Age in Love

“This compelling book deftly integrates issues of gender, age, history, and politics in its bold reevaluation of the Shakespeare canon. Vanhoutte’s argument insightfully qualifies, and sometimes overturns, new historicist paradigms of Elizabethan sexuality—both generally and literally defined.”—Douglas Bruster, Mody C. Boatright Regents Professor of American and English Literature, Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Texas at Austin

“In this stunning appraisal of sexual senescence in Shakespeare’s plays, Jacqueline Vanhoutte shines a light on a figure who’s been hiding in plain sight: the aging male lover. Far from risible roués, characters such as Falstaff and Antony embody the politically potent but sexually quiescent men who hovered around Elizabeth in her final years. Beautifully written and hugely original, Age in Love pulls off that rarest of acts: adding a dimension to the highly defined profiles of some of Shakespeare’s best-known characters.”—Paul Menzer, professor and director of the Shakespeare and Performance graduate program at Mary Baldwin University

“In clear and elegant prose this book builds a persuasive case for Shakespeare’s plays as deeply engaged with court history. Exposing the limits of New Historicist analysis, [it] offers a brilliant and groundbreaking methodology for producing historically informed literary analysis.”—Catherine Loomis, author of The Death of Elizabeth I: Remembering and Reconstructing the Virgin Queen