Constituting Old Age in Early Modern English Literature, from Queen Elizabeth to King Lear

4. Sexuality and Senescence in Late Elizabethan Poetry: "Old Strange Thinges"

100 ChAptEr FOur sexuality and senescence in Late Elizabethan poetry: “Old strange Thinges” When crafting his Affectionate Shepheard, Richard Barnfield drew upon no less popular a text than Geffrey Whitney’s Choice of Emblems of 1586 as a source for his interpolated account of how, when Death and Cupid unwittingly take up one another’s quivers, youth begins to die as old men “dote.” Although Barnfield’s application gives the myth a more vituperative turn, Whitney’s poeticized tag to his emblem “De morte, & amore: Iocosum” (see fig. 1)—adapted in turn from Andrea Alciato’s Emblematum liber (1531)—takes a sanguine, “joking” look at the theory that, amid this cosmic confusion, “aged men, whome deathe woulde bringe to grounde:/Beganne againe to love, with sighes, and grones.”1 Whitney’s etiological account of Mors and Cupid’s accidental exchange of arrows attempts a measure of mythic justification (if not vindication) of the amorous elder. Even after the mixup comes to the attention of the deities responsible, who perceive “how youthe was almoste cleane extinct:/And age did doate, with garlandes freshe, and gaye,/And heades all balde, weare newe in wedlocke linckt,” the adjustment leaves several arrows in the wrong quivers: “Then, when wee see, untimelie deathe appeare,” we are told, “Or wanton age: it was this chaunce you heare.” If “natures lawes” are expressly “infringed” by the inversion, the spectacle of the elder’s passionate desires was evidently as familiar or recognizable and prevalent as premature death—and was something that, in the popular imagination, divine rectification itself could not hope to preclude. Age in love would of course find its lyric champions throughout the period, however compromised or compassionate their performances, from Sidney’s Basilius to the speaker of Thomas Campion’s “Though you are yoong and I am olde,” who pointedly affirms, “Yet embers live, when 101 Sexuality and Senescence in Late Elizabethan Poetry flames doe die.”2 Yet such gestures remained the generous exceptions within a national lyric anthology that unapologetically gave voice to a more malign sensibility. For instance, in what the variorum editors speculate was his first surviving epigram—and therefore among his earliest surviving poems—John Donne targets the antiquarian proclivities of one Hamon: “If, in his study, Hamon hath such care,/To hang all old things, let his wife beware.”3 In subsequent versions of the text, the second line’s “old things” expands into “old strange thinges,” an amplification as deft as it is nasty. The original epigram had been content to redirect its satirical roguery from the antiquarian collector (already a butt of literary abuse in the 1590s)4 to his spouse; the redaction enlarges, by means of this adjectival insert , into a poem about “estrangement” and the objectification that comes with age. As the erotic intimacies of youth fade, the couplet sardonically implies, familiar people inevitably devolve to the status of strange things. The antiquary’s wife needs to beware the dusty knickknacks cluttering her husband’s ridiculous displays less because of the penury such extravagant Fig. 1. Geffrey Whitney, from A Choice of Emblems (Leyden, 1586). Reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California. 102 Chapter Four purchases typically threaten than for their human cost—specifically, the emotional displacement configured by these gathered curiosities, among which she now takes her unremarkable place. In old age, the lover comes to look upon his previous object of affection as (at best) a grotesque artifact worthy of inclusion in his museum, itself representative of a pathetic desire to recover and reconstruct a now remote past. This early epigram’s concern for the disengagements threatened by time’s physical effects would itself mature to preoccupy much of Donne’s verse.5 It is also symptomatic of a prevailing impulse to de-eroticize old age, and the correspondingly scurrilous indictment of aged sexuality that extends from antiquity to early modernity (and beyond). Nowhere were the social or psychological consequences of late life more dramatically pronounced than in matters of sexual conduct. Poetically, the presumed antipathy between sexuality and senescence finds characteristic expression in William Jaggard’s 1599 anthology of pirated lyrics, The Passionate Pilgrime, in a verse excerpted from a longer piece published elsewhere as “A Maidens choice twixt Age and Youth”: Crabbed age and youth cannot live together, Youth is full of pleasance, Age is full of care, Youth like summer morne, Age like winter weather, Youth like...