I CONCLUDE WRITING Old Age with one last stanza, the last stage of playing voiced by Jaques in As You Like It. There, he ties the depiction of age on the stage with the well-worn conventions of the “Ages of Man.” It is useful to consider how this depiction fossilizes the decay of body and mind driven by the weight of years.

Moving from middle age to old age, Jaques's description of the aging body on stage “shifts” first the physical dimensions and abilities of the body: the vision is blurred and weakened, making “spectacles on nose” a necessity, recalling the failing vision of the author and scribe, as Hoccleve and Caxton portray them. Those well-fitting hose as well slip off the newly shrunken body, whose legs resemble those of Chaucer's Reeve with his staff-like legs. The voice, which once boomed and commanded, presumably, attention and audience, wavers and trembles, eventually going silent in the final stage of death, echoing the strange and antic voice of Pericles's Gower, who assumes “man's infirmities” so that an early modern audience can “hear an old man sing.” The end of this “strange eventual history” is oblivion and the loss of all sensory experience, which brings to mind the end of Parlement, as Elde, who has marshaled narrative after narrative stressing the end of ability and strength, himself moves to the grave.

While this speech highlights the weaknesses associated with old age and makes central how old age is defined both by narrative and that narrative's depiction of impairment, it does not voice the advantages and powers associated with that narrative of old age. As the resurrected Gower in Pericles makes clear, narrative becomes more than important for the old figure in literature of Late Medieval England, even if that literature merely evokes this medieval past.