Shakespeare doesn’t do Christmas. There’s a topic of conversation for the festive season.
It might not make the pub go quiet or set the girlfriend/boyfriend on fire but it could fill an awkward moment at the dinner table.
He didn’t do Easter either, or Whitsun or any major Christian festivals for that matter but let’s keep our focus. You can bring it up again at Easter if you wish and even become a Shakespeare bore like me. Soon nobody will invite you to dinner and then you can relax.
Why doesn’t Shakespeare do Christmas? People ask this (or those who can be bothered, do). They seem to think it’s a poor show, especially as so many heroes of English literature are really big on Christmas – Dickens wallows in it and the Brontes are full of Christmas episodes. Jane Austen too.
So why is Shakespeare so absent, after all, he is supposed to be ‘for all time’, according to fellow playwright Ben Jonson. So why not Christmas? None of Shakespeare’s plays are set at Christmas, however. Even “Twelfth Night”, which is commonly considered to be a Christmas play, contains nothing to do with Christmas.
The word Christmas does indeed appear a very few times in a distinctly lacklustre tone, such as in Love’s Labours Lost:
At Christmas I no more desire a rose
Than wish a snow in May’s new-fangled mirth
But you can sort of tell that The Bard is not too enthusiastic about it all. You can almost imagine him adding ‘and I have no use for rose-tinted glasses either’.
I think I know the answer to his strange absence from the festive scene. It is not because people in the sixteenth century didn’t have much of a festive season, they certainly did. It’s not because he was non -religious either (though he doesn’t appear to have been a particularly fervent Christian – just plain God-respecting), and it’s certainly not what Max Beerbohm, the Victorian writer and critic proposed in 1896 – that Christmas Day was his wife Anne Hathaway’s birthday (she of the second-best bed) and was therefore a day he would prefer to forget. Their relationship may have been dodgy but there is absolutely no record of when she was born.
In reality, the word Christmas is remarkable for where it does not appear in his works. Take this marvellous poem that is simply entitled ‘Winter’
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,
Tu-who;
Tu-whit, tu-who: a merry note,
While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.
When all aloud 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,
Tu-who;
Tu-whit, tu-who: a merry note,
While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.
It is one of the most evocative seasonal poems ever written and as I start to read it, I am thinking ‘ah yes, a Christmas poem’, but it is absolutely not. Because Shakespeare as we know, doesn’t do Christmas.
And now, as we further consider those words, the real reason sticks out a mile- because as this poem shows, Shakespeare is the most unsentimental writer there has ever been. He simply will not do sentimentality, he sticks to the facts and he lets the truth of the facts and the characters speak for themselves. And the main fact is that Christmas even four hundred years ago, had a whiff of that sugary false emotion called sentimentality, that is now the norm.
Passion he does -yes. Violence yes. Pain and despair certainly, because he portrays the human condition in the raw – just like Marian’s nose in the poem. But be sure of this, Shakespeare does not do schmaltz or any form of sentiment, that ‘exaggerated and self-indulgent tenderness, sadness, or nostalgia.’ (OED). Such spurious emotions ‘full of sound and fury signifying nothing’ simply do not interest him.
If you don’t believe this go to Romeo and Juliet, a play with more potential for schmaltz than any I can imagine and look for sentimentality – you will not find it though you may think you do, when you see lines such as
Good night, good night! parting is such sweet sorrow,
Or
“thus with a kiss I die”
And these are indeed the passionate words of two very young and let’s face it, rather foolish lovers that The Bard portrays in this way to emphasise the underlying message of the play – that love and sweetness and tenderness are understandable but highly dangerous for young people in a cruel and violent world. To love, he says, may be part of human nature but you do so at your peril.
Shakespeare lived in an age when people struggled with (in the words of Jan Kott, the late Polish political activist and Shakespeare authority) ”the divergence between the greatness of the human mind and the frailty of the moral order”, an age of intrigue and violence in politics and in entertainment, with mounting fear at the social and economic changes that were happening. In short, an age strangely similar to the age we live in now.
Shakespeare was indeed ‘not of an age, but for all time’ as Ben Jonson so memorably said.
And the reason for this has been well put by publisher Joseph Pearce of The Augustine Institute:
He writes with unsurpassed beauty about the things that unite humanity across all ages and all cultures. He writes of those things that are essentially human, that are part of our very being, of the timeless virtues and the timeless verities, of the timeless vices and the timeless vanities. More to the point, and crucially, he does so from the perspective of Christian orthodoxy, which encompasses the virtues and the verities (the good and the true) and is at war with the vices and the vanities (the deadly sins and the pride which is the deadliest sin of all)
He does not, as Pearce might have added, do schmaltz and that is why he doesn’t do Christmas.
In a few days’ time the movies ‘White Christmas’, ‘It’s A Wonderful Life’ and much more will soon be filling us with almost unbearably phony goodwill and nostalgia for the umpteenth time, as we prepare to gather and over-eat-and-drink as tradition demands. Half the world is struggling with war, famine and destitution but if we have another drink, perhaps we won’t mind so much.
Try instead to look at our world as one man looked at his, four centuries ago – a man who saw reality and recorded it with understanding, compassion and humour. A man who dealt with true human behaviour and emotions without minimising the consequences. It’s an interesting exercise.
