Celebrating Celebration

Celebrating Celebration

One of the many Christian traditions that has become relatively quiet is the celebration of the Epiphany, or Twelfth Night, as it is sometimes called. This was a night of great celebration, as it was a remembrance of the Magi’s arrival at the birthplace of Christ, and it began the winter carnival season. In the time of Shakespeare, a play was written with this night in mind, and was appropriately titled, Twelfth Night. Now the play doesn’t have anything directly to do with the celebration for which it is named, and the only obvious connection is that it is thought that the first performance of this play was done on Twelfth Night, 1602. But there is a highly symbolic connection between the title and what ends up happening throughout the play. The title is representative of the attitudes and actions that prevailed on Twelfth night, and indeed throughout the entire carnival season, right up until lent. These attitudes were light and carefree, and oftentimes, life seemed to be turned completely on its head. It was a topsy-turvy world on Twelfth Night, and such is the nature of Shakespeare’s brilliant work, Twelfth Night.

In Shakespeare’s time celebration was quite a hot topic, as the tensions between the Catholic Church and those separatists known as the puritans were coming to a head. While the Catholics still embraced celebration and the idea that ceremony was a good thing in religion, the puritans were on a quest to rid religion, and indeed everyday life, of almost all ceremony, and many times of any kind of elaborate celebration. Because of the nature of the season, one can see that Carnival time, which included the celebrations of Twelfth night, Carnival itself, Mardi Gras, and lent, was a time wh...

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...sonalization, and the audience can get into the mind of the characters more effectively than simply seeing the festive action on the stage.

Works Cited:

- Twelfth Night (Holiday), 26 Jan 2005, MediaWik, 27 January 2005,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twelfth_Night_%28holiday%29

- Nicolson, Adam. God’s Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible. New York:

Harper Collins Publishers Inc., 2003

- Ford, David Nash. “The Gunpowder Plot” http://www.britannia.com/history/kaboom.html

- Sachs, Julie. “Was Shakespeare a Closet Catholic?” The University of Kansas OREAD

Online. http://www.oread.ku.edu/Oread00/OreadJuly14/shakespeare.html

- Shakespeare, William. Twelfth Night, or What you Will. New York: Oxford University

Press, 1998 Jones, G.P. "Malvolio Flouted and Abused." English Language Notes 42:2

(2004): 20-26.