SOURCE: Mignon, Elisabeth. Introduction to Crabbed Age and Youth: The Old Men and Women in the Restoration Comedy of Manners, pp. 3-35. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1947.

In the following essay, Mignon analyzes the comedy of manner's attack on old age and its reverence for youth, illustrating with numerous examples.

Superannuated belles and timeworn rakes crowded the English stage between 1660 and 1700. The old women with their decayed charms are always pursuers, never pursued. The old men are predestined to wear the horns on their ugly foreheads. The aged of both sexes are loathsome to the gay young blades and precocious heroines who bewilder and victimize them. For it is the young who rule with arrogant ease the beau monde of these plays. It is the old who are intruders. To their highly sophisticated juniors they are merely old harridans and fossils.

The autumnal face of a lady...