Although literary gerontology has existed for several decades as an area of investigation, it has thus far remained marginal to the fields of both gerontology and literary study. Perhaps because it has often focused on the portrayal of aging in isolated examples of fiction, drama, and poetry, and assumed the transparency of representation and the universality of the aging experience, work in literary gerontology has sometimes failed to question the contextual and constitutive aspects of literature that are of major interest to both literary scholars and critical gerontologists.

Christopher Martin’s Constituting Old Age in Early Modern Literature from Queen Elizabeth to “King Lear” goes a long way towards redressing this weakness. Martin is a scholar of the literature and culture of early modern Europe, and as such, brings a critical perspective and a wealth of historical and cultural knowledge to his discussion of the complex and sophisticated negotiation of aging in England from the 1580s to the early 1600s. The book opens with “Age, Agency, and Early Modern Constitutions”, a chapter that sets the theoretical framework for the detailed close readings of political and literary texts that form the balance of the book. Aging, then as now, involved re-evaluation of one’s identity in the face of a changing body and societal prejudice against the aged.

Contrary to other scholars of the period, Martin argues that instead of merely accepting old age as a necessary and universal evil, some writers of the period explored the “constitution” as a factor in the aging of individuals. He uses this term as defined by the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) in the sense of “healthiness”, “strength”, and “vitality” as they relate to the body (p. 2), and points out that it was during the sixteenth century that the word developed this shade of meaning. The primary meaning of the word, however – “the action of constituting, making, establishing” (OED) – equally suits the argument Martin puts forward, as his book is concerned not only with the way the constitution of aging individuals was recognized as a category during the period but also with how an aging (yet vital) identity could be constituted and agency maintained. His purpose is to demonstrate “how the figures in question struggle . . . to reclaim this agency, which is grounded in the private but equally authoritative self-awareness of one’s own constitution” (pp. 7–8).

This “struggle” was against not only one’s aging and inevitably deteriorating body, but also against the widespread societal belief that age automatically entailed failing physical and mental capabilities and required older adults to retire from society and exhibit decorous behaviour; an attempt on the part of an aged individual to overcome or ignore the ravages of age regularly invited scorn and caricature. Martin traces the various treatises on aging, both classical and contemporary, that were available during the period – Seneca’s Epistles 12 and 121; Thomas Wilson’s Arte of Rhetorique (1553); Castiglione’s Il Cortegiano (trans. 1561); Andreas Laurentius’s Discourse on Old Age (trans. 1599) – and notes how they reinforced the gerontophobia of the culture. A corrective appeared in Cicero’s De Senectute (trans. 1577), which has long been recognized as a text that valorizes old age. It is, says Martin, “an exploration of what it costs to maintain one’s dignity in the face of age’s harsher prospects” (p. 20).

In chapter 2, “Elizabeth I’s Politics of Longevity”, Martin closely analyses four episodes during Elizabeth’s reign that demonstrate her shrewd use of her aging body: the debate in 1579 (and her response to it) instigated by her potential marriage at the age of 46 to the 24-year-old duc d’Alençon; her loss of friends and advisors as she aged; her deliberate exposure of her partially naked body to Ambassador de Maisse in 1597–98, when she was 64; and the unsuccessful Essex rebellion in her final years on the throne. Throughout the chapter, Martin’s focus is on the ways that Elizabeth both defied and exploited her status as an aging monarch in a culture that disdained the aged.

In a shift from politics to poetry, chapter 3, “Out to Pasture: The Bucolic Elder in Spenser, Sidney, and Their Heirs”, is concerned largely with how aged voices assert themselves in the Shepheardes Calender (1579) of Edmund Spenser and Philip Sidney’s Arcadia (1580s). Old age in the character of Spenser’s Thenot, concludes Martin, “grounds its dignity in a fiercely ironic, confrontational sense of self” (p. 79). Sidney’s aged characters, however admirable or foolish, refuse to yield their authority and agency to a younger generation. In chapter 4, “Sexuality and Senescence in Late Elizabethan Poetry”, Martin continues his study of aged voices in literature as he traces how sexual desire among the aged had from classical times been scorned, and demonstrates its connection to the concern with “time’s eroding power” (p. 107) that characterized poems by Sir Walter Ralegh, William Shakespeare, and John Donne. Chapter 5, “‘Confin’d to Exhibition’: King Lear through the Spectacles of Age”, explores one of Shakespeare’s best-known plays, which turns upon the generational struggle for political power. It presents a clear example of the judgement of the aged by youth and the consequent attempt by the aged to resist the characterization thrust upon them, resulting in their development of what Martin calls “an enduring, constitutionally determined subjectivity” (p. 176).

Although each chapter of this book stands on its own as an investigation into particular complexities of the aging dynamic, together they demonstrate that English culture at the end of the sixteenth century was struggling with the tension between, on the one hand, a tradition that mocked the political and erotic aspirations of the aged and on the other, an awareness that the individually experienced constitution was as important an aspect of aging as a physically deteriorating body. Martin is an erudite scholar, whose detailed and innovative analysis of familiar texts is compelling. The argument is clearly organized, and the writing engaging. If there is a weakness in the book, it is that so much of it is concerned with aged characters as conceived by youthful writers, a point Martin himself acknowledges (pp. 28–29); I would like to have seen a similarly detailed and contextualized examination of how aged writers of the period experienced and interpreted senescence. I would also like to have seen a more comprehensive index and a reference list, rather than the extensive bibliographical notes that require hunting to pinpoint a source (although this format is the publisher’s standard). Those quibbles aside, Martin’s book will be a valuable resource for both students and scholars of English Renaissance literature and culture. Its greatest value, perhaps, is in its contribution to literary gerontology – not simply for what it can teach us about perceptions of aging in the English Renaissance, but as a sophisticated model of critical gerontological enquiry.