The senex cupiens: Old age and masculinity in Italian and English Renaissance comedy

This study focuses on the dramatic portrayal of the senex cupiens (the desiring old man) in Italian and English Renaissance comedy. Frequently, domestic comedy dramatizes an old man's deviance from a socially prescribed model of exemplary old age, his construction as a repudiated other, and his final public correction. In Florentine erudite comedies by Bernardo Dovizi da Bibbiena, Niccolo Machiavelli, Donato Giannotti and Lorenzino de' Medici, father-son sexual competition recalls the actual conflicts taking place between young males and Florentine elders, who withheld military responsibility and full citizenship rights from the youth. This study reads the ageist rhetoric in these comedies as a critique of a political system that disenfranchised young men. Turning to the comedies of Angelo Beolco (Ruzante) and Andrea Calmo and the commedia dell'arte scenarios of Flaminio Scala, this study argues that the relatively serene gerontocracy reigning in Venice, a byproduct of its successful mercantile economy, while instrumental in promoting external forms of stability, failed to satisfy the primal urge for periodic social renewal, symbolized in generational succession. The flourishing of intergenerational conflict in staged comedy worked to meet this deficiency, although the genre's propensity for finally absolving the senex of blame and its refusal to challenge the grounds of his domestic authority disallow any serious threat of social upheaval. Finally, this study considers English comedies by William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Thomas Middleton, Thomas Dekker and John Ford. Their own treatments of senescence are shown often to rely on imagery involving Renaissance humoral theory and the discourse of alchemy. Representations of old age gained a particular urgency and resonance in early modern England, in the context of apocalyptic fervor and the belief that the world itself was growing old. English comedy borrowed from chemistry (i.e., alchemy) and biology (i.e., the effects of melancholy) to probe the anxieties induced by the aged in a rapidly changing world.