Old Age, Masculinity, and Early Modern Drama

Comic Elders on the Italian and Shakespearean Stage

Anthony Ellis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780754665786
• eBook ISBN: 9781351914024
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This first book-length study to trace the evolution of the comic old man in Italian and English Renaissance comedy shows how English dramatists adopted and reimagined an Italian model to reflect native concerns about and attitudes toward growing old. Anthony Ellis provides an in-depth study of the comic old man in the erudite comedy of sixteenth-century Florence; the character's parallel development in early modern Venice, including the commedia dell'arte; and, along with a consideration of Anglo-Italian intertextuality, the character's subsequent flourishing on the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage. In outlining the character's development, Ellis identifies and describes the physical and behavioral characteristics of the comic old man and situates these traits within early modern society by considering prevailing medical theories, sexual myths, and intergenerational conflict over political and economic circumstances. The plays examined include Italian dramas by Bernardo Dovizi da Bibbiena, Niccolò Machiavelli, Donato Giannotti, Lorenzino de' Medici, Andrea Calmo, and Flaminio Scala, and English works by William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and Thomas Dekker, along with Middleton, Rowley, and Heywood's The Old Law. Besides providing insight into stage representations of aging, this book illuminates how early modern people conceived of and responded to the experience of growing old and its social, economic, and physical challenges.

Chapter 1
“All the world is of this humor”: Senescence and Melancholy in Shakespeare’s England and the Case of King Lear

In a recent book on growing old, the late Betty Friedan remarked that Western medicine promulgates two polarized attitudes toward senescence. One paints a pessimistic portrait of old age as a period of inevitable mental and physical deterioration that can be met at best with stoic resolution. The opposing viewpoint counters that many elders, in defiance of gloomy stereotypes, enjoy the benefits of wisdom, maturity, and greater independence; the challenge to society is to make the opportunity to do so available to more old people. Friedan positions the traditional medical establishment at the former pole, gerontology at the other.¹ Interestingly, her “two faces of age” have an analogue in early modern England, where debate over the virtues of growing old pitted harsh descriptivism against a deferential (often class-based) idealism. Certainly little could be found desirable in seventh-age decrepitude, but the sixth age—the senescent stage that corresponded astrologically with Jupiter—had its benefits. Shakespeare’s Jaques, we remember, takes the low road and associates the sixth stage with the pantaloon, a target of mockery. But Henry Cuffe, expounding The differences of the ages of mans life (1st ed. 1607), reminds his readers that “Old age from Jupiter receiveth gravitie and staydnesse” while the “poysonous infirmities” of “crooked age” all derive from Saturn, later.²

This attainment of greater gravity and wisdom, coupled with biblical injunction, formed the ideological basis for old people’s alleged superiority. Keith Thomas points to evidence that an English preference for seniority did exist in village government, in the clergy, and in the highest posts at universities.³ At the same time, a concerted effort seems to have been afoot to extend teens’ and young adults’ period of subordination as long as possible, thereby delaying their full political participation. But not surprisingly, the extent to which the elderly reaped any benefits supposedly accruing to advanced age was mostly dependent on their economic class. In short, if they retained their property, their children had still to show them reverence; if they bequeathed it during their lifetimes to the next generation, neither their offspring nor the society at large could always be relied upon in the event of subsequent misfortune. Furthermore, it appears that the achievement of respect came often at the price of independence. It was contingent on the old person carefully sustaining a dignified public image, concerning everything from wearing proper attire to suppression of the sex drive. Thomas concludes that the circulation of an abstract “gerontocratic ideal” contradicts the overall failure of the elderly to “command respect” in practice at all but the highest socioeconomic levels.⁴

Reviewing Thomas’s study, Lawrence Stone concurs, while adding that he detects slight esteem for either youth or old age in English institutions, which could be counted on to promote instead the interests of the middle-aged.⁵ This disenfranchisement of young and old plays out memorably in As You Like It, where Orlando and Adam must rely on each other to overcome their shared condemnation by an antagonistic society. The younger son, a victim of primogeniture and of a spiteful sibling, suffers exclusion from courtly circles; the old servant is simply cashiered.⁶ Orlando’s impetuousness, visible in his seemingly suicidal decision to wrestle Charles, betrays that his “animal spirits” have not yet reached maturation. But this maturation point nears, as Orlando knows and Oliver fears—“The spirit of my father grows strong in me,” he asserts (1.1.66–7)—leading the elder brother to step up his project to ruin him. Adam manifests those fixed, sedate qualities Orlando lacks, but his society no longer accepts unchallenged his role as a positive influence on the youths who can benefit from his experience. As such, the servant proves the exception to the emergent stereotype that attributed to young and old men alike a shortage of self-control, an inability to regulate their passions—desire, jealousy, anger, fear, grief—that compromised their standing as rational subjects, and, thus, their masculinity.

In The Passions of the Minde in Generall (1604), Thomas Wright charges these two age groups specifically with this fault, although he acknowledges some behavioral variation based on the heterogeneity of the species. Young men are prone to incontinency, boldness, and inconstancy, their ceaseless bodily alterations discouraging them from weighing matters carefully or persisting in any one undertaking for long. As for old men, Wright espouses the pathological model of growing old, quoting the proverb “Olde age is a perpetuali sickenesse” and declaring that senes tend to be “fastidious, testie, froward, and never contented.”⁷ Significantly, women constitute the final overly passionate subgroup. While Wright contends that the combination of women’s lesser innate heat and their greater propensity for shame actually causes them to be less incontinent than men, this blessing is mitigated by their typical self-surrender to four other passions: pride, envy, inconstancy, and indulgence in venomous gossiping. Wright leaves his readers with the impression that only middle-aged males are physiologically constituted to live in accordance with a lofty, if unexciting, ideal of temperance and prudence. Clearly, this pseudoscientific belief system justified the English partiality toward the middle-aged noted by Stone. It also suggests why descriptions of old men who fail to conform to expected behavior patterns are so often couched in language linking them to the two other discredited groups. In short, they regress to childhood, or they act like women.

All theorizing done on the passions took place within the rudimentary Galenic framework of the four bodily humors: blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile. The humors model, which dominated Western medicine until late in the seventeenth century, elaborated a network of correlations between these fluids and the four seasons, the known elements (air, water, earth, fire), and the so-called “qualities” (hot, wet, cold, dry). Each humor corresponded with one season and one element, and drew its defining characteristics from a unique combination of two of the four qualities. All persons were thought to possess variable proportions of the four humors as their basic, life-giving substance. This proportion fluctuated somewhat over the life cycle, but in most cases, one fluid predominated from birth, predisposing an individual to think and act in certain ways. It is important to remember that according to Renaissance medicine, humoral proportion not only affected a person’s physical constitution, but shaped one’s personality and mental outlook as well, for the humors were responsible for releasing powerful vapors to the brain. This is to say, humoral determinism had a moral component. Regarding temperament, it was believed that individuals with relatively high proportions of blood were sanguinary by nature. Similarly, the dominance of phlegm made persons phlegmatic, that of yellow bile, bilious (or synonymously, choleric, as this humor was also known as “choler”), that of black bile, melancholic (a reflection of this humor’s alternative name, “melancholy”). The body’s vital functions were regulated by separate entities—the three “spirits,” the natural, vital, and animal, produced in the liver, heart, and brain, respectively—but one’s basic health depended on the proper balance of humors. From this schema, we can see that anybody, regardless of age, class, or sex, may or may not be inclined toward, for instance, melancholia. We are also able to deduce that everybody is always potentially a melancholiac, depending on the increase and diminution of corporeal substances shared universally, only in varying proportions.

And this raises a question: how did physicians conceive the precise relationship between the humors and the passions? Here expert opinions differ. Part of the difficulty of answering this question resides in the shiftiness of the terms’ definitions, which can lend explanations of physical and behavioral cause and effect a frustrating circularity. The consensus medical opinion held that life choices and one’s proportion of the four humors operate reciprocally: bad behavior can jeopardize one’s fluidic equilibrium and lead to poor health; conversely, most people are born with one dominant humor and thus have temperaments that cause them to act and to make decisions in predisposed ways. As a result, a melancholy character made one jealous, and jealousy increased one’s melancholy. Melancholiacs tended toward idleness, and too much idleness in society (as in high unemployment and vagrancy) produced melancholic subjects. Since cause and effect could reverse themselves in this manner, prescribed measures for bringing the body into balance, such as altering diet and purging the blood, offered no reliable or lasting cure. The French physician André Du Laurens identified what he saw as the three principal sources of melancholic disturbance, which contain numerous subdivisions: “nature,” “the minde,” and “the intercourse of medling or evill angels.” This multiplication of potential causes, to include even the supernatural, underscores the difficulty of adopting preventive or curative measures.⁸

Complicating this issue still further is the particular threat thought to be posed by the melancholic humor becoming burnt, or “adust.” If an excessive amount of melancholy in the body endangered one’s health and disposition, this corrupted form of the humor proved especially menacing. Again, writers on this subject stress the power of the mind, when disquieted, to produce pathological physical symptoms. For example, Leonard Lessius warns in his Hygiasticon (1634) that one’s “Fancy,” by arousing grief even in the absence of any material cause, “straitens the heart, and hinders the free dilation thereof, whereby the melancholic humour becomes adust, and more malignant.”⁹ Physicians explained the physical onset of “melancholy adust” as a literal burning of the “warmer” humors (blood or yellow bile) due to excessive heat brought on by hot passions, and aggravated by grief and fear. Thus, the scorching of either blood, produced by the liver, or yellow bile, originating in the gall bladder, generated a deadlier kind of melancholy than the type “naturally” found in the spleen.¹⁰

Certainly, all types of people were diagnosed or identified themselves as suffering from melancholia in this period. Robert Burton marvels at the multiple causes and symptoms that lead his treatment of the subject to be so encyclopedic: “how difficult a thing is it to treat of several kinds apart; to make any certainty or distinction among so many casualties” (pt. 1, p. 177). Yet over and over, both scientific and popular appraisals of melancholy correlated scatology and senescence in suggestive ways. The discourse is scatologically inflected where it speaks of remedies, to wit, the induced evacuation of either melancholy adust or excess “natural” melancholy; it takes up senescence in the frequent allegations that high levels of these fluids are found disproportionately in the old. At times, the strains are combined. Concerning the former, Frankie Rubinstein traces the frequent punning in Shakespeare on the familiar association of “melancholy” with scatological processes. (Her lexicon offers for the word the primary definition: “Bowel disorder, shitty.”) Rubinstein’s etymology reveals that the word contains two puns, one associating melan with “black” and the other evoking from colic the sense of “griping belly pains, arising from the bowel.” As one of her many examples, when old Polixenes “is gone aboard a new ship to purge melancholy and air himself (Winter’s Tale 4.4.766–8), Autolycus may be alluding to the king’s flatulence and his need to “purge (evacuate the bowels) [of] melancholy”; the extrinsic cause for his condition is his grief over his missing son.¹¹

While the word “melancholy” was accruing such connotations of filthiness, it maintained a special relevance to investigations of the aging process. Simply put, it was widely believed, following Galen, that human bodies became steadily colder and drier as they aged. The characteristic “qualities” of melancholy were cold and dry. By definition, then, the aged would tend toward developing signs of melancholia, even if they lacked this predisposition in their original genetic makeup. Not surprisingly, based on this conceptual framework, physicians often interpreted “dotage,” that is, what was probably in most cases the onset of senility, as indicating melancholia. On this subject, the OED makes clear that in the word’s early usage, “dotage” was not always age-specific, but signified simply “the state of one who dotes or has the intellect impaired.” Thus, Du Laurens does not refer specifically to the elderly where he defines “dotage,” in the context of a section on “melancholike diseases,” as “when some one of the principal faculties of the mind, as imagination or reason, is corrupted.”¹² But naturally, most of those people referred to as doting (like Lear, by Goneril) were old, so that the problem of the “madne...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 “All the world is of this humor”: Senescence and Melancholy in Shakespeare’s England and the Case of King Lear
• 2 Old Age and the Uses of Comedy: Bibbiena’s Calandra and Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor
• 3 Comedy and Florentine Politics: The Problem of Generations
• 4 Andrea Calmo, Renaissance Venice, and the Challenge of the Gerontocratic Ideal
• 5 “Caso unico nel mondo delle Maschere”: The Comic Mutations of the Pantalone Mask in Flaminio Scala’s Commedia dell’Arte Scenarios
• 6 Jonson’s Alchemist and Dekker’s Old Fortunatus: Magic, Mortality, and the Debasement of (the Golden) Age
• 7 Old Age and the Utopian Project: The Tempest and The Old Law
• Bibliography
• Index