Holiday Festivities and Elizabethan Theater

Whether it’s trimming the tree or spinning the dreidel, preparing special foods for shared feasts or joining in community singalongs, many of us have holiday traditions. Ditto for people in Shakespeare’s time, whether it was crossdressing, roleplaying, acting in amateur theatricals, eating pancakes, or sports—which may sound familiar when you think of Shakespeare’s plays.

Erika T. Lin, an associate professor of theatre and performance at CUNY Graduate Center in New York, studies early modern holidays and her work has yielded some surprising revelations—not only about holidays themselves, but about the relationship between holidays and what we now think of as “theater.”

We talked to Lin on our Shakespeare Unlimited podcast about how people celebrated in Elizabethan England and how they might have felt about Shakespeare’s plays in a period when the line between holiday festivity and theater wasn’t quite clear. Read the excerpt below and then listen to the full podcast episode. Barbara Bogaev interviews Lin.

BARBARA BOGAEV: Since many of us aren’t that familiar with the holidays that were celebrated in England in Shakespeare’s time, why don’t we start there—for instance, what was Martlemas?

ERIKA T. LIN: Martlemas was a holiday in November that was the feast of St. Martin. It was the time when they salted down the meat to preserve it for the winter. So, they would eat up anything that they couldn’t actually preserve. It’s often understood as the beginning of the winter cycle which then lasts until Shrovetide in February.

BOGAEV: So people celebrated or observed it mostly by feasting?

LIN: Yes, there are a lot of feasting holidays. Christmas we all know, but Shrovetide, which is Mardi Gras, also involves feasting. It was a holiday where people would celebrate by eating pancakes, and that happened on Tuesday. Pancake Day is still what they call it in England.

BOGAEV: Pancake Day, yum. Moving on, tell us about Midsummer.

LIN: Midsummer was the feast of St. John the Baptist, June 24th. It was often celebrated with bonfires and also parades. They had giants and unicorns. Lots of the craft guilds would march in procession. They would decorate their houses and so forth. It’s one of the holidays that ends a cycle that begins at Easter.

So, what you have is, you have the winter of cycle of holidays and you have the summer cycle of holidays, from Easter to Midsummer, which included the time of year they referred to as “The May.”

BOGAEV: The May—okay, we know about dancing around the maypole and the May Queen, but The May were also the May Games?

LIN: Yes. It referred to not just a single day, May Day, but to a series of holidays including Trinity Sunday, Whitsunday (which is Pentecost), Corpus Christi Day. These holidays together included not only a maypole, but also building an arbor to cover the May Queen or the May Lady, sometimes they also had a May Lord or May King. The term Summer Lord is also a term that gets used frequently—or Summer Lady—for these figures.

One of the things they would do is they would do a lot of roleplaying and there was actually a lot of crossdressing during this holiday as well. It was popular at Christmas too. You see that more formally in a holiday festive dance known as the Morris dance. There’s Morris dancing today as well, it looks a little bit different, but there’s some similarities. They would tie bells around their ankles and put scarves or napkins in their hands and hop around. They also had characters in the Morris dance including Maid Marian from the Robin Hood tales, and often a friar as well, or a fool, and they would dance together.

Robin Hood was another term that was used sometimes for the Summer Lord. The Robin Hood figure served more than one function. There were stories back then, but in addition to that, he was simply a prominent member of the community who would organize the activities, a layperson.

BOGAEV: Oh, as opposed to an outlaw.

LIN: Yes, he’s an outlaw in the stories, but in the festive context, in local parishes, each year they would have a Robin Hood who would be in charge of all the administrative functions. Some people actually tried to beg off because they didn’t want to have to do that labor.

They would dress in green and there would be archery and so forth but the main thing that they did was to sell livery badges, which were little paper badges you would put in your cap. It’s like selling raffle tickets for a church bazaar, so that you can raise money to, say, fix the leaking roof. By having people buy one of these livery badges, then they too become one of Robin Hood’s Merry Men. It’s a kind of roleplaying game.

BOGAEV: Right, I was going to say elaborate roleplaying/school bake sale.

LIN: Yes, exactly. They had a lot of food and drink too, so these things were also called church ales. Ale being the drink, but also the name for the party, right? It’s like saying a kegger.

BOGAEV: Fantastic, a Robin Hood kegger! All right, so, there was a Robin Hood and there was a Summer Lord and sometimes they were the same, and it sounds like from your writing, sometimes there were two of them and the two would square off against each other in games.

LIN: These terms are really fluid. Sometimes you would have more than one Robin Hood. We think of Robin Hood as an individual character, but you see references to “the Robin Hoods” and it indicates that this person is a functionary. Their job is both festive leader, in terms of the roleplaying, as well as administrative head.

Often, the kind of games that they would use as fundraisers included various kinds of athletic combat or dancing. There were certainly various kinds of festive combat games where people would spar off, and it’s a spectator sport, right? Not unlike football today.

BOGAEV: Because we’re going to be talking about how all of this contributed to or evolved into professional theater, what was the roleplaying like? It sounds like you were kind of stuck with doing this administrative work, it sounds kind of like a drag, but also very fun if you were Robin Hood or the Summer Lord. But did these people really get into the roleplaying?

LIN: Yes. They dressed up. They were certainly into the roleplaying. As far as we can tell from the records they were involved in some small dramatic skits. We don’t have very long scripts. These skits are really rudimentary, kind of, excuses in order to stage a fight and so forth. But as far as we can tell, you know, people would enjoy playing this the way that somebody might enjoy playing Santa Claus today. The figure of the Robin Hood, it’s a form of communal bonding. Just like at Halloween today, there’s an opportunity to dress up and to play a character you don’t normally get to play. Crossdressing and the Robin Hood games are inter-related in that way.

BOGAEV: I’m interested in these sports matches because sports functions this way too, as a community bonding and building event. I picture this as, kind of, a wild festival where people are dressed up and you’re raising money but you’re also really getting into the sport and it’s a little bit like capture the flag.

LIN: They definitely enjoyed playing these sports during many of these holidays, Shrovetide, in particular. These kinds of games, you really do see the legacy of it today in football, both in the US and abroad. The way the fans behave, where they dress in the colors of their team, right? There’s a lot of eating and drinking at tailgating parties. All of these kinds of activities: the mascot, which is a form of roleplaying, and the spectacle involved. These are things that are very much part of that long festive tradition.

BOGAEV: Let’s dig into the roleplaying some more because I’m thinking of Halloween when you have your costume on and you are pretty much yourself a lot of the time, but some people, if they’re Dracula, they’re Dracula the whole night. They really go method on the whole holiday. So what was the expectation during these festive days?

LIN: For them, the notion of a character isn’t the same as what it is for us. We think of a character as a fully fleshed out entity with a childhood and a psychology and so forth.

BOGAEV: A backstory.

LIN: Exactly. For them it’s more of a functionary. If you have, say, the banker in Monopoly, the banker has a role to play in the game but it’s not like you can say, “Oh, the banker has some sort of personal history.”

To some extent, there’s a developing notion of character in this time period, which really makes a difference in terms of how we interpret what’s happening on stage. Because we often think of the characters on stage as fully fleshed out beings, and that’s how they’re performed today in the theater. But I think there’s a transition period happening here where people are understanding character as something they play regularly themselves and something that has a kind of communal function—that the point of crossdressing is not to pass as another gender, but rather to participate in a festive activity that involves various kinds of spectacle and games and dancing and singing and eating and drinking, and, together, it reinforces social bonds through a communal ritual.