Our Aging Monarchs

In As You Like It, Shakespeare wrote:

The artist Robert Smirke depicted the “seven ages of man” in a series of paintings between 1798 and 1801. Consider the final three. With the benefit of experience, “the justice,” Shakespeare’s fifth age of man, is wise and judicious — a natural leader. But then things start to regress. “The pantaloon” (the mildly disparaging 16th-century term for an aging man) begins to lose his physical and mental rigor. Shakespeare describes the seventh and final stage, old age, as “a second childishness and mere oblivion.”

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Madeleine Kearns

Madeleine Kearns is a former staff writer at National Review.

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In As You Like It, Shakespeare wrote:

The artist Robert Smirke depicted the “seven ages of man” in a series of paintings between 1798 and 1801. Consider the final three. With the benefit of experience, “the justice,” Shakespeare’s fifth age of man, is wise and judicious — a natural leader. But then things start to regress. “The pantaloon” (the mildly disparaging 16th-century term for an aging man) begins to lose his physical and mental rigor. Shakespeare describes the seventh and final stage, old age, as “a second childishness and mere oblivion.”