Constituting Old Age in Early Modern Literature from Queen Elizabeth to “King Lear” by Christopher Martin (review)

Although literary gerontology has existed for several decades as an area of investigation, it has thus far remained marginal to the fields of both gerontology and literary study. Perhaps because it has often focused on the portrayal of aging in isolated examples of fiction, drama, and poetry, and assumed the transparency of representation and the universality of the aging experience, work in literary gerontology has sometimes failed to question the contextual and constitutive aspects of literature that are of major interest to both literary scholars and critical gerontologists.

Christopher Martin’s Constituting Old Age in Early Modern Literature from Queen Elizabeth to “King Lear” goes a long way towards redressing this weakness. Martin is a scholar of the literature and culture of early modern Europe, and as such, brings a critical perspective and a wealth of historical and cultural knowledge to his discussion of the complex and sophisticated negotiation of aging in England from the 1580s to the early 1600s. The book opens with “Age, Agency, and Early Modern Constitutions”, a chapter that sets the theoretical framework for the detailed close readings of political and literary texts that form the balance of the book. Aging, then as now, involved re-evaluation of one’s identity in the face of a changing body and societal prejudice against the aged.

Contrary to other scholars of the period, Martin argues that instead of merely accepting old age as a necessary and universal evil, some writers of the period explored the “constitution” as a factor in the aging of individuals. He uses this term as defined by the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) in the sense of “healthiness”, “strength”, and “vitality” as they relate to the body (p. 2), and points out that it was during the sixteenth century that the word developed this shade of meaning. The primary meaning of the word, however – “the action of constituting, making, establishing” (OED) – equally suits the argument Martin puts forward, as his book is concerned not only with the way the constitution of aging individuals was recognized as a category during the period but also with how an aging (yet vital) identity could be constituted and agency maintained. His purpose is to demonstrate “how the figures in question struggle… to reclaim this agency, which is grounded in the private but equally authoritative self-awareness of one’s own constitution” (pp. 7–8).

This “struggle” was against not only one’s aging and inevitably deteriorating body, but also against the widespread societal belief that age automatically entailed failing physical and mental capabilities and required older adults to retire from society and exhibit decorous behaviour; an attempt on the part of an aged individual to overcome or ignore the ravages of age regularly invited scorn and caricature. Martin traces the various treatises on aging, both classical and contemporary, that were available during the period – Seneca’s Epistles 12 and 121; Thomas Wilson’s Arte of Rhetorique (1553); Castiglione’s Il Cortegiano (trans. 1561); Andreas Laurentius’s Discourse on Old Age (trans. 1599) – and notes how they reinforced the gerontophobia of the culture. A corrective appeared in Cicero’s De Senectute (trans. 1577), which has long been recognized as a text that valorizes old age. It is, says Martin, “an exploration of what it costs to maintain one’s dignity in the face of age’s harsher prospects” (p. 20).

In chapter 2, “Elizabeth I’s Politics of Longevity”, Martin closely analyses four episodes during Elizabeth’s reign that demonstrate her shrewd use of her aging body: the debate in 1579 (and her response to it) instigated by her potential marriage at the age of 46 to the 24-year-old duc d’Alençon; her loss of friends and advisors as she aged; her deliberate exposure of her partially naked body to Ambassador de Maisse in 1597–98, when she was 64; and the unsuccessful Essex rebellion in her final years on the throne. Throughout the...