Los procesos de enseñanza aprendizaje de la lectura y la escritura

The importance of securing a good old age by disciplining one’s behavior recurs in the plays. In The Old Law, Lisander, who is nearing the age of eighty and therefore vulnerable to the euthanasia law, engages in a variety of activities associated with youth—drinking, dancing, and fencing—and has dyed his beard in order to appear younger. Instead of sympathizing with his plight, the morally upstanding Cleanthes lectures him for not conducting himself in a way befitting a person of his age. A good many of the clinical readings of Lear’s old age, I will argue, are preoccupied with Lear’s personal failure to successfully complete old age as a developmental stage, and therefore these readings focus on the way Lear brings about his own tragic end by failing to plan responsibly for himself. The Lord Chief Justice also schools Falstaff for behavior that is inconsistent with the sobriety and dignity that the Chief Justice believes is the proper purview of his age. These prescriptive attitudes are also found in the early modern advice

literature that offers defenses of old age and advice on how to age well.9 Thane argues that

In philosophical, theological, and, often, medical texts, from the ancient world at least to the eighteenth century, representations of old age are as often metaphorical as literal: a good, or bad, old age is represented as the reward or punishment for conduct through the life course. Such texts or visual images aimed to teach good conduct and/or temperate living, rather than to represent old age ‘as it was.’ (6)

Though these texts can be read as conduct manuals that discipline the behaviour of older people, they also offer the sense that one can exercise personal agency over the aging process. The treatises aim to “teach [the readers] how to come to terms with [aging’s] unavoidably terminal consequences. The assumption was that idealisations of masculine elderliness (from Cicero, Plutarch, Plato) and Biblical examples of long livers helped those on the frontiers of old age to withstand its anticipated trials” (Taunton, Fictions 8). Cicero’s De Senectute (c. 44 BCE) was a highly influential defense of old age that was

first translated into English by Caxton in 1481 (Thane 40), and was again Englished by Thomas Newton with the title The Worthye Book of Olde Age (1569, and translated by

9

J. L. Helm summarizes the early modern attitude to what is now called gerontology:

Did there exist a Renaissance ‘art’ of gerontology? The answer is that there did not if we measure Renaissance ‘gerocomy’—Galen’s, Cornaro’s and Bacon’s regimens of optimism, temperance, and hygiene in old age—beside the post-modern exacting clinical and interdisciplinary study of senescence. Yet the idea of such an art is parallel to the entire sweep of Renaissance thought: in the same way that the recovery of Classical learning and literature revivified early-modern European culture, the reclaimed Graeco-Roman ars senectutis, epitomized in Cicero’s Cato Maior, apologist for the aged state as it was, carried within itself an impulse towards rejuvenation and prolongevity. (41)

him again in 1577). Cicero, writing in the voice of Cato the Elder, encourages people to regulate their behaviour throughout their lives, arguing that this will help ensure one’s old age is a positive experience:

I am praising that old age which has its foundation well laid in youth. Hence it follows—as I once said with the approval of all who heard it—that that old age is wretched which needs to defend itself with words. Nor can wrinkles and grey hair suddenly seize upon influence; but when the preceding part of life has been nobly spent, old age gathers the fruits of influence at the last. (75)

Per Cicero, old age is not the period of decline that many make it out to be; instead, as Maria Teresa Ricci observes, he offers old age as “a moment of spiritual elevation and detachment from the body” (66). Works like De Senectute express the “value attached to being old; old age is a condition worth preserving, and by knowing how to prevent the body’s decay, man is in position to fashion nature so as to slow down the whirligig of time and significantly delay its revenges on the body” (Taunton, “Time’s Whirligig” 24).

Francis Bacon’s The Historie of Life and Death (1638) explores the possibilities

of prolongevity. The preface assures the reader that it is not unchristian to seek the prolongation of life and defer death (and, implicitly, defer one’s salvation) because “For while we Christians aspire and labour to come to the Land of Promise; it will be a signe of Divine favour, if our shoos and the garments of our frail bodies, be here little worne in our journey in the worlds wildernesss” (sig. A6v).10 Bacon asserts that aging can be prevented by repairing the radical moisture that decays with aging. Though the “spirits,

10

blood, flesh, and fatnesse” are “easily repaired,” “dry parts” such as “membranes, tunicles, nerves, arteries, veines, gristles, most of the bowels, and all the organicall and instrumentall parts” are more difficult (sig. B2v and B3r). He also rejects the notion that astrological forces influence people’s aging; instead, people age at different rates

depending on the era, or Age of the World, in which they are born, the location of their birth, “their stocke and Kindred,” and their personal physical constitution (sig. B6r). Ultimately, Bacon promotes the notion that one can exert an influence over one’s own aging, and his concern is “How Mans Life is lengthned and shortned, by sustenance, Dyet, government of Life, exercise, and the like, and by Ayre” (sig. B6r). Du Laurens also discusses the ideal diet for old people at length. The prescriptive literature is directed towards readers concerned with their own aging, offering defences of old age, or methods to preserve the more active, early stage of old age (as described earlier by Cuffe) for as long as possible. The fascination with prolongevity is also evident in the popularity of Thomas Parr’s life story, and with the pains taken in the accounts of his life to identify the potential variables that led to Parr’s superlongevity. However, the degree to which one can extrapolate the lived experience of early modern old age from prescriptive texts on aging is questionable. As Johnson writes, “The tropes of old age that appear with a certain monotony in texts on health and morals from the ancient world to the modern are rightly viewed as literary constructions, ripe for any number of equally valid readings of the way old age was socially and culturally formed in past times” (17).