Introduction

I take the title of this book from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 138, a poem about an aging male speaker who, by virtue of his sexual entanglement with the dark lady, “vainly” performs the role of “some untutor’d youth” (138.2–5).1 As his theatrical metaphor indicates, the speaker views his desire for the lady as a violation of generational roles. The sonnet establishes equivalences between the speaker’s senescent sexuality and female sexual promiscuity by paralleling his lies about his age with the lady’s lies about her fidelity. The claim that these are transgressions of the same order may strike modern readers as disingenuous or hysterical. After all, in the era of Viagra, we tend to applaud aging men in the role of lovers: the sexual activity of our old men signals their transcendent virility, their triumphant conquest of time. In the era of the Virgin Queen, this was not the case. Lust was the proper purview of those of “strippling age,” a period roughly corresponding to adolescence and young adulthood, not those of “olde age,” which might begin as early as the forties or fifties.2 Instead of indulging in “days of love, desire, and vanitie,” as the sonnet speaker does, Sir Walter Ralegh believed that older men had to grow “to the perfection of [their] understanding.”3 Those who continued to conceive sexual desires as they aged defied social expectations regarding appropriate behavior, exposing themselves to the judgment of others. No wonder, then, that Shakespeare’s speaker “loves not t’ have years told” (138.12).4

Although the gap in age between the sonnet speaker and his love objects is of obsessive concern in the sequence, coloring “almost every motive and action in the relationships to which the Sonnets refer,” critics have been largely silent about its implications.5 This silence is all the more striking given that Shakespeare’s decision to embrace the perspective of a lover whose “days are past the best” (138.6) is not an aberration. Rather, we might think about the poetic persona of the sonnets as a kind of signature, an overt admission on Shakespeare’s part of his enduring fascination with the amorous experiences of older men. The pattern that I am calling “age in love” pervades Shakespeare’s mature works, informing his experiments in all dramatic genres. Many of his most memorable characters—Bottom, Othello, Claudius, Falstaff, and Antony, to name a few—share with the sonnet speaker a tendency to flout generational decorum by assuming the role of the “young gallant” (Merry Wives of Windsor, 2.1.22). These superannuated lovers supplement their role-playing through costume changes: Bottom takes on an ass’s head, Malvolio dons his stockings and garters, Falstaff and Antony dress like women. Hybrids and upstarts, cross-dressers and shape-shifters, comic butts and tragic heroes, Shakespeare’s old men in love turn in boundary-blurring performances that probe the multiple categories by which early modern subjects conceived of identity. The ways in which these protean characters draw attention not just to gender distinctions (as do the androgynous heroines of the romantic comedies) but also to generic and generational ones make them flexible vehicles for a range of social, political, philosophical, and aesthetic inquiries. In the chapters that follow, I show that questions that we have come to regard as quintessentially Shakespearean—about 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 immortality—receive indelible expression through his artful deployment of the age-in-love trope.

The courtliness in which Shakespeare cloaks this ancient trope matters: what drew him to the old man in love, I argue, is not just the timelessness of this figure but also its timeliness. Leslie A. Fiedler points out that “myths of old men in love” are “as ancient as the culture of what we call the West.”6 These myths took on a culturally specific cast in late Tudor England because of the composition of the Elizabethan court. While the accession of Elizabeth I in 1558 enabled the meteoric rise of some young men, including Robert Dudley (later Earl of Leicester), thereafter “new blood entered” the Elizabethan court “only when vacancies were created.”7 According to Keith Thomas, the “median age of Privy Counselors” at the Elizabethan court “was never less than fifty-one.”8 In 1588, when the court dramatist John Lyly first staged his influential Endymion, a play about aging courtiers, average life expectancy at birth was thirty-seven; those who made it to twenty-five might expect to live to their early fifties.9 Sir Christopher Hatton was forty-nine, the Earl of Leicester fifty-five, Sir Francis Walsingham fifty-six, and William Cecil, Lord Burghley sixty-nine at the time—all elderly men by early modern standards. Shakespeare’s pose as an aging lover in his most courtly work identifies him with the court’s “fairest creatures,” many of whom had failed in their aristocratic duty to produce biological “increase” (1.1).

While Elizabeth followed precedent set by her male forebears in surrounding herself with older men, her expectations regarding their behavior were distinctive. As Hillary Clinton’s running mate Tim Kaine observed, traditionally the idea of the “strong man” does not include serving a “strong woman” in a supportive role.10 Elizabeth’s exceptional status as the female monarch of a patriarchal system, and her strategies for maintaining that status, required the men around her to make exceptions as well. None did so more spectacularly than her elder favorites, Leicester and Hatton. By parlaying their subservient brand of sexual charisma into political capital and social status, these two violated their culture’s gendered ideals, which insisted on sexual restraint and male dominance as crucial components of masculinity.11 Through the queen’s favor, Hatton, a member of the lesser gentry, rose to the position of lord chancellor of England, while Leicester, arguably descended from “a tribe of traitors,” became “the one man in England who . . . approached a king’s estate.”12 Although Castiglione’s proposition that “the thoughts and ways of sensual love are most unbecoming to a mature age” garnered wide agreement in the period, these men continued to perform the role of the lover regardless of age.13 Their deviations from gender and generational norms called attention to other deviations, like the failure to secure timely marriages or produce legitimate heirs, and helped render Hatton and Leicester subjects of unprecedented gossip and public scrutiny. In her groundbreaking study of contemporary responses to Elizabeth I, Carole Levin identifies rumors about the queen’s love affairs as signs of widespread discomfort with female rule—an argument that can be expanded to include responses to the queen’s alleged lovers, whose unorthodox behavior was sometimes difficult to reconcile with their dignified status as royal counselors.14 A rich cultural discourse, in a variety of media—rumors, images, unpublished and published poems and treatises, plays and performances—sprang up around these elder minions, making them celebrities avant la lettre.15 According to Michael L. Quinn, “the first requisite for celebrity is public notoriety,” which helps convert individuals into “representatives of the character traits most revered (or feared) by the community.”16 Hatton and, to a much greater extent still, Leicester came to play such a representative role, embodying communal fears, anxieties, and fantasies about the transformational powers of female rule.17 At a time when all politics were personal, the incessant chatter about these men was a form of political speech, a sign of people’s interest in state matters that were technically the purview of elites. That the Elizabethan regime was alert to the dangers of this phenomenon is evident from the fact that they passed new laws, criminalizing various forms of speech.18

Despite the government’s best efforts, the collective conversation about the queen’s men found its way into print, where it assumed conventional patterns. Allusions to Ovid’s Circe framed sexual submission to Elizabeth as a form of male degeneration, for example, and references to bearbaitings, law courts, or hell and the Last Judgment expressed a desire to see the queen’s favorite men punished for their perceived transgressions. These satiric discourses generated distorted images of public figures with a tenuous connection to the men themselves. As the favorite target of contemporary invective, for example, Leicester acquired an unshakable reputation for lechery and drunkenness, even though his biographer assures us that the earl was an “abstemious man.”19 By making the debate about the queen’s eldest favorites audible again, I am able to show that theatrical representations of libidinous elderly courtiers drew on its characteristic tropes, thus shedding light on problems that have long vexed Shakespeare scholars, like the nature of the relationship between The Henriad and The Merry Wives of Windsor (chapter 2). I am also able to identify new sources for major characters, like Malvolio (chapter 3), forge connections among major works rarely discussed together, like Hamlet and Antony and Cleopatra (chapter 4), and propose new readings of these works. Ultimately, I demonstrate that Elizabeth I and her court shaped Shakespeare’s plays in unexpected and previously undocumented ways.

The many references to lecherous older courtiers in plays offer one gauge of how the conduct at court conflicted with broader expectations regarding gender- and age-appropriate behavior. The publication of Endymion in 1591 launched a veritable vogue for the senex amans that lasted into the Jacobean period, with Thomas Middleton’s Revenger’s Tragedy (1607) and Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra (1608) marking the final wave of the phenomenon for my purposes. On stage, the “limited performances” of “old men lustful” openly alluded to the Elizabethan court; Lyly’s Cynthia, Shakespeare’s Cleopatra, and Middleton’s Gloriana are all objects of senescent lust modeled on the queen’s public personae, for example.20 Surveying the preponderance of “old man’s venery,” one stage character explains that the behavior that was “rather an emblem of dispraise . . . in Monsieur’s days”—the days of Elizabeth’s last official suitor—had by the time of James’s accession grown to “a fashion.”21 As this metaphor indicates, the figure of “age in love” evokes forces of change and innovation for early moderns, however counterintuitive it might seem to us to embody such forces in randy old men. The timeframe for the phenomenon, meanwhile, identifies it with what historians refer to as the second reign of Elizabeth I, when the possibility of the queen marrying had vanished and the sexualized protocols of the court were therefore played out “vainly.”22 Under such conditions, the desire to “make the old fellow pay for’s lechery” gives dramatic expression to a range of controversial impulses.23 It is no accident that attacks on “treacherous, lecherous” older men (Hamlet 2.2.581) often double as gestures of independence from dominating and adulterating women in Renaissance plays.

By offering sexualized portrayals of fictional characters that glanced at historical figures, the theatrical “fashion” for “old men’s venery” participated in the rise of “embodied writing” that Douglas Bruster argues transformed society in the final decades of Elizabeth’s reign, ushering in an early modern version of the public sphere.24 Depictions of “old men lustful” offered cover for political commentary, adapting to artistic and polemical purpose a rhetorical strategy favored by Tudor dissidents, who preferred to take aim at the queen’s counselors rather than at the queen herself.25 This strategy of indirection is particularly effective against a female ruler (or, as the 2016 American election showed, a would-be female ruler) because it reduces her to an object of masculine discourse and manipulation, thus enforcing rhetorically the patriarchal norms that she violates politically. To cite a pertinent example, the widely circulated Catholic pamphlet known as Leicester’s Commonwealth (1584) relied on such tactics in its seminal (an irresistible word, under the circumstances) representation of Leicester as an oversexed old man. Although its authors, a group of anonymous Catholic expatriates, objected to policies that the queen had approved, they limit direct attacks to Leicester and his henchmen.

The earl was an obvious target for malcontents and dissidents: not only did he enjoy a privileged relationship with the queen, but he was also the leader of the Protestant faction at court, and a major patron and protector of radical Protestants. Leicester conducted his affairs, including his courtship of the queen, in a shockingly public fashion, moreover. Relying on traditional modes of aristocratic self-display, he ordered matching portraits showing himself and the queen for the 1575 festivities at Kenilworth, for example. According to Elizabeth Goldring, these gestured toward “a future in which Leicester is no longer an earl, but a prince consort or a king.”26 Leicester was also among the first statesmen to turn to the printing press to court “popularity,” a word that Jeffrey S. Doty shows gained traction during this period and which referred to the cultivation of popular favor and to the public pitching of political arguments.27 Straddling old and new methods of publicity, the earl relied on his extensive patronage network to circulate flattering images of himself—at times quite literally, in that some books included a portrait of the handsome aristocrat.28 Others reproduced the Dudley bear and ragged staff, an aristocratic “insignia” of the sort Jürgen Habermas associates with the “representative” publicity of pre-print culture.29

While Leicester and his older brother Ambrose, Earl of Warwick, had adopted the badge to advertise their (matrilineal) descent from the fifteenth-century Beauchamp Earls of Warwick, the badge now signaled Leicester’s official imprimatur in printed books sold to a burgeoning population of readers instead. The epistolary dedications of these books presented the earl as the embodiment of Protestant and humanist ideals; he was a man “upon whose wisedome, foresight, trustinesse, pollicie, & stoutness, God hath ordained the securitie of our most gracious soveraigne Lady, & of her Maiesties Realme and subiectes” as well as “of his owne Religion.”30 Leicester deserved promotion to the highest places not because he had the right aristocratic credentials but because he had all the right “qualities of the mind, and . . . qualities of the bodye.” Thomas Blundeville proposed others might look to the earl as a “glasse” showing these qualities, and that “those that Honors woulde atcheeve / and Counslers eke desire to bee” should take him as their model.31 Years later, Francis Bacon would affirm Blundeville’s wisdom, by advising the turbulent Earl of Essex to imitate his stepfather when addressing the queen.32

All this humanist puffery had unintended consequences, however. While the idea that Leicester’s career offered a reproducible blueprint for upward mobility was exciting to some, it proved alarming to others. The earl had in effect invited these others to discuss their reservations by going public with arguments about his own merits. Taking the cue, Leicester’s Commonwealth represents itself “a debate or conversation” about the earl, illustrating “the relationship operating between rumour, manuscript and print.”33 Although he presumably came to regret it, Leicester had initiated this conversation. Where his clients found a paragon of excellence, his critics saw “an aspiringe minde . . . tristinge after dignities, swaie and authoritie” far beyond those afforded by his place. Not only was the earl an ambitious upstart, according to these naysayers, but he was also an aging voluptuary “loste in lawless luste” and “base and filthy luxurie.”34 Leicester achieved unprecedented notoriety, becoming the most discussed member of the regime after the queen. His defenders wondered at his detractors, who found “new & strange kinds of rancor and venim (more then all the Poets from the beginning of the worlde could ever invent from the description of Envie, & the Furies themselves) wherewith to . . . empoison their most outragious slaunders, breathed out against him.”35 Because the Dudley bear and ragged staff was a frequent target, these “new & strange” attacks became identified with the sport of bearbaiting (see chapter 1).

There are, in other words, specific historical reasons that the “volumes of report” on the “doings” of the great sound like the “false, and most contrarious quest” of barking dogs to Shakespeare (Measure for Measure, 4.1.59–61), or that he developed a “strong if unconscious association between sex and publicity.”36 Shakespeare’s earliest reference to bearbaiting takes the form of a figurative assault on an earl proud of his badge; Clifford, playing on Warwick’s “rampant bear chain’d to the ragged staff,” threatens to “rend” the “bear / And tread it underfoot with all contempt, / Despite the bearard that protects the bear” (2 Henry VI, 5.1.203, 208–10). Although it lacks sexual overtones, this exchange links bearbaiting tropes to attacks on the bear and ragged staff badge, a visual symbol that Londoners would have identified with the Elizabethan Earl of Leicester. Plays like Merry Wives of Windsor and Twelfth Night exploit audience interest in such court connections in more subtle fashion, by casting their aging lovers as the bear-like objects of public scorn. In its first chapter, this book traces Shakespeare’s enduring fascination with the senex amans through Lyly’s Endymion to the Catholic exiles who first used bearbaiting tropes to portray the Elizabethan court as a hotbed of geriatric sexuality. Subsequent chapters show that Shakespeare addresses a range of timely subjects through the timeless figure of the old man in love, including the problems attendant on the succession (in Twelfth Night), the relation of Elizabeth I to the country that she governed (in the Falstaff plays), and the nature of the queen’s powers over male subjects (in Antony and Cleopatra). His lusty old men thus testify to the complicated pleasures afforded by the playwright’s exploitation of court scandal, as well as to his tendency to extend to his audiences the tools for political judgment.37

Although they participate in a “fashion,” Shakespeare’s contributions to the age-in-love tradition are distinguished by his self-consciousness about the commercial, political, and artistic implications of this figure. Metatheatrical devices underscore how the spectacle of a highly placed older man succumbing to erotic impulses produces debate among lower-placed beholders (e.g., the opening scene of Antony and Cleopatra). Insofar as this debate occurs among inferiors about superiors, and alludes to real as well as imaginary figures, it confirms that the theater is a “place of judgment,” to which “even the worste sorte of people” are admitted as “the judges of faultes there painted out,” a process that the antitheatricalist Stephen Gosson argues is “neyther lawfull nor convenient” but constitutes “a kinde of libelling, and defaming.”38 Gosson, who takes special exception to the lampooning of public figures on stage, was right; in an absolute monarchy, “private men, and subjects” had no “lawfull authoritie . . . to judge” the men that the sovereign had raised to public office.39 Yet Shakespeare shows us private subjects—including his Windsor wives—modeling such behavior repeatedly. By peddling the fantasy of calling a powerful man to “accompt . . . to see what other men could say against him,” Shakespeare embraces the democratizing functions of the theater, and positions his audiences as “adjudicating” publics, a rhetorical strategy that Peter Lake and Steven Pincus find characteristic of the emergent Post-Reformation public sphere.40

As Lake, Doty, Bruster, Paul Yachnin, Stephen Wittek, András Kisery, and others have argued, early moderns turned to the theater to satisfy cravings generated by changing modes of publicity, like the desire for “news” or for the political competence that might produce social prestige.41 Works about the court supply these cultural goods in abundance. The “new & strange” stories about Leicester were considered “news,” for example, since many believed them true (like participants in today’s internet culture, participants in early modern print culture were not always able to distinguish real from fake news). The “growing news consciousness” that marked Elizabethan culture was a top-down affair; in plays and pamphlets alike, “news” means “news at the court” (As You Like It, 1.1.97) and more specifically still news about “who’s in, who’s out” of favor at the court (King Lear, 5.3.15).42 While it privileged sexual morality and social decorum over more political concerns, the late Elizabethan conversation about court favoritism was conducted among “private persons” about the public figures who ruled them.43 Theatrical representations of lecherous old courtiers contributed to this phenomenon by inciting audiences to laughter, considered in the period a form of judgment. In the Book of the Courtier, laughter performs the same work of enforcing social norms as “praising or censuring.” Not only does Castiglione discuss how to provoke laughter, but his courtiers also express their decorous “regard for time and place” by laughing together at manifest absurdities, like the idea of “old men [in] love.”44 The judgments encouraged by the theatrical fashion for old men’s venery were not valid because they conformed to the edicts of reason, as in the Habermasian ideal of the public sphere. Rather, these were social judgments, based on commonly held criteria regarding appropriate sexual and generational behavior, which put into play emotions of shame, envy, desire, disgust, embarrassment, and resentment. By making, in Henry Wotton’s memorable phrase, “greatness very familiar, if not ridiculous,” theatrical portraits of deviant elderly courtiers also distinguished moral status and social prestige from class rank, thereby granting audiences a measure of ascendancy over their nominal betters.45

Since perceptions of Elizabeth’s favorites impinged on perceptions of her legitimacy, these scathing portraits implicated the regime as a whole. Ultimately, the target was the queen herself. A commonplace of post-Machiavellian political thought held that subjects could judge monarchs by the company they keep. Blundeville argues, for example, that if counselors “be well chosen, the Prince is judged as well of straungers as of his owne subjects to be wise and carefull of his common wealth” but “in preferring will before reason” a prince risks “rather to be called a tyrant than a Prince.”46 Such views made relations of love or friendship fraught for all monarchs, who in showing affection for one subject risked alienating others.47 A female ruler whose promotions reflected “private affection and respect, or partialitie” incurred the additional risk of confirming that women were natural tyrants who privileged “will before reason.”48 Under such conditions, Sir Philip Sidney believed that “who goes about to undermine” Leicester’s good name “resolves withal to overthrow” the queen.49 Curtis Perry’s “dream of the impersonal monarch” first appeared during Elizabeth’s reign because it gave expression to gendered longings.50 The protopublic sphere may have been politically radical and democratizing, as Doty, Kisery, Lake, and others have argued, but it was also socially conservative. It enforced gender and generational hierarchies and gave rise to the modern idea that “to be properly public required that one rise above, or set aside, one’s private interests and expressive nature.” Michael Warner’s language here points to the constitutive role that social decorum—always a gendered phenomenon—plays in framing notions of publicity. By conjuring “affects of shame and disgust” through satiric depictions of elderly courtiers devoted to queens, plays helped redefine “proper” publicity in terms of traditional masculinity.51

As a group, late Elizabethan and early Jacobean playwrights were intent on exploiting the democratizing and misogynistic implications of “age in love” figures. Where Jonson or Middleton invariably present lecherous older men as sources of ridicule, Shakespeare’s aging lovers often produce more nuanced reactions, however. The critical tradition on Falstaff or Antony bears ample witness to these characters’ ability to elicit a range of responses beyond condemnation, including powerful emotions of loss, sympathy, and identification.

One explanation for Shakespeare’s distinctive approach can be found in the network of social relationships connecting Elizabeth’s most talented subject to her favorite subject. When Jonson and Middleton began writing plays, Leicester had been dead for years; neither playwright is thus likely to have had much exposure to the queen’s elder favorite. In contrast, Shakespeare, eight years older than Jonson and sixteen years older than Middleton, came of age when Leicester was still the premier theatrical patron in the country. Leicester died in 1588, at the beginning of Shakespeare’s career as writer, when the public theater was a fledgling institution, just starting to wean itself from court patronage. The founder of the Theatre where Shakespeare’s plays were first staged, James Burbage, had been a liveried member of the earl’s famous traveling troupe, as had the clown Will Kempe. Leicester was also instrumental in putting together the Queen’s Men, the company of elite players created for Elizabeth I in 1583, which included several more of Shakespeare’s future colleagues. One scenario for Shakespeare’s “lost years” has him starting his career with either Leicester’s players or with the Queen’s Men, which needed an actor when it visited Stratford in 1587.52 Even if he did not learn his craft under the earl’s protection, as so many of his colleagues did, Shakespeare must have taken a lifelong interest in Leicester, who was the local magnate in Warwickshire. The playwright’s boyhood coincided with the earl’s long public courtship of the queen, which had culminated in the legendary 1575 entertainments at Kenilworth, near Stratford. Some biographers believe Shakespeare to have attended these entertainments, alluded to in several plays.53 Had Leicester succeeded in his matrimonial ambitions, Warwickshire as a whole might have reaped the benefit.54 If the earl’s hopes of preferment were always pinned on pleasing the queen, Shakespeare’s hopes must have at one time been pinned on pleasing the earl.

Throughout his career, the homology between theatrical artist and royal favorite gave Shakespeare a way to orient himself in relation to the extraordinary woman who ruled the country. Already in Love’s Labor’s Lost Berowne berates the “allow’d” Boyet for being “some please-man, some trencher-knight, some Dick / That smiles his cheek in years and knows the trick / To make my lady laugh when she’s disposed” (5.2.478, 464–66). The aging upstart’s gift for “jesting merrily” with the Princess of France turns her aristocratic suitor’s show to a stale “Christmas comedy” (5.2.462–77). The idea that royal favorites were usurpers of aristocratic privilege who resembled actors or jesters is not new to Shakespeare. Those who resented the queen’s men often described them in theatrical terms. Robert Naunton reproduces a classic bit of gossip from the period, for example, when he claims “Hatton came to the court . . . as a private gentleman of the Inns of Court in a masque, and for his activity and person (which was tall and proportionable) taken into the Queen’s favor.”55 When wielded by less favored subjects, the analogy to theatrical artists highlighted violations of divinely sanctioned class and gender hierarchies. Elizabeth’s alleged proclivity for handsome and entertaining men—“Daunsers . . . [who] please her delycate Eye”—made mincemeat out of traditional criteria for judging masculine excellence, installing in pride of place a lowly “vegetable” like Hatton or a consummate hypocrite like Leicester, who knew how “to play his part well and dexterously.”56 According to one observer, the queen always surrounded herself with “very tall, fine strong men . . . so that I never in my life saw their like.”57 Critics proposed that the queen’s preference for such charismatic and attractive men threatened to undermine the hierarchical order over which she presided.

The emphasis on the favorites’ theatricality reflects anxiety about the destabilizing effect of the queen’s elective powers, which Shakespeare at times shares, as do the modern critics and historians who reproduce these unflattering stereotypes about Hatton and Leicester.58 But throughout his career Shakespeare also relishes the possibility that gifted artists who brought a bit of “sport” to court, and who knew how to “please . . . the ladies” might become “made men” (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 3.1.10–12, 4.2.17–18). Louis Montrose characterizes Bottom’s experiences in A Midsummer Night’s Dream as “an outrageous theatrical realization of a personal fantasy” common among Elizabethans.59 A handful of privileged men had realized this fantasy, or so many Elizabethans believed. In addition to being the subjects of envy and slander, Hatton and Leicester were aspirational models of sorts, who had achieved what Tom MacFaul describes as the “highest point to which a subject might aspire.”60 Their careers were a major source for the dream of social mobility that haunts Elizabethan culture, and that, in Shakespeare’s works, so often takes the peculiar form of election, on the grounds of sexual merit or personal attraction, by a regal woman. Bottom, Malvolio, Falstaff, Claudius, Othello, and Antony play out (or attempt to play out) different versions of this scenario, which revises orthodox humanist fantasies about meritocracy along unorthodox sexual and gendered lines.

The homology between theatrical artists and royal favorites shapes the age-in-love figures that concern me in this book, and helps to provoke the incompatible impulses—the desire to punish and the desire to emulate—that account for the complexity of Shakespeare’s lusty old men. In a political setting, the royal favorite’s resemblance to a theatrical artist evokes negative associations, prompting retaliation, like the verbal beatings that Hatton and Leicester endured, or the stage violence visited on characters like Claudius, Falstaff, or Malvolio. In a theatrical setting, where audiences share Elizabeth’s notorious “partialitie” for amusing performances, the same likeness can also conjure the adulterating emotions of pleasure and admiration that modify colder judgments. The obloquy reserved for lecherous older men in early modern culture thus allows Shakespeare to test his own faculties of suasion, his uncanny ability to turn apparent transgression into artistic transcendence. The playwright inherited a fundamentally satiric trope from classical authors like Plautus, which been adapted by earlier Elizabethan writers to convey a critical attitude toward Elizabeth I and her court. He experimented with this received material in a range of generic modes—submitting it to the self-reflective conventions of the sonnet or to the synthesizing tendencies of tragicomedy, for example. These experiments in turn produced new perspectives on the court and on the idea of artistry. Shakespearean age-in-love figures share a tendency to suppress “simple truth” (138.8) in favor of the lies, dreams, and “rare vision[s]” (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 4.1.205) of the con artist and the artist. That these visions are often inspired by a “great fairy” (Antony and Cleopatra, 4.8.12) tells us something about the strong toil of Elizabeth I’s grace on Shakespeare’s imagination.

In taking up the topic of Shakespearean superannuated male sexuality, this book builds not just on recent scholarship about the Post-Reformation public sphere, but also on emergent interest in premodern constructions of aging, as manifested by the slew of books and essays that have appeared on the subject in the last decade. Perhaps the question of how Elizabethan subjects represented the descent into “the vale of years” (Othello, 3.3.266) has remained unexplored until recently because, as Keith Thomas puts it, “of all divisions in human society, those based on age appear the most natural and the least subject to historical change.” Thomas goes on to argue that this appearance blinds us to the variant cultural meanings attached to aging. Tudor society was organized along the gerontocratic premise that old men should rule and young men should serve; at all levels, from parish to playhouse to palace, age and seniority helped determine rank.61 This arrangement reflected the common belief in older men’s superior powers of discernment and self-government.62 An extensive discourse, which drew on classical works like Cicero’s Cato Maior: De Senectute, elaborated on the gerontocratic ideal, legitimating the authority of elders by reference to their acquisition of the qualities necessary to governance, including “counsaile, wisedome, authoritie and pollicie.”63 Since good health and long life were considered the product of good judgment, moderation and self-regulation, Cicero argued, reaching a certain age constituted in and of itself a credential for authoritative office.64 Such beliefs explain the preponderance of elderly counselors in plays, like Hamlet’s Polonius or Coriolanus’s Meninius. Still, the benefits that older men enjoyed were contingent on their ability to retain control over themselves and over their material circumstances. The most privileged class had arrived at the first stage or onset of old age, sometimes described as the “green and spirited” old age, a category which overlaps with our notion of the middle-aged, and to which all of Shakespeare’s aging lovers, with the possible exception of Falstaff, belong.65 The positive valuations of the elderly were also offset by ancient prejudices inherited from the warrior societies of the past, which placed a high value on the physical abilities of hale male bodies.66 Such factors have led scholars like Thomas, Nina Taunton, Christopher Martin, Philip Collington, and Anthony Ellis to find that Tudor society was beset by a “paradox of old age,” in which the idealizing constructions of official discourses conflicted with actual practices, or with “gerontophobic” representations in poetry and drama.67

Although they might appear gerontophobic, the satiric representations of lecherous older men that concern me in this book enforce behavior consistent with gerontocratic ideals.68 Considerations of age determined what constituted natural behavior, shaped perceptions about gender and sexuality, and influenced relations among individuals. Alexandra Shephard calls attention to this often ignored “generational dimension of patriarchy,” arguing that age was a key determinant of masculine status and privilege.69 As Shakespeare’s Rosalind reminds us, “boys and women” were considered “for the most part cattle of” the same “color.” Rosalind’s metaphor is revealing: “changeable, effeminate . . . inconstant,” lacking control over their bodies and the ability to regulate their emotions, boys were like women and domestic animals in requiring the supervision of adult males (As You Like It, 4.4.410–14). Under such conditions, full manhood was “a distinct phase in life,” not a condition enjoyed by all men at all times. One corollary is that “patriarchal imperatives . . . constituted attempts to discipline and order men as well as women.”70 The proscription on sex after a certain age protected the privileged category of the older man by defining appropriate conduct. Given that “the race and course of age is certayne,” men should observe a decorous progression: “For even as weakenes and infirmytie is incident to yonge Chyldren, a lustinynes and braverie to younge men, and a gravitye when they come to rype years; soe lykewyse the maturitye or rypenes of old age, hathe a certain speciall gifte, geeven and attrybuted to it by nature, which oughte not to bee neglected, but to bee taken in hys due tyme and season when it cometh.”71 For a mature man to take the role of the lover constituted an unnatural regression, which would return him to the effeminate condition of the boy, or reduce him to the state of a domesticated animal (sheep, asses, black rams, Barbary horses, and Bartholomew boar-pigs, to name a few relevant examples).72

Having waited to attain the perfection of full manhood, older men had to guard against aspects of aging to maintain it. Aging was considered a cooling process, in which “the natural heat, which is the source of the body’s vitality, gradually diminished, consuming the natural moisture.”73 Insofar as this cooling meant that men—and women—became less subject to animal passions, it heightened their capacity for judgment and wisdom; according to the French physician Laurent Joubert, “youthful fury has run its course” in the old man, making him “wiser and more prudent.”74 Castiglione deems “old men” better equipped to transcend sensual desire and experience spiritual love than young men on similar grounds.75 According to Hamlet, even women might benefit from the cooling effects of aging; “at your age,” he tells Gertrude, “The hey-day of the blood is tame, it’s humble / And waits upon the judgment” (3.5.68–70). Although the attrition of vital heat helped cooler heads prevail, if left unchecked, it became a source of concern for men because it threatened to make them like women and children.76 Cicero, a major proponent of the virtues of aging, stresses the need to conserve “the memorie and reasonable parte of man, whyche is the mind,” comparing it to “a Lampe, if to muche oyle bee infused into it, burnethe not brightly . . . soe likewise the mind is a like dulled & blunted, when the body is either overcharged wyth syperabooundance and surfette.”77 Sexual “surfette” was treacherous because it expended vital heat in vain. Older men were sometimes believed incapable of engendering sons, one reason perhaps that the sonnet speaker emphasizes the futility of his desire in Sonnet 138.

Although medical authorities disagreed about many aspects of senility, they agreed that sexual activity hastened its advent, a correlation conveyed through the word “dotage.”78 The destabilizing effects of erotic desire compounded that of advancing years, so that frequent sex might turn even young men old: “whoredome . . . dimmeth the sight, it impaireth the hearing . . . it exhausteth the marow, consumeth the radicall moysture and supplement of the body, it riveleth the face” and “induceth olde age.”79 Treatise after treatise urged men to delay senility by refraining from “immoderate venerie,” which “hastneth on old age and death.” For “an olde man to fall to carnal copulacion,” one treatise claimed, meant “he doth kill a man, for he doth kill him selfe.”80 Cicero counseled men who wished to age gracefully not to “go against nature” lest they precipitate their decrepitude or demise; “let us therefore bid adieu to al such youthly prankes,” he proposes, which belong to “lustye and greene headed Gallantes . . . agitated and pricked with the fervent heate of unadvised adolescencye.”81 When Shakespeare’s aging males play the parts of untutored youths or young gallants, their language echoes the philosophical and medical discourses that policed senescent sexuality.

Superannuated lovers were an affront not just to nature, but also to society. Cicero supplements his allusions to natural cycles with theatrical metaphors, which signal a violation of social decorum, a refusal to “handle and playe” the “parte” appropriate to one’s age.82 Castiglione shares this preoccupation with age as a problem of decorum, devoting many passages to the question of how older men ought to behave. There is something unseemly about owning to sexual desire after the “young affects” had become “defunct,” as Shakespeare’s Othello acknowledges (Othello, 1.3.263–64). In his scene of judgment, Othello is primarily concerned with refuting implications of sexual incontinence, and for good reason.83 Premodern decorum insisted on rigid protocols of age-appropriate behavior. Aging men had to maintain what Thomas calls “a dignified exterior” at all times, which meant avoiding “sexual competition with younger men. Lust in the elderly was an infallible occasion for ridicule and censure.”84 This condemnation recurs in all types of premodern works, from ballads, proverbs, epigrams, poems, and plays to scientific, philosophical, and moral treatises. The age limit beyond which carnal desires became suspect for men was low, moreover. Barthomolaeus Anglicus thought the proper time to father children was before age thirty-five, Sir Thomas Wyatt said his farewell to love before dying at age thirty-nine, and Petrarch placed himself at age forty in the tradition of the puer centum annorum, or the hundred-years-old boy, whose “most notable folly . . . was his desire to continue to have love affairs.”85 Since age was thought about in relative rather than absolute terms and sexual incontinence accelerated the processes of aging, the context of an active sexuality produced especially low chronological tresholds for categorizing men as old.

Even the fear of being cuckolded—a defining emotion for many Shakespearean males, including the sonnet speaker, Othello, and Antony—reflects anxieties about age-related social judgments, since cuckoldry was an experience to which older men were prone.86 Joubert argues against the notion that old men could not bear sons to defend couples constituted of a young wife and an elderly husband from charges of cuckoldry and adultery. Although he notes that the wife’s reputation suffered in these situations, Joubert focuses on beliefs about the aging husband’s sexuality, the provoking offense.87 Mark Breitenberg views the premodern obsession with cuckolding as a sign of patriarchal “regulation and scrutiny of women’s sexuality.”88 This obsession also reflects a perceived need to regulate the behavior of aging males. By insisting that a young wife will turn to an age-appropriate lover, cuckolding scenarios imaginatively restore a natural, moral, and social order that the old husband’s lust has violated. Such scenarios are a mainstay of classical and medieval literature, where the senex amans is an old husband who arrogates (or tries to arrogate) a desirable young woman to himself, as Chaucer’s January does. Older husbands with young wives usurped a role that society had reserved for younger men—they did not restrict themselves to their proper “parte.” Long before Shakespeare’s aging speaker imagines himself playing the role of an “untutor’d youth” in an erotic triangle with an unchaste woman and a younger man, this behavior had been established as unacceptable, inviting all manner of retaliation, including the ridicule meted out in the fabliau tradition, the shaming enacted by charivaris, or the public disgrace that followed on accusations of cuckoldry.89

Although Shakespeare’s theatrical representations of the senex amans diverge in telling ways from the traditional May-December marriage plot—Malvolio and Falstaff are bachelors, Claudius and Antony choose age-appropriate partners—they retain the emphasis on senescent male sexuality as a theatrical usurpation of youthful prerogative, a form of social transgression that incites public punishment.90 This censorious attitude reflects the gerontocratic orientation of premodern society. If old age “hath in it so greate aucthoritye, that it is muche more to bee esteemed and is farre moore woorthe, then all the vaine pleasures of headye and rashe Adolescency,” for an older man to behave like a young one amounts to a form of madness—a point taken up in some detail by Twelfth Night. Of course, some older men did give into “beastly, savage, and furious” lust, rather than give it up, as Cicero advised them to; actual behavior does not necessarily conform to prescriptive ideals, or there would be no need for such ideals.91 Under normal circumstances, however, these men had little reason to expect that their sexual activity would lead to rewards other than momentary pleasure and they had every reason to expect that it would bring disastrous consequences, ranging from diminished social status to failing health to premature death. The older man wishing to indulge in the “expense of spirit” did indeed bring “a waste of shame” on himself (Sonnet 129.1), as Falstaff, Malvolio, and Antony find out.

The last two decades of Elizabeth’s reign suspended these normal circumstances for the most visible and privileged men in the country. Her courtiers’ abdication of conventional gender and generational roles had brought them what Hatton called the “singular blessings and benefits” normally associated with conformity to these roles—titles, land, high office, vast influence, great political authority.92 In a remarkable 1572 letter advising Hatton to diverge from traditional masculine behavior, the courtier Edmund Dyer urged his friend “to consider with whom you have to deal, and what we be towards her; who though she do descend very much in her sex as a woman, yet we may not forget her place, and the nature of it as our Sovereign.”93 Leicester and Hatton took advice like this to heart, compromising on their “place” first as men and then as older men—delaying or forgoing marriage or remarriage, failing to produce heirs, playing the role of the lover—to accommodate Elizabeth’s contradictory “place” as woman and sovereign.

That this unorthodox strategy proved successful challenged what Charles Taylor calls “the social imaginary”: “the ways in which people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others . . . the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations.”94 Indeed, the singular virulence of anti-Leicestrian discourses—as D. C. Peck notes, “other counsellors were slandered but with nothing like the same enthusiasm, imagination, and perseverance”—suggests that the earl’s continued hold on Elizabeth provoked more public concern than did that of younger men like Ralegh or Essex.95 Like the man who dresses in women’s clothes, the older man who plays the merry gallant disturbs sanctioned hierarchies by descending from a privileged “place” to a less privileged one. Shakespeare’s sonnet speaker acknowledges as much when he places himself structurally on par with an unchaste woman. His self-awareness reminds us that deviance, viewed from a certain angle, can become defiance, and apparent futility a kind of triumph. Through its oscillations in meaning, Sonnet 138 executes a precarious balancing act, simultaneously condemning and celebrating its speaker’s unorthodox sexuality. As such, it forms the perfect introduction to Shakespeare’s fascination with the fraught figure of the old man in love, inspired in part by the Elizabethan court’s experimentation with gendered and generational roles.

In highlighting the influence on Shakespeare of the “great Planets” who orbited the monarchical moon, this book supplements historicist readings of Shakespeare that focus on what Susan Frye calls “the power struggle for the meanings surrounding the queen’s female body.”96 This approach, which derives from the work of Stephen Greenblatt and Louis Montrose, has dominated accounts of the queen’s impact on literary phenomena for three decades and highlights the anxiety and resistance that Elizabeth I provoked in her male subjects. Montrose’s assertion that the queen’s “pervasive cultural presence” was a “condition” of the imaginative possibilities explored by Elizabethan writers remains an enabling one, on which I premise my argument.97 But I agree with Katherine Eggert that the new historical emphasis on masculine anxiety sometimes results in reductive readings, in which Elizabeth’s “queenly influence” is met with “either authorial resistance” (good) or “authorial capitulation” (bad).98 Elizabeth did not just cause “anxieties about male privilege up and down the line.”99 She also prompted some men to experiment with unconventional ways of extending their level of privilege. Like the Renaissance lyrics examined by Catherine Bates, the drama abounds in “figures who appear by choice to defy the period’s model of a phallic, masterly,” and rational “masculinity.”100 The fact that these characters expect their deviance to result in social, political, or even spiritual reward can be attributed to Elizabeth’s queenship, which unleashed radical possibilities that we have yet fully to investigate. The negative views of Elizabeth’s effect on the men around her prevail because of a critical preference for one kind of evidence over another: the scorn of the queen’s detractors over the praise of her panegyrists, the career of the Earl of Essex over that of the Earl of Leicester, Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream over his Antony and Cleopatra. Indeed, the high value that new historicists place on political dissidence often aligns their arguments with the perspectives of the queen’s disgruntled male subjects at the risk of extending the “venerable tradition of misogyny” that Montrose identifies as a dominant mode of opposition to Elizabeth.101

By returning men like Hatton and Leicester to their place in the story, I aim to highlight evidence of innovative cooperation between the queen and her male subjects instead. Judging by the characters I examine in this book, this cooperation sometimes strikes Shakespeare as a form of collusion and sometimes as a form of collaboration. A compromised figure, “age in love” is also a figure of compromise, valued by Shakespeare for the ability to find a midway between extremes. Shakespeare’s lusty old men are all go-betweens: the sonnet speaker has one foot in the theater and one in court, Falstaff one in court and one in the tavern, Antony one in Egypt and one in Rome. The nuanced perspective afforded by these characters enables Shakespeare to move beyond the extremes of praise and blame endemic to early modern (and modern) discourses about Elizabeth I, to consider instead the emotional and aesthetic responses that the queen inspired. Writing about A Midsummer Night’s Dream’s investment in art’s “utopian potential,” Hugh Grady contrasts the critical view of the play as “performing local and power-accommodating work in deference to the Queen” to his own. These are not mutually exclusive propositions; the same queen who prompted Shakespeare to “power-accommodating work” inspired his utopian fantasies.102 To go from Bottom to Antony, as I do in this book, is to chart the gradual elevation of the age-in-love figure in Shakespeare’s canon, an elevation that I argue reflects his growing appreciation of the Elizabethan court.

Throughout this introduction, I have used words like “debate” and “conversation” to highlight a fundamental premise of my argument, namely that Shakespeare’s view of public figures is always in dialogue with that of others. Crucial among these is Lyly, who had a gift for the kind of diffuse political allegory that encourages speculation and discourages reprisals.103 Maurice Hunt argues Lyly’s court comedies “provide the only sustained dramatic precedent for Shakespeare’s critique of Queen Elizabeth by means of allegorical mirror images.”104 While “critique” does not convey the range of perspectives on Elizabeth examined in this book, I share Hunt’s conviction regarding the centrality of Lyly’s influence on Shakespeare. An acknowledged source for Midsummer Night’s Dream and Merry Wives of Windsor, Endymion sets a theatrical precedent for all the lecherous old men that concern me, which is why my first chapter focuses on it.105 Shakespeare learned from this play how to fuse real and fictional figures, thereby inspiring what the prologue to Endymion calls “pastimes,” a word that links what we refer to as the topical component of plays to other pleasures afforded by the theater.106 As Lyly reminds us, allusions to political persons, events, or patterns do not necessarily reflect the writer’s desire to align himself with certain factions, criticize certain policies, or intervene in public affairs. They also have entertainment value. Eager for the “journalistic news and topical comment” purveyed by plays, London audiences enjoyed playing at politics.107 For the price of admission to the theater, even the disenfranchised might become knowledgeable consumers of political material, who “voted on what they liked or did not like.”108 In Bartholomew Fair (1614), Jonson’s mocking scrivener draws up “Articles of Agreement” between spectators and authors that describe applause as a form of “suffrage.” While granting spectators “their free will of censure,” he also tries to prevent “any state decipherer or politic picklock” from searching out “who was meant” by various characters.109 As this caveat—or is it an invitation?—suggests, early moderns tended to read “plays . . . analogically, often ‘applying’ quite exotic fictions to contemporary persons and events.”110 Playwrights may have had incentive to provide grist for their audience’s interpretative mill, but catering to a taste for “pastimes” was risky, as Jonson and Thomas Nashe found out when their provocatively entitled Isle of Dogs (1597) led to Jonson’s imprisonment.111 In the aftermath of this affair, the Privy Council ordered “the common playhouses” struck down because of “lewd matters that are handled on the stages.”112 Although this order was never enforced, the council pursued a policy of tighter control over performances in the late 1590s, with “mixed success” and perhaps mixed motives.113 Writers for the public theaters had ample reason to balance the commercial value of staging politically loaded material against the risk of offending their courtly patrons. Lyly’s veiled allegories offered a model for attaining such a balance, which accounts for their enduring popularity with Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights. Shakespeare, Jonson, and Middleton all recycle materials from Lyly’s plays, including a bit of stage business from Endymion, in which a male favorite collapses on stage before his lady. This tantalizing pattern ran afoul of authorities only when Jonson abandoned the normal caution and made the lady “Elizabeth I” and not “Cynthia,” “Gloriana,” “Titania,” “Cleopatra,” or an unnamed fairy queen.114

Shakespeareans are often reluctant to allow “pastimes,” because they believe censorship prevented playwrights from referring to specific persons or they are wary of following the “inglorious” path of forebears like N. J. Halpin, whose ham-fisted “equating of dramatic characters with historical personages” has not aged well.115 Although this reluctance originates in mid-twentieth-century formalist approaches to literature, which sought to establish the timeless nature of Shakespeare’s work by purging its timeliness, it has persisted even in the wake of the new historicism.116 Taking David Bevington’s cue, historicist critics prefer to find evidence of “ideas or platforms”—or, nowadays, political ideologies and discursive practices—in Shakespeare’s plays over references to “personalities.”117 While few critics would, after Leah Marcus and Louis Montrose, contend that a Titania or a Joan offer no comment on Elizabeth I, many continue to approach the idea that Shakespeare’s plays glance at public figures other than Elizabeth with suspicion.118 Even Matthew Steggle, who argues that theatrical “personation . . . was a point of contention” throughout the period, cites critical consensus to exclude Shakespeare’s plays from consideration.119

This resistance is rooted in values that have little to do with early modern politics, in which platforms or positions were invariably tied to personalities (as, for example, a radical Protestant agenda or an interventionist policy in the Netherlands was tied to Leicester). Nor does it reflect what we know about Renaissance aesthetics. Given that Jonson set himself the task to write plays “near and familiarly allied to the time,” his famous praise of Shakespeare as “not of an age, but for all time,” which continues to exert undue influence over Shakespeare’s literary reputation, may have been tinged with irony.120 Certainly Hamlet, who commends players for being “abstract and brief chronicles of the time,” shares in Jonson’s theatrical values; his warning to Polonius that the “ill report” of players should be avoided “while you live” (2.2.526) identifies court figures as proper targets for satiric representation on stage. Not surprisingly, the clearest statement of anxiety about theatrical personation in the period is from a high-ranking member of the court, Elizabeth’s last favorite, the disgraced Earl of Essex, who worried in 1600 that “they shall play me in what forms they list upon the stage.”121 The earl’s anxieties were well-founded. The representation of actual “gentlemen of good desert and quality that are yet alive under obscure manner” did occur.122 If Jonson denounces the allegorical readings of “narrow-eyed decipherers,” he also provides them with plentiful fodder for speculation.123

In this introduction as in the rest of this book, I draw on the early modern vocabulary for describing the timely content of plays, because this vocabulary helps to elucidate the nature and function of theatrical allusions. Richard Dutton sensibly proposes that the problem with most topical readings is that they insist on too precise a correspondence, when theatrical analogies were “incomplete, titillatingly so.”124 As his adverb indicates, ambiguous allusions to contemporary persons have a stimulating effect on audiences, then as now. While Téa Leoni’s character in the television show Madam Secretary is not Hillary Clinton, she confronts similar situations, prompting comparisons to her historical counterpart. These comparisons are integral to the pleasure we experience in watching the show, a pleasure fundamentally cognitive in nature. When, as happened during the 2017 season of Madam Secretary or the 1624 run of A Game at Chess, an actual figure takes offense at a fictional representation, the relationship between the two may be more one of identity. The early modern “personate” implies such a one-on-one correspondence between fictional character and historical person. Other expressions, like “sport,” “device,” “glance,” and “pastime” suggest more complicated processes are at work, however. The verb “glance,” for example, means “to strike obliquely,” to “pass by without touching,” or “to allude or refer to obliquely or in passing, usually by way of censure or satire; to hit at, reflect upon.”125 “Glance” conveys an almost imperceptible touch (as opposed to a heavy-handed identification), a skewed perspective, and motivations that range from playfulness to aggression. An inferior discussing a superior in public might only “glance” for fear of repercussions; so Shakespeare’s Adriana “in company often glanced” at her husband’s abusive behavior (Comedy of Errors, 5.1.66).

As this example suggests, early modern expressions for personal allusions emphasize a social dimension and consider their effect on real or imagined audiences (Adriana’s “company”), including those constituted by authorities. When glancing at persons in an “obscure fashion,” playwrights eager to avoid repercussions could apply principles of selection or concentration, thus making what Hamlet calls an “abstract.” They could also fragment their target into multiple “forms,” to use Essex’s locution, or conflate several different targets into one form. Hamlet describes Luciano in the Murder of Gonzago not as brother to the murdered king but as nephew to the king (3.2.244): a reflection of Claudius’s past actions, of Hamlet’s future actions, and of the incestuous and murderous practices of the Danish court more generally. Hamlet can assert that the play contains no offense because it is not a perfect match for his intentions or for Claudius’s crimes—ultimately, like all plays using glancing allusions, it allows its author to claim that “it touches us not” (3.2.242).126 Glancing allusions are a form of “functional ambiguity,” to borrow Annabel Patterson’s phrase; they capitalize on the arousing effects of timely content while avoiding “directly provoking or confronting the authorities.”127

Such allusions also encourage audiences to bring anterior knowledge to bear on matters set before them by the play. No matter what topic they point to, extratextual references stimulate an audience’s cognitive functions, including those involving memory, asking members to participate in the play. References to analogic interpretation as a “sport” or “pastime”—the bearbaiting trope comes to mind, as we will see—suggest that such participation provided playgoers with an extra measure of pleasure. Like Castiglione’s courtiers, whose ambiguous references to real persons provoke knowing laughter, playgoers express a shared understanding of proper regard for “time and place” when laughing. Positioned as competent interpreters, auditors can speculate about a range of possibilities and collaborate in the construal of meanings.128 Where a one-one correspondence asks the audience to accept a playwright’s criticism or praise of a historical figure, a more diffuse resemblance prompts comparative thinking; weighing how a particular character both is and is not like that public figure, audience members learn to form judgments of their own. Hamlet, eager to secure a judgment of Claudius, does not have his actors play the murder of his father. Instead, he has them play “something like the murther of my father” (2.2.595). The relationship between Shakespeare’s age-in-love figures and actual Elizabethan courtiers also tends to be one of evocative likeness, the “fat meat” (2 Henry IV, epilogue, 27) on which such speculative judgment feeds, rather than absolute identity, food only for censorship.

When glancing references provoke communal “sport” or collective laughter, audiences are transformed into publics, joined together not just by shared emotions and experiences in the theater but also by the shared cultural memories that produce those emotions and experiences. As Marvin Carlson puts it, when we laugh at theatrical parody “the parallel response by our fellow audience members is evidence that they share our memory of the material whose comic iteration we are witnessing.”129 Carlson’s emphasis on evidence indicates that participating in a theatrical public involves both feeling together and thinking together. What he calls the “memory machine” aspect of the theater, especially powerful in repertory theatres with continuity in personnel and audiences like Shakespeare’s, replicates in theatrical terms the reflexive “circulation of texts among strangers” over time that Michael Warner argues constitutes publics.130 For Warner public-making is a print-based phenomenon. As his emphasis on reflexivity suggests, however, human memory plays a fundamental role in linking texts over time. The theatrical “fashion” for “age in love” drew on printed pamphlets and books, and it drew on theatrical and cultural performances, prompting audiences to remember these varied “texts” and to compare them to one another, thus generating the common ground that brought them together as a public. Shakespeare’s uncanny survival as an artist may derive from his ability to secure an enduring public by reproducing these effects within his own canon. When modern audiences watch Falstaff, they might catch a glimpse of Bottom’s ghost, especially if the same actor has played both parts (as Will Kempe likely did). Early modern playgoers had a far richer series of predecessors to draw on, from plays, pamphlets, poems, and other sources. By reconstructing this context, I hope to shed light on how Shakespeare transformed timely material into timeless art.

The Earl of Leicester is a key figure in this book because he embodied a pattern of courtly behavior (of the erotic and upwardly mobile variety) for his contemporaries, who left an extensive written record of their reactions to him.131 By the time Shakespeare joined in the debate about royal favoritism, both Leicester and Hatton had died. Leicester had made such an impact on the collective memory, however, that the “new” and “strange” conversation about him continued unabated long after his death. Shakespeare’s attraction to these haunting and haunted materials reflects his interest in afterlives—in what makes certain events, patterns, or individuals so memorable that they earn “a place i’ th’ story” (Antony and Cleopatra, 3.13.46).

By remembering the extraordinary performances of the queen’s suitors, Shakespeare’s plays capitalize on their audience’s conscious and unconscious associations for a variety of purposes. While we cannot know with certainty whom the playwright meant to catch with his “unsavory similes” (1 Henry IV, 1.2.79), it is possible to speculate responsibly about how these worked, especially given the metatheatrical moments that guide interpretation. Shakespeare’s allusions often work in unexpected ways. They do not plead on behalf of a particular court faction or promote a particular political agenda so much as they encourage an expanded and expanding public to laugh, to take pleasure in reflecting on the Elizabethan regime, or to think through the ramifications of new modes of publicity. Taken together, the plays that concern me in this book also constitute Shakespeare’s career-long meditation on the memorializing functions of the theater, a process that endows past individuals with a kind of secular immortality. While no eyewitness report testifies to the validity of connections that I make, three generations of playwrights reproduce a set of interlinked patterns with remarkable consistency. If I worry at times that I am becoming too much like Jonson’s “narrow-eyed decipherers,” I am comforted by the fact that I am in good company, since Shakespeare read Lyly’s age-in-love tropes analogically and Middleton read Shakespeare’s that way.

Chapter 1 sets the stage for the rest of the book by situating the senex amans in the context of the Elizabethan court, where it came to accumulate the culturally specific meanings on which Shakespeare later drew. I examine the ways in which Elizabeth I’s approach to rule caused her favorites to deviate from normative standards of behavior, thereby triggering unprecedented public concern. Opposition tracts like Leicester’s Commonwealth and Cardinal Allen’s Admonition to the Nobility and People of England and Ireland (1588) exploited these anxieties by depicting the queen’s favorites as threatening, buffoonish, or animalistic figures. I propose that the scandal to which Lyly’s Endymion refers is the crisis of publicity that ensued on the circulation of these slanderous materials to a broad public. Leicester in particular became subject to “all vulgar relations” and to the “libels” generated by “men in passion and discontent.”132 These attacks on the earl alarmed members of Elizabethan government, who felt that they compromised the regime as a whole. Where other critics contend that Endymion either praises or criticizes the queen, I argue that Lyly’s “tale of the Man in the Moon” responds to “libels” about Elizabeth’s courtiers, and that its main focus is on their behavior, which it aims to reform through its didactic portrayal of old men in love. Lyly’s theatrical treatment of senescent male sexuality proved influential; despite their divergent approaches and affiliations, later playwrights and pamphleteers all present “old men lustful” as theatrical creatures, who in “show[ing] like young men” threaten normative values.133 They also associate generational violations with other forms of usurpation, including that of class privilege and of monarchical authority.

Shakespeare’s amorous older men dominated the public stage for over a decade after the publication of Endymion. In the second chapter, “Falstaff among the Minions of the Moon,” I argue that Hal’s favorite knight offers a provocative reflection of Elizabeth’s favorite knights. My argument is rooted in posthumous descriptions of Leicester, who died in 1588, but had achieved a kind of cultural immortality. By repurposing key aspects of anti-Leicestrian materials, Shakespeare endows his fat favorite with the haunting qualities that have ensured his survival over the centuries. Of particular significance to the characterization of Falstaff are satiric depictions of the earl as a bear baited for his lechery. Although the baiting pattern is consistent across the three plays that feature Falstaff, it is most explicit in The Merry Wives of Windsor, where Shakespeare is uninhibited in his solicitation of “pastimes.” The established connections among the queen, her aging favorite, and the theater also help Shakespeare make the lecherous old man a device for situating his plays in relation to the Elizabethan court. By encouraging comparative analysis, the Falstaff plays urge audiences to make political and aesthetic judgments, and thus to usurp the sovereign’s position.

The third chapter argues that Falstaff’s ghost haunts Twelfth Night. In this late comedy, Shakespeare experiments with the same materials in a different generic register, reflecting in the process on the consequences of the fat man’s success. Multiple allusions to Endymion, the Falstaff plays, Ben Jonson’s satirical comedies, and Sir John Harington’s A New Discourse on a Stale Subject, or the Metamorphosis of Ajax (1596) establish Twelfth Night’s preoccupation with “th’unmuzzled thoughts” (3.1.118) of satirists. While Twelfth Night participates in the discursive processes it examines, it also records misgivings about doing so. The play strains against the conventions of satire by giving us a surfeit of amorous old men; where the portrayal of Malvolio accords with popular forms of anticourt satire, Shakespeare offers an emended portrait of the amans senex in Orsino. A new Endymion, Orsino embodies the generative and artistic potential of this protean figure by his nostalgic aestheticism.

The concluding chapter draws on preceding chapters to reconsider the relation between Antony and Cleopatra and the court of Elizabeth I. Although Antony is not often considered in the company of the other lecherous old drunks I examine, he is made of the same stuff. I propose that Antony and Cleopatra is a kind of eulogy in dramatic form, which conjures present emotions in an effort to intervene in cultural narratives about the transformative effect of queens on men. While Shakespeare hews to the facts in Plutarch’s “The Life of Marcus Antonius,” he does not encourage the conventional contemptuous attitude toward those facts. His Romans echo the antigovernment propaganda of the 1580s and 90s in finding that their general’s “dotage o’erflows the measure” (1.1.1) and in characterizing the queen he loves as witchlike, but the play itself pushes us to more complicated and emotional reactions to its central characters. The nobility of Shakespeare’s “mutual pair” (1.1.37)—upheld if the play is felt to be a tragedy and the protagonists deserving of the elevation that tragic status implies—counters prevalent attitudes toward gender, aging, and sexuality. Four years after Elizabeth’s death, defect had begun to look a lot like perfection to Shakespeare.