Seventeenth Century writers and poets exploited the discourses on age, which early modern
humanists inherited from Antiquity, reworking at their convenience theories about natural wit, the
value of experience, or humoral constitution, to propound an image of the ideal author favoring
their own literary careers. This article examines the confronted and shifting discourses on age by
Cervantes, Lope de Vega, and their contemporaries, considering them as strategies to claim centrality
in the literary field, in line with a hard-fought concept of the genuine author.
Key words: Cervantes; Lope de Vega; Shelf-fashioning; Age; Late style; Literary theory.