Charney Maurice - Wrinkled Deep in Time Aging in Shakespeare

There is a certain autobiographical element in this project. In the past I have written on Shakespeares Roman plays (especially the presentational imagery), two books on the style and fictionality of Hamlet, a study of Titus Andronicus, a comprehensive account of all of Shakespeare, and an investigation of love and lust in Shakespeare. Yet I have never dared to broach the formidable topic of aging in Shakespeare. However, now that I am approaching Lears age, I am embarking on a study that fills me with trepidation. My perspective has changed considerably from my undergraduate years at Harvard, when I devoured the notes in the sixteen plays that George Lyman Kittredge closely annotated, and when I was thrilled by Maurice Schwartzs rendition of King Lear in Yiddish at the theater on Second Avenue in New York, which elicited copious weeping from the audience.

It seems to me now that Shakespeare was preoccupied with issues of aging that must have had an acute relation to his own sense of growing old. Many of the old men and women in Shakespeares works are foolish in their intemperance and in their claim not to have changed from what they were in the pastin other words, in their refusal to acknowledge the ravages of time. Some are reverting to second childhood, like King Lear, or senility, like Polonius. But there is also a positive sense that with the accumulation of experience comes wisdom and fortitude. Falstaff is a type of ideal figure who tries to maintain the illusion of a youthful old age, at least in the Henry IV plays. And Duke Senior and Old Adam in As You Like It approach a pastoral ideal of the Golden Age. Although the time when old age sets in may differ in the twenty-first century from the early onset of old age in Shakespeares lifetime, the infirmities remain pretty much the same as they were four hundred years ago.

Jaquess Seven Ages of Man speech in As You Like It (2.7.13966) is a fairly standard set piece. Seven is a common division, although the number could vary according to the seasons, the astrological signs, the hours, and so forth. The ages of man were often represented graphically. Jaquess speech is unusually satiric and dismissive in tone, as if no age is the right one. Old age seems to begin with the lean and slippered pantaloon, the Pantalone character from the Italian commedia dellarte,

With spectacles on nose and pouch on side;

His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide

For his shrunk shank, and his big manly voice,

Turning again toward childish treble, pipes

And whistles in his [its] sound. (15963)

This is the enfeebled old man, like Polonius in Hamlet and Nestor in Troilus and Cressida. The seventh age, representing total decrepitude,

Is second childishness and mere [total] oblivion,

Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything. (16566)

The French sans, meaning without, is part of Jaquess affected style, effectively mocked by Rosaline in Loves Labors Lost when Berowne uses the word in his apology: Sans sans, I pray you (5.2.417).

The ages of man theme also appears in the song Feste sings at the end of Twelfth Night:

When that I was and a little tiny boy

With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,

A foolish thing was but a toy [trifle],

For the rain it raineth every day. (5.1.39194)

The wind and the rain indicate the inevitable passage of time, specifically time the destroyer, as in the Sonnets. The next to last stanza of Festes song evokes a melancholy old age similar to that of Jaques:

But when I came unto my beds,

With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,

With tosspots [drunkards] still had drunken heads,

For the rain it raineth every day. (4036)

The drunkenness is a sign of despair as the Clown nears death.

The last stanza posits an endless progression of time since the world began. It serves the standard function of an epilogue to appeal to the audience for applause:

A great while ago the world begun,

Hey, ho, the wind and the rain;

But thats all one, our play is done,

And well strive to please you every day. (40710)

It is interesting that Festes song from Twelfth Night is adapted by the Fool in King Lear, occurring just before the king enters the hovel on the blasted heath:

He that has and a little tiny wit,

With heigh-ho, the wind and the rain,

Must make content with his fortunes fit,

Though the rain it raineth every day. (3.2.7477)

The wind and the rain represent the adversities of time as it wears everything down. The old man in Shakespeare is a victim of the wind and the rain in this metaphorical sense.

How old is old in Shakespeare? Cleopatra, who is clearly not old by contemporary standards, says that she is with Phoebus amorous pinches black / And wrinkled deep in time (Antony and Cleopatra, 1.5.2829). The historical Cleopatra was married to Antony in 36 B.C. and died in 30 B.C., aged thirty-nine. Shakespeare makes no reference to these dates, but in the play Cleopatra is thought to be in her late thirtieshardly old in the twenty-first centuryalthough she was nearing the end of her child-bearing years, which was one of the markers of old age for a woman in Shakespeares time.