How Shakespeare Helped Shape Christmas As We Know It Today

From Daniel McCarthy at The New York Post:

“Hamlet” isn’t altogether a Christmas play, but Christmas is a conspicuous part of it. And there is good reason to think that “Hamlet” was much on the minds of two authors who shaped modern conceptions of Christmas in the 19th century. Clement Clarke Moore’s 1823 poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas” (“’Twas the night before Christmas. . .”) includes the charming line “Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse” — which echoes the guard at Elsinore who reports “Not a mouse stirring.” Twenty years later in “A Christmas Carol,” Charles Dickens would refer to Hamlet’s ghost in his own tale of yuletide hauntings.

In fact, Dickens observes the rule Marcellus set down in “Hamlet”: The ghosts are gone, their work accomplished, by the dawn of Christmas Day. There’s a faint reminder of “Hamlet” in an earlier Dickens tale set at Christmas as well. As in “Hamlet,” an impudent gravedigger features in a Christmas episode of “The Pickwick Papers,” “The Story of the Goblins Who Stole a Sexton.” Curiously, the goblin who first accosts the gravedigger has a catchphrase — “Ho! Ho! Ho!” — now familiar with a very different Christmas character. Moore and Dickens knew their Shakespeare, and when they set out to create new stories for the season, they didn’t forget the precedents the Bard had provided, few though they were.

“A sad tale’s best for winter: I have one of sprites and goblins,” says Mamillius in “The Winter’s Tale.” In Shakespeare’s day, sprites and goblins — and ghosts — were seasonally appropriate before Christmas. There’s debate about whether Shakespeare invented the “Marcellus rule” that banned such beings from Christmas Day onward, through Twelfth Night on the eve of Epiphany. Yet if there were no ghosts, there were other kinds of spirits. The “Twelve Days of Christmas” were a time of revelry — drinking, singing, putting on plays, and merriment — when not Santa Claus but a “Lord of Misrule” was the mascot of the season.

In Shakespeare’s age Puritans, much like Hamlet, were scandalized by bibulous customs like the wassail. “Hamlet” reminds us that our Christmas troubles and soul-searching are not altogether new. Shakespeare, too, had to ask whether his country had lost its values: Was it Christian or pagan, Catholic or Protestant, stoically philosophical or, like Hamlet in his agony, nihilistic and despairingly materialist? (Read more.)

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