Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-s2hrs Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-03T02:24:49.295Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

12 - Summer's Last Will and Testament: revels' end

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 January 2010

John Guy
Affiliation:
University of St Andrews, Scotland
Get access

Summary

Revels at Tudor schools and universities, and at the Inns of Court, belonged to Christmas. Their raison d'être sprang from the festive calendar; their literary, social and historical significance remained closely tied to those holidays. The fear of revels' end swept down ‘out of the nippe of the north’ during the final decade of Elizabeth's reign. My subject is this Elizabethan fear rather than the end occasioned by the execution of Charles I and Commonwealth revision of the festive calendar. The customs themselves are well documented. I shall look at the transmutation of fin de siècle fears about revels' end in Thomas Nashe's Summer's Last Will and Testament, a play printed in 1600 and probably written and performed in 1592.

The impact of the Reformation on the seasonal customs of England was not immediate but by the 1590s its direction was clear. Patrick Collinson reminds us how fundamental the change would be when the protestant working season finally swallowed the winter months of ‘holy play’:

These seasonal rituals were almost all contained in that half of the year which runs from Christmas to Midsummer, and which can be considered a distinctive and extended festive season, set against the relatively industrious second half of the year with its uninterrupted work discipline. Calendarwise the Reformation amounted to the intrusion of the working season into the months traditionally associated with a kind of holy play, in Phythian-Adam's words, ‘a triumph of the secular half over its ritualistic counterpart’.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Reign of Elizabeth I
Court and Culture in the Last Decade
, pp. 258 - 273
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1995

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×