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ABSTRACT
The notion of an archetypal struggle between "the young" and "the old" has dominated the critical discussion of Lear's age in Shakespeare's tragedy. This essay argues instead that such transhistorical binary constructions have obscured how King Lear presents Lears age as a contested space subject to specific, conflicting cultural definitions. Disparate representations of the life cycle, evident in early modern taxonomies of age, give Goneril and Regan the tools to recast Lear as a man in his second childhood or dotage, and thus to deny him the still powerful role he seeks to adopt as a figure in his "green old age." This framing of Lear and other older men in the play shows how an old man's physical decay might become a political fact before it was a biological one. The essay claims that King Lear-along with a handful of other plays by Shakespeare from the late 1590s to the early 1600s-reveals how vulnerable patriarchal authority could be in early modern England when older men were defined and classified in ways that disempowered them.
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What does it mean to call King Lear old? Recent studies prompt this question, arguing that critical treatments of King Lear (1605-1606) and old age have gone astray. Helen Small claims that "Remarkably little of the vast literature on King Lear . . . says much or anything about old age" (5), while Hester Lees-Jeffries notes that "Lear's age has been thoroughly . . . discussed" but "not always usefully" (733). Christopher Martin, in turn, points to a "reluctance to engage what the play has to say precisely about the experience of senescence," and thus, "Almost paradoxically, the question of age goes begging through a largely uncharted landscape" (139). These critiques reflect changing ideas about how old age and the life cycle might have been understood in early modern England. Yet gauging what makes one approach to this topic useful, and another less so, is no simple matter. Any emphasis on one aspect of age is likely to neglect (perhaps inevitably neglects) another; much depends on how one defines "the question of age."1 As with other complicated cultural markers-such as race, gender, and class-questions about definitions and interpretations abound, and old age in early modern England had...