In this festive episode, I ask lots of wonderful people all about early modern Christmas and how it impacted domestic life. We cover everything from clothes to music, entertainment, fasting and feasting, and even a bit of decorating! For a Christmas treat, we hear from Brett Dolman, Curator at Historic Royal Palaces, as well as the wonderful Roxanne Bennis, living historian Esme Wise, historian Nic Fulcher, and literary scholar, Dr. Joan Fitzpatrick. Listen, enjoy and be merry!
In this festive episode, I ask lots of wonderful people all about early modern Christmas and how it impacted domestic life. We cover everything from clothes to music, entertainment, fasting and feasting, and even a bit of decorating! For a Christmas treat, we hear from Brett Dolman, Curator at Historic Royal Palaces, as well as the wonderful Roxanne Bennis, living historian Esme Wise, historian Nic Fulcher, and literary scholar, Dr. Joan Fitzpatrick. Listen, enjoy and be merry!
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Anjna Chouhan: Welcome to Shakespeare's Pants a podcast that's all about domestic activity during the life and times of our beloved William Shakespeare. My name's Anjna and I'm a Shakespearian which I like to think might one day have some useful application in real life; but in the meantime, I'm determined to make Shakespeare and history come together for you, my lovely listeners.
Thank you for joining me for this one-off Christmas special in which we'll be hearing from historians, musicians, and literary scholars, and as a magical festive treat we're even going to hear from a curator at Hampton Court Palace! So pour your spiced ale and ready those mince pies, for here be Episode 9: The Christmas Special.
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Voice-over: Shakespeare's Pants Christmas Special.
Anjna: To mark the festive season this episode is all about early modern Christmas; when, what, and how did people celebrate this much-anticipated period in the 16th and early 17th centuries? How did people entertain themselves? What was understood by the whole notion of Christmas? I mean its relevance to not just the Christian, but also the domestic calendar. What, in short, was the impact of Christmas on the life domestic for our early modern predecessors, and how, as per usual, did any of this find its way, or indeed bypass completely, the works of Billy the Bard.
Let's begin by outlining what Christmas actually meant in the period. As one of the most significant events in the Christian calendar along with Easter, Christmas was a period of reflection and piety especially during Advent when, as a hangover from the pre-reformation, people were encouraged to fast and abstain from indulgence to mark the birth of Christ with some degree of sobriety.
However, from Christmas Day through to January the 6th, a period known as "The 12 days of Christmas" sobriety was far from the norm. Post reformation, the regular feasting for saints and festival days diminished, and so the festivities associated with Christmas were a compensatory, if somewhat concentrated form, of holiday. Let's hear from our first guest: living historian, Esmé Wise.
Esmé Wise: The 12 days of Christmas are Christmas Eve to 12th night which is the evening of the 5th of January- the 6th of January is the 12th day- so those are the 12 days you are forbidden to toil. You're not meant to do any work. That's really important for a Tudor because your life is work. Particularly in the winter, the days are so short but actually, if you are working, you're fitting quite a lot in a very small window. It's not like the summer where you can have a two-hour dinner break in the middle of the day and have a sleep. In the winter you're trying to fit everything in. Admittedly you've got slightly less to do in the farming calendar, but if you're a craftsman or a labourer you're still having to do a lot of work.
The fact that you're not working and you're not allowed… It's not just that you're not working, you're not allowed to work for those 12 Days of Christmas, would have just been a great break, this is your holiday.
They would wrap the spinning wheel in garlands, in ivy, in decoration which meant it couldn't be used. It's been both practically and symbolically shut away so that you cannot spin for those 12 days which just shows that you're not working. It was a very religiously important time as well. People went to church. You went to church a lot. You would've felt that communal religious spirit as well of everyone celebrating together.
Anjna: I'm still curious about the physicality of the festival. If work stopped how did people actually mark the occasion at home tangibly? Esmé tells me about the importance, and indeed origin, of decorating the house.
Esmé: Just bringing in the greenery, that's a pagan idea. Anything living, anything evergreen was brought in. Holly and ivy were the two most important ones and they always were brought in, but the other two that are mentioned a lot are rosemary and bay, and they all have symbolic meaning, some of which I think was Christian-symbolic meaning. I believe the red of the holly berries is meant to represent Christ's blood. The Tudors definitely did kissing under the mistletoe. That was a Roman thing of meeting under the mistletoe meant that you were meeting in peace and you couldn't hurt each other under the mistletoe, it was sort of a magical thing. The centerpiece is actually something called a kissing bough, and it's like a ball or crown of greenery, and it always had mistletoe in it. Then that was lifted up into the ceiling and then you'd meet under the mistletoe and you'd kiss each other. That would be part of that. Kissing under the mistletoe is definitely an old pagan thing. Bringing greenery into your house is pagan.
Anjna: It's logical that local foliage was brought into the home, but what if you lived somewhere a little less verdant?
Esmé: If you lived in the town, you'd buy it. There are records of people buying ivy and holly, who live in a town so that they can decorate. Urban churches, for example, you've got to decorate the church, so they buy in the greenery. It does depend where you live, what you're going to decorate with. You might decorate with apples. Again they're a seasonal thing, they're around, they're bright, they're colorful red apples. If you are wealthy, you might use oranges as well, because oranges are at their best at Christmas. Even in the 16th century, in the early 17th century, they're known as a bit of a Christmas fruit. If you can afford oranges you might bring them. Then the Christmas spices, cloves, ginger, nutmeg, cinnamon, those are the smells that you're going to want around your house.
You might stick cloves in your orange if you can afford-- That's a very expensive thing to do, don't get me wrong. Again, this is all relative. If you're very poor you're going to bring in some ivy and holly you found in the hedge, and you've decorated your house. If you're wealthy you're going to stud an orange all over with cloves and put it in the middle of your table and go, "Look at that, what I can afford." I might gild it too, just for fun, but the greenery we've been doing that for hundreds of years before the 16th century, that is pagan, the idea of bringing the greenery in.
There is that idea which I love of the reason why you don't keep it in your house after 12th night, because that is entirely pagan origins because the idea is that the spirits of the trees and the greenery, they don't really like being brought inside. If they stay inside too long they're going to get annoyed with you, so you can have it in your house until 12th night, but then you've got to take it out your house and put it back outside, so the spirits are appeased.
Anjna: We have our time off from work, and the house is beautifully decorated, but what else was there to do?
Esmé: I will add however that in every single excerpt I've ever seen about, "Wow, we don't get to work at Christmas." No one ever mentions the fact that someone has to cook the feasts.
Anjna: The major events of cooking and eating were central to the 12 Day celebrations, but before we actually get to the food let's recall that prior to Christmas Eve, Advent traditionally marked a period of dearth or abstinence.
Esmé: For the religious, they'd actually been fasting before the period of Christmas. There had been a time of want. It's not dissimilar to Easter. It's a Fast. Basically no eggs, no dairy, no meat. That's fast. If you hear about fasting in a Tudor context, it doesn't mean don't eat. It doesn't mean you're not eating at all. You are abstaining from meat and dairy and eggs.
Anjna: Assuming that one observed an Advent Fast, the official period of indulgence could then begin. I asked Dr. Joan Fitzpatrick from Loughborough University about specific Christmas traditions pertaining to foods.
Dr. Joan Fitzpatrick: They would've enjoyed good food, as much as they could afford, of course. There were certain traditions. For instance, it was traditional for the wealthier houses to have a boar's head taking pride of place in the center of the table.
Anjna: In fact, so popular with the boar's head as the focus of feast, and indeed spectacle, but a popular carol from the period is entitled The Boar's Head Carol.
Actor: "The boar's head in hand bring I, With garlands gay and rosemary, I pray you all sing merrily, The boar's head, I understand, Is the chief service in this land; Look, wherever it be fand."
Anjna: Joan tells us that good food was expected during the period. I'm curious about where this was actually coming from. Of course, if you were a wealthy sort this might be self-evident, but what about middle and lower sorts, households; where did they get food from? This is Esmé again.
Esmé: Well, you've slaughtered everything, that's one point, so you have quite a lot of meat because a lot of people what they do is they would slaughter the animals, so they don't have to feed them over winter. This is one of the times you might actually have some meat because you'll have freshly slaughtered animals particularly pigs, and people saved up. People who could afford very little would save and save so that they could have the twist of sugar, the tiny bit of spice, and it will be the only time in the whole year that they might have some sugar and some spices, and they won't have it any other time but they're going to make sure they've got enough, so they can have just a bit for Christmas.
Coupled with the fact that it is early winter, we're not talking the really cruel months of January and February because by then you've run out of everything. This is actually quite near the beginning. You haven't yet run out of stuff or you shouldn't have done. If you have you have miscalculated horribly.
Anjna: Let's return to Joan for some more Christmas food traditions.
Joan: Lower-income households might have used preserved meats. Meats that had been stored over the winter so spiced and salted, just the usual way of preserving foods and pickles. I imagine that the Twelfth Night cake which was a highly fruity spiced cake and you can see where our Christmas Cake comes into being, it would've been made, I presume like Christmas Cakes, very early in the year. They would've used the ingredients when they had plenty of them for the cake and then the cake would improve with age, I suppose. This was a cake where they would have a bean and pea inserted into the cake, the Twelfth Night cake. There were lots of references to the Twelfth Night cake in literature from the period.
They would've had a bean and pea inserted into the cake and whichever recipient of a slice of cake got the bean and whoever got the pea, they would be king and queen. There would be wassails. They would have toasts drunk to them and they would be king and queen for that evening.
Some are traditions like for example, mince pies, hark back to this period but are very different because the mince pies in early modern England would've been meat-filled, so they wouldn't have been sweet. There are recipes for mince pies with, for instance, veal; minced veal. Puddings often were savory as well. When we talk about Christmas pudding, puddings of all sorts would've been a bit-- a bit like Haggis I think. A blood pudding and lots of very savory intensely highly-flavored puddings, and spices if they could afford to use them. They did have sweet plum pudding which, it's similar, more of a precursor to our Christmas pudding, so a sweet plum pudding. Plums would've grown in, of course, their orchards.
They would've had easy access to a lot of fruits, not potatoes, not sprouts. They wouldn't have had potatoes, of course, they come from the new world. Vegetables would've been rare. There aren't very many vegetables in descriptions of early feasts, either medieval or early modern.
Anjna: Let's hear from Esmé again.
Esmé: Certain groups were not so fond of that aspect definitely, but for ordinary people, this was their big holiday. Their chance to just survive, enjoy and have a wonderful time and that being okay. I think a lot of the time enjoying stuff especially certain things you weren't always meant to. You weren't meant to drink to excess in the Tudor period really, except for Christmas, where suddenly it's absolutely fine to get completely drunk all the time, then it's okay.
I sometimes have this image and this is just my own head but I just have sometimes this image of all these men who are normally working suddenly very much getting in the way at home because their wives are still having to cook the food and the husband should be working but he's actually just drinking with his mates. The normal routine is thrown out the window and that's I think quite key because the routine of daily life is suddenly upended for these 12 days.
Anjna: We will return to this whole notion of disruption to routine. For now, careful planning, saving, and preparation were all clearly imperative. However, from our series so far we've learnt that the watchword of the early modern period was moderation. How, therefore, did people reconcile the business of indulgence with pious abstinence and the sobriety of this Christian festival?
Joan: If they could afford to overindulge, they could compartmentalize some of the difficulties that gluttony being a sin would present them with. Of course, strictly, gluttony isn't simply a sin of overeating, it's a sin of enjoying food.
Anjna: One of the ways in which this compartmentalization might have occurred was by way of charity. If one feasted one's neighbors and donated money to the church and to the poor, the sentiment both moral and spiritual, was enough to counteract the otherwise contradictory emphasis on indulgence.
Esmé: I imagine you're going to feast in other people's houses. I would've thought within the community you would be going-- you are feasting in this person's house, and then the next day you might go to so-and-so's house and you take turns. It's not that one person in the village is the one who's providing all the food. That's not practical, in a village community anyway. Although I think generosity was important so I imagine that those who were better off, it was their time to be generous and to give to those who were less well off.
Anjna: In a diary entry from 1667, Samuel Pepys wrote:
Actor: "It being a fine, light, moonshine morning, and so home round the city, and stopped and dropped money at five or six places, which I was the willinger to do, it being Christmas Day, and so home, and there find my wife in bed, and Jane and the maids making pies, and so I to bed, and slept well."
Anjna: Being financially the "willinger", or more disposed to generosity at Christmas, was extremely significant whether by way of food or money, benevolence often due to hospitality was a given.
Now if we circle back to the morality for a moment, the material culture feasting is itself rather curious. To learn more about a specific example, this is material culture historian Nic Fulcher, formerly of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust.
Nic Fulcher: I think from that height of Christmas and that whole idea of "the best is the best" is the notion of your banqueting. We still use the term banquet, don't we, to associate with a fine meal? Whereas the banqueting course in the Elizabethan period was the last course where the top table, if you like, would withdraw from the main dining call into a separate room, to do the sweet meats and the treats at the end of it. Little luxury items often made of marchpane, the forerunner to marzipan, but also just those things that are created to look beautiful sometimes covered with gold leaf, sometimes beautifully iced with powdered sugar and lemon juice applied with a feather. That beautiful almost patisserie, as we would know it today, this lovely delicate thing.
They were often served on what were known as Posy trenches; a circle of wood sliced very thinly, left usually plain on one side for the sweet meat to be put on. Then on the flip side of it would be beautifully painted and decorated and usually with a motto in the middle of it. Some coming from the Bible. Interestingly, probably the forerunner of Christmas crackers in many ways that you've got this motto. Of course, they usually come in sets of eight because that's usually how many people you had in your banqueting course on that side of things but they would also stimulate conversation.
Some of them actually come in sets where the motto all runs through, so you need all eight of them together to be able to do it. In the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust collections, we have a couple of sets of Posy trenches. One particularly, it again, is a set of eight and has lovely little moral sayings on the other side and you can understand how it would then enable people to have a conversation, a bit of a party breaker I suppose in many ways, but seeing as you've eaten it, you're eating it right at the end of the banquet and had quite a lot of drink to go with. I'm not entirely sure you would need much encouragement [laughs] at this point in the time.
Anjna: Before you question the efficacy of moral sayings etched into one's tableware, it's helpful to remind ourselves about Dr. Tara Hamling's observations from Episode 3:
Dr. Tara Hamling: The idea was that you focus and you meditated on death during life. There's a phrase Memento Mori; remember you must die, that you see a lot in the visual and material culture of the period. Objects could really help with prompting remembrance. If you think about it, when are you most at liberty to think about things? It's when you're doing the mundane, the ordinary things in your daily routine.
Anjna: The posy trenches from the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust collection that Nic mentioned, bear phrases such as:
Voice-over: -"Who in his life is void of care, shall, in the end, have simple fair."
Anjna: And…
Voice-over: "He that climbs higher than he should is like to fall lower than he would."
Anjna: Although not about mortality, such mottos fall into Tara's category of Protestant instructive meditations on everyday morality. Let us veer away from the gravity of this subject back to the concepts of community and hospitality. Here's Nic Fulcher again.
Nic: Within the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust collection, we have the beautiful cristallo glass wine bowl, a high-end piece but roughly 1600-Venetian beautiful crystal glass wine bowl. The top end of your punch bowls which takes you into that whole realm of wassailing and all those traditions that also happened at this particular time of year. Wassailing both in terms of the Christmas for sale, the one that is there for celebrations, and then the other form of wassailing, which is the one for ensuring a good harvest for the following year. It varies in different parts of the country.
If you're in a malt-growing area, you're going to be wassailing with heated beer. Whereas if you're in an orchard area, Herefordshire where they make cider. There's loads of variations. You also get the lovely dish of what is known as lambswool, which has bits of bread soaked into it as well, which then puffs up with the liquor. It looks like lamb's wool, and you often find that there were bits of toast at the bottom of it, so hence the reason probably why we still raise a toast today.
Anjna: Having a nice drink, wassailing, and raising toasts to the coming seasons was all part of encouraging community spirit. Now, what about Christmas outfits? What were people wearing? Nic Fulcher tells us more about garments for special occasions.
Nic: Clothing was normally bought in its raw form, the material. You will find that there is material expenditure, but not necessarily what is actually being worn. However, that said, obviously, the 12 Days of Christmas and Epiphany; the 6th of January, is this time for feasting festivals. It's a display of your wealth and your social position, despite the fact you're entertaining people. As you go up the social scale, you're then getting into the realms of the masked balls.
There is more than one sense of dressing up going on here in the fact that you are dressing up. For the masked balls, you may be putting on costumes to represent other characters. Inevitably, behind all of that, you aren't going to be wearing your Sunday best or your best clothes that go with it.
Anjna: On the night of her wedding day, Juliet cannot contain her excitement, and longs for Romeo to visit her exclaiming.
Actor: "So tedious is this day As is the night before some festival To an impatient child that hath new robes And may not wear them."
Anjna: Before a festival like Christmas, how common was it to have new robes?
Nic: It depends on your means to do it, it depends on the need as well. Of course, you've also got to take into account the time it takes to make something. Most people are going to be making their own. The higher up the social scale you go, the more you can afford, or the more that you can actually get by being given gifts. Again, this whole celebration period around Christmastide, and you have the tradition of New Year's Day gifts. Of course, Elizabeth was a very shrewd person and knew very well that she could drop into conversation that she really did favor material, dresses, jewelry, and lo and behold, it's what people gave her. No surprise there.
It also, in some of the accounts that you have of people doing the day to day, that the trimmings and the stuff that goes with your costumes or your outfits, and the materials, would be sold at market because they were small enough and consumable enough to be sold almost in that side of things. Bolts of cloth or large amounts of cloth was a significant investment. If you're buying a yard as it was then, roughly a meter of cloth of gold, you're talking about a laborers' wage of six months for a yard of cloth of gold. It is incredibly expensive, any sort of fabric, and hence the reason that you have that modular approach and the clothing, even the Queen.
We know what was in the queen's wardrobe at the time of her death because that is in the infantry. There are just short of, or around, 2,000 items of clothing but they're all separates. Obviously, by having all these separate pieces, the Queen's outfit could be different from day to day and you could put different sleeves with different bodices, different dresses, or different dress material over it. You can really combine all of these and produce those amazing things, hence the reason that it's all modular and held together with braids or ribbons or laces, or indeed, pins.
Anjna: The tradition of giving New Year's gifts is an important one. Our early modern counterparts marked the start of a new year with small tokens always of course commensurate with one's sort and accompanying resources. Nic tells us that small items of wearables were exchanged as New Year's gifts, a bit of lace, a new collar, et cetera. In 1668, Samuel Pepys recorded buying some furniture for his wife as a New Year's gift for which he paid the handsome sum of £11, a pretty substantial gift.
One of the most commonly practiced Christmas traditions was centered around music or generally speaking, entertainment. Music and dance historian Roxanne Bennis explains how budgets were set out in advance for the Christmas festivities for the men at the Inns of Court.
Roxanne Bennis: 1527, those who shall keep Commons at Christmas, so these are the ones who weren't going home, they were actually staying at the Inns of Court over the Christmas holidays, they should be allowed one boar, which is obviously the boar's head for the feast, the stipend of the minstrels at Christmas, 30 shillings and a cartload of coals for fuel. Right there, you've got the boar's head, the food, the coals to stay warm, and 30 shillings to pay musicians for the 12 Days of Christmas.
It was right there, assumed you're having music and dancing and partying. There was also a song from the time. It is ‘A Glee at Christmas’. It starts off very serious, "'Tis Christmas now! When Cato's self could laugh, And smoothing forth his wrinked brow, Gives liberty to quaff, To dance and sing, to sport and play, For every hour's a holiday. And for the 12 days, let them pass In mirth and jollity: The time doth call each lad and lass, That will be blythe and merry, To dance, to stance, to sing, to sport and play, For every hour's a holiday."
Then I think they get really optimistic here because it says, "And from the rising of the sun To the setting, cast off cares; 'Tis time enough when 12 is done. To think of our affairs."
I think that sums it up. The 12 Days of Christmas was dancing, singing, music, drinking, and eating. There is this much more communal feel about it. Especially the king, the nobles, the lords of the manor, they were expected to extend hospitality. I really think it had a lot to do with that communal and sense of community and everyone celebrating together.
There's also a lot of references to people going around to do-- The mummers. The mummers would go around to different houses as even today to a certain extent, but there were all these activities where you went round the community to the houses, and you were given food and drink. It was almost in a way of really getting a lot of people through a really hard cold lean time. It's a great way of having fun, but it was also a great way to beg for that bit extra without looking like you were begging because you were helping the party.
Anjna: In Love’s Labour’s Lost, the character Biron laments that his strategy for wooing women has been thwarted by the much more savvy party of ladies.
Biron: "I see the trick on't: here was a consent, Knowing aforehand of our merriment, To dash it like a Christmas comedy."
Anjna: Biron’s reference to a Christmas comedy implies that humorous festive entertainment was calculatedly subversive, something that dashes or dismantles expectations. We'll return to the subversive aspect of Christmas entertainment shortly. Before that, let's learn a bit more about festive partying.
Roxanne: They also had mummers' plays, rowdy and silly and knockabout humor and lots of in-political jokes and that sort of thing. Did you know that Ben Jonson wrote a mummers' play? It's actually called Christmas, His Masque. When you read the thing, it's a mummers' play. All these weird characters come in, they say silly things, but it's rather interesting because Father Christmas comes in and this is how Father Christmas is dressed, according to Ben Jonson; round hose, long stockings, a closed doublet, color is not specified though.
A high crowned hat with a broach, a long, thin beard, little roughs, white shoes, scarves, and garters tied cross, cross-tied. And for some reason, he's carrying a truncheon. That's father Christmas for you, in Tudor times. Father Christmas did not bring presents to children. What's interesting is he comes in with 10 of his children. This is Misrule.
Misrule is wearing a velvet cap with a sprig, a short cloak, a great yellow ruff, like a reveler, and accompanied by a torch bearer. So we are talking the absolute overdressed foppish, dandy. Minced Pie is one of the characters. Mumming in a masking pied suit with a visor. New Year's Gift in a blue coat, like a serving man, with an orange, a sprig of Rosemary gilt on his head, his hat full of broaches and a color of gingerbread, with his torch bearer carrying a marchpane and a bottle of wine under either arm.
Then the important one, the musical reference, is Carol, who is actually a boy. He comes in wearing a long tonic coat with a red cap and a flute at his girdle. Flute could have been either flute or recorder, of course. His torch bearer, carrying before him a songbook open. There you've got though, in this mask, one of the 10 children is singing, and music: Christmas Carol. The interesting thing is because when we say carol, we tend to think of all the very solemn, slow Victorian carols.
Carol originally meant a jolly song. It was a jolly song. You had Mayday carols. You could even have Easter carols. This is why we always still refer to Christmas carols. You think it's redundant but it isn't because a carol could be sung about any topic at any holiday at any time. By the way, one Christmas carol that we still sing today which does go back to Tudor times is God rest ye merry gentleman.
It would've been sung, "God rest ye merry gentleman." It wasn't this, "God rest ye merry gentleman." [laughs] The first Christmas carol book that we know of was published in 1521, literally Wynkyn de Worde, W-Y-N-K-E-N D-E W-O-R-D-E, and it is our source for the Boar's Head Carol.
Anjna: Of course, the serious festive entertainments took place at court. To learn more about how royalty enjoyed Christmas, let's hear from Brett Dolman, curator at Historic Royal Palaces. Let's begin by defining what court actually was in 1603, the year of Shakespeare's great promotion.
Brett Dolman: The court is a movable concept, so it doesn't just stay in one place. It moves from palace to palace. You get places like Hampton court filled at Christmas with perhaps up to a thousand courtiers, visiting ambassadors and their servants, all needing to be fed and entertained, but also meeting to make big decisions about the country. This describes what Hampton court would have looked and felt like in 1603, which is the first-- or the first English court of James I and James VI of Scotland. It would have been a busy, crowded, loud place.
Normally, it would've been a dirty and trashed and exhausted place after a few weeks, which is why the court then tends to move on to somewhere else. If you can imagine all of the necessary stuff that had to happen and be cooked and washed to support that many people in residence, all crammed together for such a period of time, at some point it needs to go somewhere else. Well, let me paint you a picture first of 1603 in particular. Queen Elizabeth has died and we have a new Monarch. You have quite an exciting new, young royal family. You haven't had a royal family to look at, to gorp at for quite a long time. Elizabeth was famously childless.
You have a king, in James I, but you also have his queen, Queen Anne of Denmark, where she came from. Also, their nine-year-old son, Prince Henry. There's been plague across the summer of 1603, the court is moved for Christmas out of pestilential London to Hampton court, which is considered to be a bit safer, a bit more rural. The courtiers are gathering there to have fun but also to see this new royal family. There was a real sense of optimism and looking at a king who's ruled successfully in Scotland already and people are hoping for a new era of religious and political peace, I think.
James has got this name as being a Rex Pacificus, a peaceful king that's interested in peace, not war, of finding compromise. All of these things are coming together and you get all of the courtiers and ambassadors arriving at Hampton court in December. Yes, to take care of matters of business of state, but also to have a festival of Christmas and to look at and study and hopefully be impressed by the new royal family.
Anjna: As Brett mentioned, court was a place of lobbying, politicking and power playing. Famously, in January, at the end of the Christmas period, James held the Hampton court conference to discuss all matters religious. The outcome of which was the commissioning of the King James Bible, which was an attempt to appease the pious sobriety of the Presbyterians as well as the hangover high Anglicanism of the post reformation. It was in this mélange of religious and political debate that the King's Men performed at Hampton court palace.
Brett: What we know about what happened then in 1603, once the court has gathered at Hampton court, is you get this intoxicating festival and occasionally intoxicated festival of plays, of dances, of masks and banquets. One of the key groups who are performing at this festival are the newly liveried King's Men. They have not only been recognized as one of the leading acting troops on the public stage, the king is now saying, "I'm going to give you royal patronage, so you're going to be called the King's Men.
They become courtiers. They're grooms of the chamber, which is a functioning title within the royal court. For that, they're awarded red gowns for the previous year so that they have a uniform, if you like. We know that they came to court. We know that Shakespeare was there and we know that they were paid £53 for performing six plays over the Christmas season. Four in front of the king and two in front of Prince Henry.
We don't know what these plays were, except that we know that one of them was almost certainly A Midsummer Night's Dream because one of the audience, a courtier called Dudley Carlton, he records that-- I'm going to quote from a letter that he wrote. "We have had here a merry Christmas. The first holy days, we had, every night, a public play in the great hall. On new year's night, we had a play of Robin Goodfellow and a mask brought in by a magician of China."
Most people agree that Robin Goodfellow was probably A Midsummer Night's Dream. Another play that was probably performed was Hamlet. This would've all have taken place, as Carlton has described, in the evening entertainment amidst the or after the political meetings and the daily religious services that would've taken place during the day. Well, first of all, you have to imagine the great hall at Hampton court, which is one of the few surviving spaces where we know that Shakespeare performed. This, on a normal day, would've been a works canteen.
You'd have had all of the courtiers, the lower ranks of courtiers, being fed there twice a day. On special occasions, you'd have had an army of painters, glaziers, plasterers, feather makers, carpenters, and wire drawers, who were the people that strung wires across the ceilings on which chandeliers would've hung, all coming together to transform these spaces into magically lit theaters.
In the evening, with the candle light and all of the color of all of the costumes of the courtiers that were gathered there and the tapestries that were on display, woven with their gold and silver thread, the whole thing would've been genuinely a magical, busy, fun experience to have. We've got an eyewitness account, not of 1603 but of a bit later, Orazio Busino, who is a Venetian diplomat at court in 1618. He complains of the overcrowding.
"We moreover," he says, "Had the additional affliction of a Spaniard who came into our box by favor of the master of ceremonies asking but for two fingers' breadth of room, although we, ourselves, had not space to run about in. I swear to God that he placed himself more comfortably than any of us." All of these people, important people, were crammed into terraced seats, we think, that would've been either side of a stage that would've taken up the middle of the great hall, with the king and queen on a raised platform at the end, and the actors entering from the opposite end of the hall.
I think it's worth pointing out that James's court becomes pilloried, criticized, admittedly, most frequently from the safety of the commonwealth a bit later, by people that said-- Well, they described James's court as being full of spangle babies in a nursery of lust. I've amalgamated two quotes. It's Thomas Dekker, the playwright who writes of spangle babies, people covered in costume and jewelry and extravagance.
A nursery of lust describes, from a Puritan point of view, the debauched behavior of courtiers. Everything was criticized, from the short skirts of the lady maskers, including the Queen herself, through to the lewd behavior. This is a young court. This is the thing to emphasize. This is a space full of 20-somethings and 30-somethings having fun. Of course, it's not always successful. James complains during one performance, "What did they make me come here for?" It was a big ask.
These plays had to be successful. Sometimes they weren't and sometimes they went on too long. Orazio Busino in 1618, a Venetian diplomat, he complains that the performances went on into the early hours and then everybody was so hungry that they went through to the next room and descended on the buffet "like so many harpies," he says. The plates and the glass on the tables collapsed and crashed and smashed everywhere. It's not a formal state occasion. It is a time for letting your hair down and having fun.
Anjna: I asked Brett about the implications of some of Shakespeare's work being performed in front of James. Plays such as Macbeth, King Lear and Measure for Measure, for instance, which all deal with pretty rotten kings and leaders.
Brett: There was propaganda in Shakespeare's plays. In as much as that he is, as a playwright, acutely aware that he is writing not just for the public stage but for the court stage too. James, the king, is also equally aware that he is a very visible manifestation of monarchy. He says himself in Basilikon Doron, which is his book on states craft, that the king is as one set on a stage whose smallest actions and gestures all the people gazingly do behold.
This means that particularly on occasions at court where you have the king at one end of the court watching a performance, that people are watching him and his reactions as much as they're watching the performance. Shakespeare knows this too. You get plays like Measure for Measure, for example, which we know was performed at court the Christmas after 1603, where it's a play about a corrupt legal system and it's the Duke's intervention that saves the day. You can say that therefore it's the king acting as an all-knowing, all-powerful, just ruler coming to solve a real genuine political problem.
There were ways in which you could read Shakespeare's plays, some of them, as facilitating the King's message to come out. It doesn't mean that he doesn't shy away, as a playwright, from controversial subjects. You get something like King Lear, which is all about kingship and the right of a ruler to act. You also get Macbeth, which is a really interesting play because it's essentially about James's ancestors.
You also get Hamlet, which we think was probably performed in 1603. Hamlet, I’ll paint you a picture of Hamlet being performed at court. Within Hamlet, you have the scene of a play within a play, where you have a play being watched by the king and queen of Denmark. At the other end of the hall, in a court performance, you have a real king and queen watching a king and queen watching a performance. It's a play within a play within a play. Then you have the audience watching James and Queen Anne, who is, after all, also from the Danish royal family.
There's layers of meaning and messaging within a court performance that would have not been lost on the well read, well informed political courtiers there at the time. This is a book by Alvin Kernan and the book is called Shakespeare, the King's Playwright: Theatre in the Stuart Court, 1603-13. One of his chapters is on Macbeth and how it would have gone down at court. According to the original stage direction, a show of eight kings, the eighth with a glass in his hand who parades across the stage like a living family tree.
In the mirror, carried presumably by the last of the eight kings, could have been held up to show the ninth Stuart King, who is James himself, reflected sitting in his throne during their performance in August, 1606. Also, nor did the line of Stuart kings end with him, for the play prophesizes that he shall be the progenitor of many more who shall carry the symbols of rule over both England and Scotland.
I think there is a thing there which is making a case for a new beginning and also very much the other topic of the year is Britain. Great Britain is a phrase that James is actually fond of himself, and he is the first monarch that is uniting the two crowns. They're still two separate crowns of England and Scotland. This new idea of uniting the clans was something which needed support. It needed a marketing voice, if you like, and maybe there were parts of Macbeth which are part of that.
Anjna: It's always struck me as audacious of any playwright, let alone Shakespeare, to presume, to lecture a monarch on the nature of, well, monarching. Actually, Brett had a wonderfully thoughtful response to this.
Brett: I think that Shakespeare wouldn't have had such a successful decade as a court dramatist if he had crossed the line too many times. I think that he became expert in recognizing and addressing issues of the day that everybody was, after all, talking about, but then packaging his plays so that the plays became potentially a vehicle to produce a royal response.
They don't shy away necessarily from controversial subject matter but they provide a way of creating an answer for James to make himself, through the vehicle of the play. I'm not saying that that's always successful but I think that James, as a king, is also very aware that these are debates that are being had within his court about religion, about politics, about divine right to rule, about Great Britain as a concept.
It would have been foolish as a king to ignore them. You have to address them. If you are able to address them and talk about them whilst getting your point across, and if you managed to package that up as a form of entertainment at the same time, so people don't even know they're being lectured at, then I think that's quite a powerful-- It is wrong to call it propaganda, I think, because propaganda is more of a modern word but I think it's very clever marshaling of the resources that are at your disposal to try and get your point across.
Anjna: Notwithstanding all of this marshaling of resources to edutain court and king, I can't help but wonder where the fun actually was in any of this entertainment.
Brett: Well, the really fun, spectacular, headline, fun entertainment packages were the masks rather than the plays. The plays are performing a dual function of, if you like, serious entertainment, what we'd call something to get your intellectual juices flowing, but there were also Shakespearean comedies as well and there are comedy elements within other plays which are there to provide the light relief of some of the more serious, testing moments.
You have the mask, which is a combination of music, of play, of dance, and also very much more, of propaganda because, generally speaking, a mask followed a very similar plot. You had a world that in some way was thrown into chaos and it's only through the advent, normally of the arrival of the monarch or a cipher for the monarch in terms of a god or something like that, they would come along and then create order out of chaos and then everybody would have a spectacular dance and take to the floor and have a good time. That's the bit, I think, that people genuinely look forward to, if you like, and you have colossal stage sets and enormous amounts of expense that were utilized for creating these fantastical, immersive moments of theater for the mask.
Anjna: Such material exuberance inevitably trickled down from fashionable court into the manor houses of the country, setting high standards for Christmas entertainment. Brett's reference to fantastical theater coupled with Nic's discussion about dresses and costumes and masks helpfully leads us into one of the most curious conceptualizations of Christmas celebrations from the period, and circles us back to the concept of subversion.
Earlier on, Esme talked about the disruption to daily routines in domestic life brought about by the extended break from work. This disruption was something that featured heavily in the tradition of the Lord and Lady of Misrule, who, as Jane stated earlier, were chosen after located the beans and peas in the Twelfth Night cake. Here's Esme again to tell us a little bit more.
Esme: The Lord of Misrule is basically the person who's in charge of the Christmas festivities. They are in charge of the 12 nights of Christmas. The point is, they are not a Lord. They are usually someone fairly lowly. It's the idea of everything being turned on its head and the servant becoming the master. Obviously, one has to be a little careful when one is the Lord of Misrule, not to go too overboard on that. They were in charge, and it was often, frankly, someone a bit reputable. I always imagine Falstaff would be a brilliant Lord of Misrule. It's that kind of person, it's the Lord of Misrule. It's the guy you go to the pub with who gets drunk and has the good ideas.
Anjna: We've heard a lot, over the course of this series, about Protestant memento mori, and the consciousness of death woven into everyday narratives, and even domestic tasks and objects. Another less morbid but no less depressing early modern assumption was to do with transience. Nothing, in other words, is going to last. Just listen to the lyrics from first day's song in Twelfth Night.
Actor: What is love? ‘Tis not hereafter/ Present mirth hath present laughter/ What's to come is still unsure/ In delay there lies no plenty./ Then come kiss me, sweet-and-twenty./ Youth's a stuff will not endure.
Anjna: Here's Nic again.
Nic: To a play that bears the name Twelfth Night, and I know there's a lot of academic debate about when it was performed, when it was written for, all of that, but obviously it has that association with Twelfth Night. This time of misrule and its social inversion. Of course, you've got all of these things going on in the play, haven't you? About people outside of their class, imagining what it would be like to be within that social class?
Of course, most importantly by Malvolio, who believes that his Lady, Olivia, would even entertain the idea of marrying her servant and not somebody who is of her social standing. Then all of this starts to tie up with the things that he eludes to, Malvolio, he mentions he imagines wearing a branched velvet gown or playing with some rich jewel. He's imagining through what he would be wearing, would bring him to the social standing of Olivia.
It's a deliberate ploy, isn't it? That Shakespeare, through his characters, then brings down Malvolio by making him dress up. He is dressing up in his famous cross gutters and his yellow stockings. The audiences, at the period, would have known this as well. Cross guttering is so out of fashion by 1601 on that side of things, so it's a ridiculous thing to be doing in any case.
There is an Elizabethan popular song in which the husband longs in this popular song for his carefree days of being a bachelor, and it's called Give me my yellow hose again. Yellow hose was associated with young people. Malvolio is just being made such a fool of that the opportunity of doing this around something that it's framed in that whole idea of Twelfth Night is really interesting, and it was a big thing that people are moving out of their social circles.
Anjna: Twelfth Night succinctly disrupts all kinds of routines. The steward becomes the master, the maid marries the Knight of the realm, a woman becomes a man, a fool becomes a priest, a man falls in love with a boy, and a woman with a girl. The play ends with a threat of revenge. The play's title cleverly engages with the expectation of subversion in the Christmas period, and most especially with the notion of ending. Youth's a stuff will not endure, and what's to come is still unsure. Everything, in the end, moves on. The beginning of winter marks the transition into the new year.
There was a bizarre co-mingling of fear and optimism this time. After all, the worst months in terms of cold, darkness and death are always after December, in January and February. Just as the temporary holiday, social and domestic disruption cannot last. So too were the good times come to an end. It was this pervasive and cold pragmatism that lent the Christmas period it's hybrid celebratory feel coupled with a sense of gravity. Shakespeare's very few references to Christmas echo this tonal confusion. Consider this from Hamlet.
Actor: Some say that ever against that season comes wherein our Savior's birth is celebrated, the bird of dawning singeth all night long, and then they say, no spirit dares stir abroad. The nights are wholesome, then no planets strike. No fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm. So hollowed and so gracious is the time.
Anjna: The crossover between the supernatural and the birth of Christ was a palpable one throughout the period. The sentiment ties in with ideas about winter, grief and darkness. In The Winter's Tale, the doomed child, Mamillius, tells his mother that:
Actor: "A sad tale is best for winter. I have one of sprites and goblins."
Anjna: Let's try to unpack this a little more with Esme.
Esme: It is winter, and winter is dark and cold and has bad things. They used to tell ghost stories at Christmas. They tell stories of evil spirits. There is an element of reflection in Christmas as well. You are reflecting, because those 12 days also do include new year as well, so there is that part of-- there is an element of reflection and thinking about the old year and the new year. A bit like All Hollows', it's a time when the spiritual and the real become slightly more intertwined.
The veil between this world and that world become a bit thinner. It crops up a lot in festivals, but I think particularly in winter festivals, because All Hallows' is also a winter festival where-- That's where that thing of ghost stories. There is that idea of, "The spirits aren't that far away. It's dark out there. They're probably wandering around out there right now." That would be, I think, on the mind of a Tudor, more than it would be on ours now. We have the idea of Christmas spirits in the modern day. Father Christmas is a Christmas spirit, and we have his elves and they had spirits, both good and bad, of course. It's still winter and it's still a bit scary out there.
Anjna: The coldness and darkness of winter, I think, haunt Shakespeare's plays. The dread, as well as the reality of surviving an inevitable season of death and darth seeps through the DNA of the plays and poetry, and overshadows any joy or mirth associated with Christmas.
Actor: For never-resting time on. To hideous winter and confounds him there. Sap checked with frost and lusty leaves quite gone. Beauty o'er-snowed and bareness everywhere.
Anjna: The melancholy tinge to the festivities was compounded by its transience. The harsh realities of winter, the proximity of the supernatural and the inevitable end of celebration, subversion and disruption, marking your return to normality and, crucially, work. One of the most vivid portraits of domestic life painted by Shakespeare is in a song from Love's Labour's Lost, in which we imagine the coughing, cooking and general living through the winter.
Actor: When icicles hang by the wall, and Dick, the shepherd, blows his nail, and Tom bears logs into the hall, and milk comes frozen home in pail. When blood is nipped, and ways be foul, then nightly sings the staring owl, to-whit, to-whoo, a merry note, whilst greasy Joan doth keel the pot. When all around the wind doth blow, and coughing drowns the parson's saw, and birds sit brooding in the snow, and Marian's nose looks red and raw. When roasted crabs hiss in the bowl, then nightly sings the staring owl, to-whit, to-whoo, a merry note, while greasy Joan doth keel the pot.
Anjna: I adore that extract. So wrap up warm, wassail with whatever happens to be local, pop on your best frock and belt out some carols - but make sure they're in double time. Thank you all for joining me in this thoroughly thrilling and marvelously mirthful Christmas episode of Shakespeare's Pants. Have a very merry Christmas and a superlative new year.
Remember to share this special episode with all your friends and family. Do let me know what subjects you'd like me to cover in the next series. In this episode, you heard the voices of Esme Wise, Roxanne Bennis, Dr. Joan Fitzpatrick, Nic Fulcher, Dr. Tara Hamling, Brett Dolman and me, Dr. Anjna Chouhan. You also heard the voices of Pete Smith, Rich Bunn, Sarah Horner, Tim Atkinson and Lorna Giltrow-Shaw. A thousand festive wishes unto you all. Farewell.
Voice-over: Shakespeare's Pants. Christmas Special.
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