Religion and Revelry in Shakespeare's Festive World (review)

This book brings a valuable new perspective to the representations of traditional festivity in Shakespeare's plays. It seeks to correct emphases on "the political and social meanings" of festivity (9), the teleological narrative in which the Reformation initiated a separation of the secular and the sacred, and the new historicist premise that the early modern theater appropriated the ritual functions of Catholic worship. Jensen's goal is to restore a Catholic perspective on the devotional issues surrounding festivity in Shakespeare's plays and to explore how Shakespeare engages with controversies about festivity while aligning his work with the old religion. Acknowledging the multiple intersections of Catholic and Reformation cultures in early modern England and the diverse associations of traditional pastimes with religious controversy, Jensen meticulously assembles historiographic and critical commentary to consider representations of festivity in a wide-ranging selection of cultural texts. Although detached by reformers from their religious contexts, traditional practices still retained strong associations with religious controversies and the old religion. Recent work has demonstrated the complexities of the English Catholic community and its relationship to the Protestant establishment, providing a "new model of devotional identity" that resists strict devotional categories (6).

In chapter 1, "'The reliques and ragges of popish superstition,'" Jensen uses the 1618 Book of Sports to study the complex relations among Protestantism, Puritanism, Catholicism, and festivity. She challenges the argument that the Book of Sports served primarily to appropriate the power of traditional festivity to reinscribe monarchical power; instead, she highlights its significance in representing Catholic attitudes towards festivity. The Reformation attack on traditional celebrations is usually considered part of a larger critique of images and ceremonies, with the nationalization of festivity becoming one successful result of the attempt to detach mirth from worship. Although the most radical reformers were resolutely committed to identifying festivity with popery and eradicating it, moderate Protestants endorsed "properly revised" festivity (38). Both Catholics and Protestants had long been troubled by the "potential impiety" of the festive practices associated with the old religion (29). However, if Protestants sought to separate festivity from worship rather than from holidays, recusants were inclined to use festive traditions to "defin[e] themselves as an oppositional religious community" and to express their "nostalgia for a bygone era of hospitality" and a theology of works (25, 55). In chapter 2, Jensen analyzes different responses to calendrical reform in Spenser's Shepheardes Calender and Epithalamion, Dekker's Shoemaker's Holiday, and Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream. In The Shepheardes Calender, Spenser "reconsider[s] the place within the reformed calendar of traditional pastimes associated with the festival year" (77), embedding festivity within a Protestant, seasonal, and national calendar and purifying its religious associations by rededicating it to Queen Elizabeth. In Epithalamion, he explores calendrical reform in a personal, rather than a national, context. The poem's numerical divisions evoke the Protestant calendar as Spenser undertakes "a radical revision of the calendar that celebrates the making of a contemporary Christian marriage" by replacing St. Barnabas's day with a new holy day that celebrates his own wedding (87). In the 1590s, the issue of calendrical reform shared the early modern stage with a nostalgic backlash against the antifestivity movement. In The Shoemaker's Holiday, Dekker identifies festivity with commerce, undertaking calendrical reform in terms of capitalistic enterprise by superimposing a holiday for shoemakers on Shrove Tuesday, thereby redefining holy days as economically rather than spiritually valuable. Shakespeare's plays demonstrate a more conservative attitude. While engaging the rhetoric of the cult of Elizabeth and deploying a mélange of calendrical references, A Midsummer Night's Dream also connects festivity with the religious disputes of the Reformation through the actions of the fairies. The reformers associated fairies with Catholicism and malignant spirits, and Jensen argues that the blessing of the bridebed rehabilitates Titania's fairies, giving them a "positive sacramental role" (19). This resituates festivity between competing post-Reformation discourses of traditional mirth and...