Esse versus Percipi: The Old and the Elderly in Restoration and Early Eighteenth-century English Plays
Esse versus Percipi: The Old and the Elderly in Restoration and Early Eighteenth-century English Plays

Summary/Abstract: Christopher Martin, in his study on old age in Early Modern English literature, complained that “late to emerge as an orchestrated discipline, age studies have been slower still to find extended application to the fields of cultural and literary criticism” (Martin 2012: 6). Although somewhat exaggerated, humanist, or more specifically literary gerontology has indeed a much shorter history than its purely medical foundation. This interdisciplinary perspective has progressively been applied to the most well-known novelistic, poetic and dramatic genres, resulting in more or less period-focused studies on representations of age and ageing in literature. In the British context, despite the fact that more and more attention is paid to discourses of senescence, longevity and life cycles as represented within theatre and drama, there are few studies on the subject of the old and ageing in post-Shakespearean drama, which go beyond the reiteration of Frye's conclusions on the function of a senex in literature. The proposed paper focuses on selected examples of Restoration (1660-1700) and early 18th-century English plays in order to analyse their presentations of old(er) characters, including their bodily (self-)perception, as well as the social attitudes of the younger generations towards their elders. It will thus give examples to Michael Mangan's statement that: “Ageing draws attention to the gaps that can exist between esse and percipi: between how one feels oneself to be, and how one may be perceived” (Mangan 2002: 5).

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