Rewriting Old Age from Chaucer to Shakespeare: The Invention of English Senex Style.
- Author/Editor
- Youngman, William Auther.
- Title
- Rewriting Old Age from Chaucer to Shakespeare: The Invention of English Senex Style.
- Published
- Ph.D. Dissertation. Cornell University, 2014. Open access at https://ecommons.cornell.edu/handle/1813/36190 (accessed February 3, 2023). iv; 248 pp.
- Review
- Coining the phrase "senex style" in his dissertation, Youngman studies the "the function of old age as a textual and metaphorical category" (6) as expressed in "a particular rhetorical and stylistic set of practices that surround seemingly commonplace illustrations of old age, but mark these texts as resistant to the narrated restraints of what they describe of age" (7). He "traces the paradoxical treatment of old men from the Reeve in 'The Canterbury Tales' to John Gower's reanimated role in Shakespeare's 'Pericles' . . . , [i]ncorporating fifteenth century authors, such as Thomas Hoccleve, and scribes and printers, such as John Shirley and William Caxton, together with Chaucer, and Gower. . . . By focusing on a set of elements, which although shared are deployed differently, [Youngman] contend[s] that authors and speakers employ in new ways a paradoxical set of characteristics in depictions of old men taken from classical literature. . . . [T]his examination of senex style demonstrates how the figure of the old man bridges categories of language and body, by examining non-normative and less-than-able selves that are defined not only by bodily impairments but also rhetorical postures of disability and prosthesis" (ii). Youngman's treatment of Gower includes discussion of the juxtaposition of CA with several of Chaucer's lyrics in British Library MS. Additional 22139, Gower's use of senex style in CA and in "Quicquid homo scribat," and the use of the choral Gower as revision—a form of textual prosthesis—in "Pericles," where "Shakespeare reads Gower closely to the way I read him, as poeta senex, practitioner par excellence of senex style" (187). [MA]
- Date
- 2014
- Gower Subjects
- Confessio Amantis
Minor Latin Poetry
Style, Rhetoric, and Versification
Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations
Manuscripts and Textual Studies
Influence and Later Allusion