IN THE FINAL chapter of Writing Old Age, I examine how these prosthetic ideas of old age reflect in the centuries following the rule of Richard II and the authorial activities of Caxton, Chaucer, Hoccleve, and the Parlement-poet. It is clear that the age-related anxieties associated with Richard's rule extend into early modern depictions of his tumultuous reign, including the chronicles of Holinshed and Shakespeare's Richard II. The age-related anxieties of Richard II's reign echo, but in reverse, with an aging queen reminding us that the intersections among politics, age, and ability remain potent concerns. Following the Earl of Essex's staging of Richard II in the early seventeenth century, Elizabeth remarked to William Lambarde that, “I am Richard II, knowe ye not,” a comment which makes this link undeniable. Indeed, as Christopher Martin has argued, “Elizabeth's experience of age informed her expression, public and private, verbal and visual.” And Elizabeth was not the only figure negotiating anxious age in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries— as the link between Elizabeth and Richard II implies, Shakespeare's plays offer numerous portrayals of old age.

But what about the prosthetic function of these poetic depictions of age-related impairments, which seem tied to the valuation of old age in the late fourteenth century? The continuing importance of viewing old age both as site of impairment and prosthetic addition comes into focus in Shakespeare's Pericles, one of his later, co-authored plays and one which depicts medieval material in a style that calls attention to its medieval qualities. Reworking the narrative of Apollonius of Tyre, Pericles tells the story of a prince, named Pericles, who escapes certain death in Antioch when he discerns, in a riddle, that a princess he wishes to marry is in an incestuous relationship with her father. Fleeing for his life, he finds himself in Tarsus, where he marries another princess whom he subsequently loses to death, and who is later revived. Separated from his daughter, he manages to find her in a brothel, from which he rescues her and almost marries her, before he realizes she is his daughter. Pericles, wife, and daughter are reunited at the end.