to the law; he takes up with a courtesan in anticipation. An old man named Lysander tries to reclaim his lost youth by dying his white hair and taking lessons from a dancing master. Spendthrift sons, cashiered servants, and lawyers without principles all receive comic examination. Cleanthes and Hippolita manage to keep their secret for a time, though Hippolita's compassion leads her to betray it. Hippolita's cousin Eugenia is married to the elderly Lysander; when Hippolita observes Eugenia's tears over his looming fate, she tells her cousin about their ruse with Leonides, and advises her to do the same. The virtuous but naive Hippolita does not realise that Eugenia's are crocodile tears, and that Eugenia is already being courted by suitors even as her husband still lives. In time, the good couple learn Eugenia's true nature; their reproofs provoke Eugenia to divulge their secret to the authorities. Leonides is exposed and arrested. This leads to the play's culmination in the trial scene that fills all of Act V. It is eventually revealed that the Duke's harsh law is a sort of public test of virtue. The old people supposedly executed are in fact still alive, and have been kept in pleasant seclusion. Cleanthes, Hippolita, and the elderly pseudo-victims are promoted to be the judges of a new moral order, with appropriate correction for the guilty. See also Jonathan Swift: A Modest Proposal: For Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland from Being a Burden to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Publick (1729) Anthony Trollope read the play in 1876 and based his dystopian novel The Fixed Period (1882) on some of the ideas found in The Old Law. Keisuke Kinoshita's The Ballad of Narayama (1958), Korean director Kim Ki-young's Goryeojang (1963), and Shohei Imamura's The Ballad of Narayama, which won the Palme d'Or in 1983 uses the concept of Senicide as it applies to the Japanese concept of ubasute. Christopher Buckley's 2007 novel Boomsday uses the concept of Senicide as a political ploy to stave off the insolvency of social security in America. References External links The Old Law online. English Renaissance plays 1610s plays Plays by Thomas Middleton Plays by William Rowley Plays by Philip Massinger Tragicomedy plays