Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night refers to a religious ritual in its title that then is excised from the play. It appears to conform in that way to what Stephen Greenblatt has called “a sense of rituals and beliefs that are no longer efficacious, that have been emptied out.” Yet the play does not conform to such an antithesis of performance and belief. Rather, it is full of mimetic forms of emotion that embody a sense of ritual that revives and reforms social memory. This chapter examines both social ritual and festive forms (both real and fictional) via analogies with liturgy and masque, on the one hand, and theories of memory and emotion, on the other. In the process, it suggests a rewriting of the boundaries of metaphor and embodiment, as well as the sacred and secular.