Review of Jacqueline Vanhoutte’s Age in Love: Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Court

Age in Love: Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Court (U. of Nebraska, 2019) is a well researched and beautifully written book by Jacqueline Vanhoutte that examines the attitudes towards age appropriate sexual pursuits in Early Modern England, and how those attitudes were challenged by the reign of an unmarried female monarch.

According to Vanhoutte, sex was considered a pastime primarily for the young. People in their late teens and early twenties were expected to have a strong interest in sex regardless of gender or station.

This was not true for older men and women. If the wooer was past their prime then they were often subjects of mockery. This made things very complicated in the court of Elizabeth I as she and her court aged, in part because she was expected to marry, and so courtship rituals of wooing and flirtation were performed as a function of state, regardless of the age of the participants.

Courtiers and advisers were expected to flatter the queen and to treat her as a desirable sexual object worthy of wooing by potential bridegrooms. This pattern of behavior started early. It would have been accepted and approved throughout her twenties, concerning in her thirties, and thought ridiculous (yet necessary) after that.

Vanhoutte describes these social-sexual dynamics and then goes on to show how Shakespeare expresses these cultural tropes through the characters of Bottom, Falstaff, Orsino, Malvolio, Toby Belch, Andrew Aguecheek and Antony. Seeing these works through the lens…