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 ...
Thanks CondoleezzaProtege.
You’re welcome! I was thinking of pinging you but you beat me to it :)!
I blame midsummer madness.
June 21 is the start of summer not the middle of summer.
BTW Midwinter is February 1.
Hi.
As Americans sometimes do, we moved the summer solstice to Memorial day so the date moves around again.
5.56mm
It seems the Anglo-Saxons and other medieval Europeans did not use the term "spring" until the later Middle Ages. Lent was what they called the season that followed winter. Summer began in the middle of what we now call spring.
August 1st is Lammas-a harvest festival celebrated in ancient times by both Christians and Pagans...
And we moved the autumnal equinox to Labor Day.
Harvest festival is Samhain October 31 or November 1.
Yep.
5.56mm
Samhain and Lammas were both Harvest festivals-Samhain was the last one-the end of the harvest and beginning of Winter-my Brit neighbor said there were 3 harvest festivals in ancient times over there-the 1st one was before Lammas-I’ll ask her what it was called and when it was when I see her next...
You’ll blame it more when we actually get there.
It just passed.
As Americans sometimes do, we moved the summer solstice to Memorial day
No, as a matter of fact, we haven't. The 100 year skip of February 29 was itself skipped in 2000. That has had a small impact (a shift of one day) on some of the upcoming equinoxes and solstices.
Southern hemisphere. My friends in Argentina and Australia are looking forward to the summer.
Summer began on the 21st. of the month, a week ago. Mid summer won’t be until late August.
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