Free Republic

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...

William Shakespeare knew well enough the frustrations of bringing up teenage children. “I would there were no age between sixteen and three-and-twenty,” he wrote in The Winter’s Tale. “For there is nothing in the between but getting wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing, fighting.” Now parents have united online in annoyance at adolescents “wronging the ancientry”, posting pictures of their offspring ignoring their beautiful surroundings in favour of their mobile phone screens. It started with a tweet by the comedian David Baddiel, who shared a picture of his son, Ezra, 13, studying his phone while perched on a...