The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 17.0093 Thursday, 2 March 2006
From: Frank Whigham <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Wednesday, March 01, 2006 3:35 PM
Subject: no country for old men?
I'm interested in thinking a bit further about impotent and bedrid old
men, if only because of the signal importance of old men in Elizabethan
culture generally. Greenblatt goes so far as to call the social order a
gerontocracy, as by the 1590s it certainly was, if we take Elizabeth and
Burghley as central figures, with what Helgerson calls the "aspiring
minds" such as Essex and the others so cruelly (or at least
frustratingly) shorted on what they thought proper advancement by the
Elizabethan stage of Stone's "inflation of honors." The sulfuric mockery
that Shakespeare and Hamlet alike dish out to Polonius (plum-tree gum,
etc.) seems, like so much in this play, to be somewhat in excess of
dramatic necessity.
Of course, Shakespeare is capable of somewhat other reactions: concern
for "unregarded age in corners thrown," curiosity about the haunted and
obscurely dis-eased fathers of Hal and Hotspur (though they're not
guaranteed to be elderly), sympathy (and contempt) for the self/stripped
old men in Lear, and so forth.
Nonetheless, I'm curious about the possibility of some kind of
historically specific structure of feeling about old men: specifically
here about male contempt for old men at the top of a gerontocracy during
the final years of Elizabeth's possibly too-elongated reign, the stopper
for advancement ever more fully corked in by a spiteful queen whose
hatred of her own ageing must have had many imitators.
Gender plays some kind of differential role, no doubt, though Elizabeth
was surely something of an honorary male, as I believe Lisa Jardine says
somewhere. Nonetheless, in Ben Jonson's Conversations with Drummond of
Hawthornden (1619) Jonson is reported to have said that "Queen Elizabeth
never saw her self after she became old in a true Glas. they painted her
& sometymes would vermilion her nose . . ." (Herford & Simpson 1.141-42:
ll. 338-40). I assume "they" are her younger and unwillingly virginal
ladies in waiting.
What's interesting to me among these gooey tales (though I guess Norway,
unlike Claudius, has lost his goo) is the register of vengeful and cruel
hostility, a parading of youthful vigor's contrast with the pathetic and
pitiful features of ageing (notably front-loaded, I am told, in Ian
Holm's extraordinarily full-naked Lear). These features must have been
much more notable in Elizabethan physiology, lacking as they did our
access to Oil of Olay and such. (The Ghost, for instance: prematurely
and frightfully aged in his crust, an impotent and hammock-rid
anti-Pyrrhus, oiled up rather than dried up?)
So: how specific is this matter (to cite Thersites) in Shakespeare? To
the tragedies; to the hinge years, to a period before his own ageing, or
at its outset; to particular kinds of characters; to the more
spectacular examples of the gerontocracy (the old age of the queen and
Burghley, or the queen and Claudius) -- to, in short, something historical?
Frank Whigham
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