Age in Love

The title Age in Love is taken from Shakespeares sonnet 138, a poem about an aging male speaker who, by virtue of his entanglement with the dark lady, vainly performs the role of some untutord youth. Jacqueline Vanhoutte argues that this pattern of age in love pervades Shakespeares mature works, informing his experiments in all the dramatic genres. Bottom, Malvolio, Claudius, Falstaff, and Antony all share with the sonnet speaker a tendency to flout generational decorum by assuming the role of the lover, normally reserved in Renaissance culture for young men. Hybrids and upstarts, cross-dressers and shape-shifters, comic butts and tragic heroesShakespeares old-men-in-love turn in boundary-blurring performances that probe the gendered and generational categories by which early modern subjects conceived of identity. In Age in Love Vanhoutte shows that questions we have come to regard as quintessentially Shakespeareanabout 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 immortalitycome to indelible expression through Shakespeares artful deployment of the age in love trope. Age in Love contributes to the ongoing debate about the emergence of a Tudor public sphere, building on the current interest in premodern constructions of aging and ultimately demonstrating that the Elizabethan court shaped Shakespeares plays in unexpected and previously undocumented ways.