Age in Love - 9781496207593

Age in LoveShakespeare and the Elizabethan Court\nAuthor(s): Jacqueline Vanhoutte\nFormat: Hardback\nPublisher: University of Nebraska Press, United States\nImprint: University of Nebraska Press\nISBN-13: 9781496207593, 978-1496207593\nSynopsis\nThe 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 buttsand tragic heroes-Shakespeares old-men-in-love turn in boundary-blurring performances that probe the gendered and gene.