Wikimedia Commons
"Twelfth-night (The King Drinks)" by David Teniers
The holidays are upon us. And depending on our tastes, beliefs, or temperament, the annual tidal wave of traditions can either sweep us into a sea of good cheer or submerge us in a briny, surly deep. But if you’ve ever wondered what’s behind many of those traditions, you may be surprised that the Christmas spirit as we know it was more or less perfected by Shakespeare’s Tudor contemporaries.
Elizabethans, by all accounts, knew how to do Christmas. So much so that much of the English-speaking world has spent the last four centuries trying to recapture their lost magic. First of all, those Twelve Days of Christmas we’ve heard so much about? No, Shakespeare didn’t come up with them—for that we have medieval Catholics to thank. But he did do as much as anyone other than Frederic Austin, who published the current form of the carol in 1909, to immortalize the last of the dozen in the title of his play Twelfth Night, or What You Will.
The subtitle was in all likelihood what he actually intended to name the piece, being in line with other throwaway titles he was giving his comedies during that period, e.g., Much Ado About Nothing and As You Like It. Given that the play has no other apparent connection to the Feast of the Epiphany (January 6), it’s probable that the title that stuck came from the occasion of its world premiere: January 5, 1602.
For Queen Elizabeth and her court, that would have been the climax of nearly two solid weeks of partying. And they were not alone. John Stow wrote in Survey of London (1598) that, “Against the feast of Christmas, every man’s house, as also their parish churches, were decked with holm, ivy, bays, and whatsoever the season of the year afforded to be green.” For all classes it was a time of enthusiastic feasting, toasting, game-playing, and radical generosity.
The royal festivities would also have included lavish gifts and paid entertainments, among them plays put on by London’s most acclaimed companies of which Shakespeare’s the Lord Chamberlain’s Men was certainly one. And Twelfth Night was one of the merriest occasions, so a comedy featuring a Lord of Misrule–type character like Twelfth Night’s Sir Toby Belch would have been a fitting culmination to the holiday season.
More humble households would have generated their own homemade entertainment, the kind that Shakespeare likely enjoyed growing up in his country village of Stratford-upon-Avon. He refers to such rowdy, humorous folk performances more than once in his work. The drunk Christopher Sly in The Taming of the Shrew, mishearing or misunderstanding the word “comedy” asks, “Is not a comonty a Christmas gambol, or a tumbling-trick?” And Biron, the sardonic wit in Love’s Labour’s Lost, sniffs out a plot to expose a prank he and his friends had played, saying “Here was a consent, / Knowing aforehand of our merriment, / To dash it like a Christmas comedy.” He even indirectly paints the picture of a white Christmas as an archetypical one, when he remarks philosophically, “At Christmas I no more desire a rose / Than wish a snow in May’s new-fangled shows.”
Even as these plays were being written, though, pressures were at work that would force such traditions into hibernation. With the ascension of Elizabeth’s successor, James I, Puritans began advocating more strongly for a stricter adherence to Biblical practice and an end to such debaucherous celebrations. James and later his son Charles I pushed back hard, so many Puritans fled England for America and settled in Massachusetts. Three years after Shakespeare’s death, however, his rival and contemporary Ben Jonson wrote a court entertainment for James called Christmas, His Masque (1616) that mourned the passing of the beloved Elizabethan customs. In it, the personification of Christmas sings that he is there to present “A right Christmas, as of old it was / To be gathered out of dances.” “This, I tell you,” he goes on, “is our jolly Wassail, / And for Twelfth Night more meet [i.e., fitting] too.”
The Puritan Revolution overthrew and executed Charles I in 1649 and went so far as to actually criminalize Christmas. Their counterparts in Boston were of like mind and issued a public notice that “the exchanging of gifts and greetings, …feasting and similar Satanical practices” were punishable by a fine of five shillings. And while memories of revelry lived on in hearts and minds and in writings like John Taylor’s 1652 pamphlet “The Vindication of Christmas,” which extoled the singing of carols, dancing, and sport, New Year’s Day remained the only winter holiday in America well into the 19th century.
All of that changed in 1815 when a young merchant and aspiring writer, Washington Irving, went to England to try and save his family’s struggling firm and came across Taylor’s pamphlet. He copied it word for word into his notebook and used it as inspiration for a series of five short stories about an eccentric country squire, Mr. Bracebridge, who insisted on keeping the fine old Christmas traditions alive. Published on January 1, 1820, as the fifth installment of Irving’s The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., the stories tell of a Christmas Eve and Day with the Bracebridges suffused with irresistible warmth and hospitality.
Not only does Irving describe for American readers “the great interchange of presents” and such obscure traditions as the mistletoe and the mischievous kissing privileges it conferred, he also describes a scene that Shakespeare would surely have recognized: a hastily arranged Christmas masque devised by the children and presided over by the personification of Christmas, featuring “gambols” and fantastic sports, ancient customs that were “the consummation of uproar and merriment.” The narrator laments that “this was perhaps the only family in England in which the whole of them was still punctiliously observed.” Thanks in large part to the inclusion of two non-Christmas tales—“Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”—the book was massively influential on both sides of the Atlantic.
And the Christmas stories were simply too charming not to catch on. Soon Americans were wishing each other “Happy Christmas” and merchants were seizing on the potent combination of nostalgia, childhood and gift-giving to decorate their stores and fill their windows with fetching items and faux bargains. Charles Dickens, who idolized Irving, published A Christmas Carol in 1843 and enshrined forever the Victorian ideal of Christmas cheer in his depiction of a jovial party hosted by Scrooge’s genial mentor Mr. Fezziwig.
So as you hang your stockings and deck your halls, you may also offer a word of thanks to Shakespeare and his contemporaries for giving us an ideal of communal kindness and merrymaking worth aspiring to.
Tom Ridgely is the executive producer of Shakespeare Festival St. Louis.
