this holiday was celebrated as a festival in which everything was turned upside down--much like the upside-down, chaotic world of Illyria in the play.More from Wikipedia on Twelfth Night:
In Tudor England, the Twelfth Night marked the end of a winter festival that started on All Hallows Eve--which some now celebrate as Halloween. A King or Lord of Misrule would be appointed to run the Christmas festivities, and the Twelfth Night was the end of his period of rule. The common theme was that the normal order of things was reversed. This Lord of Misrule tradition can be traced back to pre-Christian European festivals such as the Celtic festival of Samhain and the Ancient Roman festival of Saturnalia.Celebrate Twelfth Night by downloading a copy of the Shakespeare's play from Project Gutenberg--4 English versions available:
- First Folio [public domain, with old-style spelling]
- Collins edition [public domain]
- Hudson edition [public domain]
- World Library edition [copyrighted]
- translation by Christoph Martin Wieland [public domain]
Tobacco, banjo playing, and dominoes do not figure in the Decalogue as recorded in the Book of Exodus. But particularly in nineteenth- and twentieth-century America, Christians have been adept, and remarkably inventive, at interpreting God's commandments to cover just about anything they don't approve of. The effect, of course, is to make the surpassingly large God of the scriptures into a petty Cosmic Patrolman. Addictions are not pretty, but for Christians, fretting over them as exclusively moral issues can be a convenient way of ignoring Jesus' admonition that it isn't what we ingest into our bodies that is at the root of our troubles, but what comes out of our hearts and minds.
--Kathleen Norris, Amazing Grace, 1998
