My daughter's nephew-in-law, Zach Appelman, is a talented actor setting out on what might very well turn out to be a terrific career. (His ascent would be more rapid if he would take his aunt-in-law's father's advice and change his stage name to Zach Barrymore or Zach Zellweger, but the young man has too much integrity to comply with aged opportunistic wisdom).
Zach recently played Hamlet at the Hartford Stage in Connecticut (Hartford Courant: "a career-propelling performance that at times takes your breath away"). I spoke with Zach at the recent family Thanksgiving and he told me that the director of this Hamlet, Darko Tresnjak, made an effort to emphasize the play's comic passages. It was a good idea, I think, because Hamlet is both in reading and performance an intermittently hilarious piece of dramatic art. But, added Zach, sometimes the audience laughed at moments that he did not anticipate. He cited an example in the so-called "bedroom scene," where Hamlet assails Gertrude for marrying Claudius. Hamlet's rebuke of his mother is harsh and dislocating. About her marriage to Claudius, he says
You cannot call it love; for at your age
The hectic in the blood is tame, it's humble
It waits upon the judgment.
These lines apparently caused quite a commotion among the seniors in the audience. It is not hard to imagine why. Hamlet, for all his sparkling intelligence, is callow. He has youth's ignorance about middle-age sexuality -- as the silver-threads-among-the-gold demographic must certainly have recognized. How could Hamlet (or perhaps even young Shakespeare, a mere thirty-five when he wrote the play), know that desire and passion increase in middle-age as impetuous adolescent oestrus and fumblings are superseded by mature appreciation and achievement.
I doubt that Shakespeare meant Hamlet's lines to be funny -- there's no room for humor in the rhapsody of words that the prince directs at his mommy. Nevertheless, a modern sophisticated and wrinkle-deep-in-time audience cannot help but titter at Hamlet's grotesque misjudgment.
These observations on sex in youth and age were still percolating in my waiting-for-wisdom brain while I re-read, for, what? the fourth or fifth or sixth time, Anthony Trollope's excellent 1857 novel, Barchester Towers. My attention was caught, this time through, by one of Trollope's digressions, very pertinent to the topic of autumnal love, and which I now transcribe in a slightly reduced version and which I think is well worthy intense study, especially by my readers of certain late-hectic ages.
"It is, we believe, [says Trollope] common with young men of five and twenty to look on their seniors -- on men of, say, double their own age -- as so many stocks and stones -- stocks and stones, that is, in regard to feminine beauty."
(Let me interject that for "young men of five and twenty", think "Hamlet." And when Trollope talks of "feminine beauty," let us recognize that the phrase is a euphemistic Victorian surrogate for issues of human desire and sexuality that conventional taboos made it impossible for Trollope to address forthrightly.)
"There never was a greater mistake [continues Trollope]. Men of fifty don't dance mazurkas, being generally too fat and wheezy; nor do they sit for hours together on river banks at their mistresses' feet, being somewhat afraid of rheumatism. But for real true love, love at first sight, love to devotion, love that robs a man of his sleep, love [and here Trollope begins to quote from the famous passage in Love's Labor's Lost] 'that will gaze an eagle blind, love that will hear the lowest sound when the suspicious head of theft is stopped, love that is like a Hercules still climbing trees in the Hesperides, we believe that this best age is from forty-five to seventy."
Forty-five to seventy, ladies and gentleman. Just the age of the men and women in the Hartford playhouse who snickered at Hamlet junior's incomprehension of his mother's passions.
And then Trollope brings his excursus to conclusion with a great sentence in which he both disses and dismisses immature youthful ardor:
"Up to that age [i.e. forty-five] men are generally given to mere flirting."
As perhaps Hamlet flirts with Ophelia.
It's intriguing that Trollope recognizes that men of seventy summers may still be ardent lovers and appreciators of the flesh. If he had been a little older and more experienced, he would have increased his estimate to seventy-five, perhaps even eighty. After all, eighty is the new seventy, is it not? Or he might even have acknowledged that it ain't over until it's over.
Trollope was only forty-two when he wrote Barchester Towers, so perhaps he knew that he was only capable of mere flirtation with Rose Heseltine. But he was 67 when he proposed, in the nasty dystopia The Fixed Period, that 68 was the age at which all men should be required to give up the ghost. The Fixed Period is a novel which, at least to this septuagenarian, provokes not titters but guffaws. Poor Anthony T. had become so terribly sour, so unlike the Trollope of Barchester.