Christmas Spirits
Of Hamlet, Puritans, and Father Christmas
Ahead of all the storm and stress of the election year, I thought I would launch this substack in a season of goodwill. Christmas has been on my mind professionally as well as personally lately: my syndicated column this past week looked at Shakespeare’s connection to modern Christmas lore, via “Hamlet,” “’Twas the night before Christmas,” and Charles Dickens.
The wider point of my column, though, was that controversies about the character of Christmas celebrations are nothing new. In Shakespeare’s time Christmas meant twelve days of reveling between Christmas Day and Epiphany on January 6. Think of it as a dozen days like Mardi Gras. There wasn’t yet a Father Christmas or Santa Claus associated with the season in England, but it was the custom for Inns of Court and colleges and universities to appoint a “Lord of Misrule,” a mock king to preside over festivities. It was a season of carousing—singing, dancing, drinking, putting on plays, and playfully inverting the social order. Not every Christian approved.
Puritans, in particular, did not. Shakespeare doesn’t make religious conflict an explicit theme of “Hamlet,” but it’s not far beneath the surface. The melancholy prince, dressed all in black, had the habit and certain attitudes characteristic of a Puritan. Despite being “to the manner born,” Hamlet notably disapproves of his kingdom’s custom of drinking the wassail, a kind of a Christmas toast (which had pagan roots and, from what I’ve read, was indeed introduced to the British Isles by the Danes). Prince Hamlet is not simply a stand-in for Puritanism, however. He and his friends are students at Wittenberg, a symbol of Protestant learning—but Lutheran rather than Calvinist. (For the aficionado of the English stage, Wittenberg might also bring to mind Christopher Marlowe’s Faustus.) The prince and his companions at the university are studying the pagan classics as well: near the end of the play Horatio confesses to being “more an antique Roman than a Dane.” Hamlet’s own dialogue attests to his struggle to decide whether he is a Stoic—indifferent to the slings and arrows of outrageous misfortune and content even to die to suicide—or a Christian, concerned for the “undiscovered country” that awaits his immortal soul.
Yet to the extent Hamlet is a Christian, he’s a perverse one: he chooses not to murder Claudius, the usurper who killed Hamlet’s father (his own brother ), when the king is praying, lest he die in a state of grace. Hamlet wants to kill him while he’s sinning to ensure he goes to hell. (To make matters more complicated, Hamlet’s father, whose ghost wanders the castle by night, is evidently in Purgatory, a realm or condition in which Protestants generally do not believe.) The wickedness of Hamlet’s intention deserves full recognition—he thinks he can use the rules of Christianity for his own vengeful purpose of inflicting everlasting torment on Claudius. The scheme is wicked, but logical, and it thus calls into question the logic and premises of the act as well as Hamlet’s intention. Can Christianity really work that way?
Shakespeare poses a similarly tough question with Ophelia. She is apparently mad when she falls into a brook; once in, she makes no effort to save herself, although the air in her clothes “bore her up” until they became saturated. The royal family attempts to give her a Christian burial, but the sextons digging her grave wonder if she isn’t really a suicide. If she were fully mad, that might absolve her (at least we would say so), but then, is Hamlet mad when he asks “to be or not to be”? He sees ghosts on occasions when other characters, and even the audience, don’t. And then there’s the question of the “special providence” (or “predestinate providence” in the first folio) that Hamlet alludes to. To what degree does Hamlet, or any other character, make his own fate? Both Stoicism and Calvinism take positions on this. For all his wrestling with his decisions, does Hamlet really believe he has a choice?
These are questions for the audience, or reader, of course. Although the typical playgoer just wanted a spectacle—as Hamlet expressly laments—plays were also seen and read, and written, by the intellectually serious, including university-educated men like Marlowe and less formally educated but no less attentive pupils like Shakespeare himself. (Shakespeare was, though, far better educated than an American undergraduate of the 21st century, or for that matter an Ivy League president nowadays.)
There was a culture war in Shakespeare’s day, too, and Christmas was a battlefield.
So was the playhouse. Audiences were drunken, raucous, a lot like Christmas revelers. Plays were profane, often salacious—certainly Shakespeare’s are. There was even a parallel to our time’s COVID ordeal: playhouses were notorious for spreading the plague.
Less than thirty years after Shakespeare’s death, a Puritan-dominated Parliament was at war with Charles I (and would eventually capture and execute him). Parliament permanently closed the theaters in 1642 and proceeded to discourage celebrations of Christmas and other feast days as well, and in 1644 Parliament observed Christmas as a fast day. The next year Parliament banned Christmas and all holy days—shops were even ordered to remain open.
The effect of the Puritan war on Christmas, however, was to give rise to a popular counterrevolution. Christmas, fondly remembered, became a symbol of the old regime—of merry old England before the Puritans and the eventual military dictatorship of Oliver Cromwell. Christmas itself was personified as Father Christmas, a cheerful old bearded man who was wholesomely jolly. (Not mischievously so, like the old Lords of Misrule.) Father Christmas represented “the good old days.”
Christmas and the theater both returned with the Restoration, although both were somewhat chastened compared to their Elizabethan and Jacobean antecedents. Inverting the social order didn’t seem like quite such harmless fun after the actual inversion brought about by the Puritans and Cromwell. (Latter-day defenders of Cromwell argue that he wasn’t the driving force behind the abolition of Christmas, but he certainly didn’t reverse Parliament’s policy.)
All this is worth remembering in the context of later Whig-Tory conflicts in the 18th century. Whigs, and their spiritual descendants today, typically cast Tories as authoritarian lovers of monarchy, but it was in fact Parliament that enacted such totalitarian measures as banning Christmas and Shakespeare. If Tories saw more danger in Parliament than in the monarchy, they had good historical grounds for that perception. Indeed, the example of France’s revolutionary National Assembly and the wisdom of America’s founding statesmen in rejecting arguments for a unicameral national legislature further attest to the peril of consolidated ideological party government and the virtues of compound government.
America suffers from several of Hamlet’s problems: it’s partly Puritanical, restlessly philosophical, aware that a return to the classical world is impossible, yet no longer simply Christian—and it’s stirred by passions at times as violent and self-reproaching as the melancholy Dane’s. Yet we are the heirs to more of Shakespeare than just “Hamlet,” and the jolly reactionary spirit of Father Christmas is part of our patrimony, too. For our time and for all time, Christmas is a light in midwinter against which no darkness prevails.
Great piece. Thanks especially for noting the references to providence and to the play's canonical objections to suicide. Both are clues -- as many have speculated -- that Shakespeare was a closet Catholic.