;Chapter 1 examines the early modern medical model of aging and its ramifications. The body supposedly passed through a series of humoral changes--the medical "ages of man"--that meant, for instance, that the later years directly prefigured death and that gender was bound to "slip" in both men and women. The chapter then surveys how aging was regarded in society's institutions and literature. Proscriptions on sexuality and the expectation that older men would be cuckolded prove particularly relevant to Shakespearean drama. Chapter 2 uses the "seven ages" speech in As You Like It to investigate how literary, religious, and philosophical views of aging might have relevance to the stage, with special reference to tragedy in the last section. The final three chapters consider aging in itself and as it links to other factors in three Shakespeare tragedies--Othello, Antony and Cleopatra, and King Lear. Beyond its inherent significance, aging intersects race, gender, and class in fundamental ways. All these factors come together in Othello, while in Antony and Cleopatra aging combines with race and gender and in Lear with gender and class. I have chosen these plays because they bear directly on the problems of aging, but other tragedies--Julius Caesar, Hamlet, and Macbeth, for instance--ask to be examined for aging issues as well.