Posted on 06/26/2021 1:46:18 PM PDT by CondoleezzaProtege
The rites and habits associated with ‘midsummer’ clustered around a number of dates in Shakespeare’s time. The June solstice occurs on a day between the 20 and 22 June, but ‘Midsummer Day’ was fixed in the calendar as 24 June (also known as St John’s Day). Midsummer was one of the most popular and keenly-observed festivals throughout the early modern period. Rural communities marked it with Morris dancing, processions, late-night drinking, the blessing of crops and the ritual banishment of devils and other unwelcome sprites – precisely the sort of pagan-originating, Catholic-saint-encompassing mishmash that Protestant reformers despised.
But by the time Shakespeare wrote A Midsummer Night’s Dream, May Day and Midsummer rituals were rare in large towns and were gradually being abandoned in the countryside. Opposition from the church, and from bourgeois society concerned with respectability, put paid to the license of Midsummer. Shakespeare’s neighbours in London were probably more likely to have watched a version of the rites of May in the theatre than to have participated themselves.
Shakespeare evidently thought it important to bring rural culture onto the metropolitan stage, as we’ve seen in our season of YouTube Premieres. From The Merry Wives of Windsor and A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the start of his career to The Two Noble Kinsmen and The Winter’s Tale at the end, he found ways to weave country habits – Maying, Morris dancing, and midsummer madness – into plays written for urban spectators increasingly distant from the pre-Reformation ways of earlier generations.
(Excerpt) Read more at shakespearesglobe.com ...
And right you are. My bad.
Speaking of a summer Solstice day:
Summer Solstice fun without the masks and spacing in London!
Well, y'know, the context is Shakespeare, and in his day, and before, and ever since, the timing of midsummer on the calendar hasn't made sense, OTOH, we don't know their climate as we do our own. The British Isles are pretty high latitude, but are warmed by (I guess it's still called) the Gulf Stream, sufficient to make it possible to grow palm trees in parts of western Scotland.
They also drink their beer warm, and spell aluminum "aluminium".
We kinda say it ‘’labratory’’.
Never once in any science class did any of my teachers make any reference at all to “midsummer”. It’s a term that largely used (correctly) in England and euphemistically in the US. :^)
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