Shakespeare wrote a play called Twelfth Night, and it follows the basic pattern of most of his comedies. The pattern tends to run like this: In Part One, there is a normal state of affairs that is not ideal--a Duke or King has been usurped or lovers are not allowed to be married. In Part Two, everything is turned even more upside-down for a brief period of time as certain characters don a disguise, become enchanted, or get lost. In Part Three, a revelation occurs--an Epiphany--that dispels the disguise or enchantment and resolves not only the problems in Part Two but also those that have long existed in Part One. The world in which the play exists is cleansed, orderly, and joyful by the end; truth, charity, and justice have triumphed, and the actors take a bow. I have a theory that Shakespeare, who would have grown up celebrating Twelfth Night--a night of partying and topsy-turviness inherited from medieval traditions--had this pattern baked into his soul, and that part of the reason his comedies so resonated with his first audience was that they were also quite familiar with the structure of these celebrations.
The Twelfth Night--Epiphany Eve--feast was usually the high point of the Christmas season, and it featured a lot of drinking, eating, and caroling, as well as inversion of the normal order of things. Landowners did menial work (such as turning spits), and anyone who came to the feast could be appointed "Lord of Misrule," directing the night's revels and bossing everyone around for an evening.
Mikhail Bakhtin, a 20th Century Russian critic, developed a theory about how these topsy-turvy feasts worked just before Shakespeare's time, in the Middle Ages. He reasoned that things were so rigidly structured during the medieval period--in terms of hierarchy, class, and dogma--that such festivities acted as a kind of "pressure valve" to keep the common people from rebelling against their lords. They had a "carnivalesque" night of revelry a few times a year, and that kept them compliant for the next few months, as they slaved away for "the Man" or the Church, or Whomever. I know, I know--leave it to a literary critic to turn fun into functional. This is still a pretty popular way to interpret these celebrations.
I'm not convinced by Bakhtin's theory, though, and I'll tell you why. No one really hates order itself. Even in societies far more rigid than medieval England (for instance, Shakespeare's England or Bakhtin's USSR), it is not order and hierarchy we mind, so much as someone else's imperfect order and hierarchy being imposed on us. The fact is that, whether our society is a well-oiled machine or positively anarchic, it is part of a crazy, topsy-turvy world, where we often feel helpless before chaotic forces that we can't control. There certainly is beauty and order in this world, but in nature, in social structures, and in our hearts, there is a lot of disorder too. In a restrictive and hierarchical society, organization itself isn't bad--until it is used to enforce chaotic injustice.
The world, in other words, is always upside-down. It's part of the reason that the play Twelfth Night still resonates with people who have never even heard of the feast it is named after. Yet the feast and the comedies both dramatize the same thing--the fact that the world is already a pretty crazy place, and that all structures have a bit of the chaotic about them, a bit of the arbitrary. Injustice often prevails in this world; bad people are often rich and good people poor; society commends as virtuous the things that are vile and forces its inverted standards upon others; sacrifice and honest achievement are met with ingratitude and envy; and real need is often answered not with charity but glib self-satisfaction. It has always been this way, yet we should mourn our own part in this mess.
In a way, then, to enjoy an upside-down feast (whether this be Twelfth Night or the practice of Twelvetide itself), is not so much releasing pressure so that the peasants don't rise up this year, as it is telling the truth about ourselves and our society. But in a way, it is also wishing for, and delighting in, a new kind of order that may on its face feel like disorder. The Son of Man came both eating and drinking, and the Pharisees, who took themselves as seriously as Shakespeare's Malvolio, said, "Look, a glutton and a drunkard!" Yet this seeming chaos that attended Christ, and his followers who "turned the world upside-down" brought true Order to multitudes, starting with their hearts. That's not to say we give our minds and souls up to the chaos, that we stop fighting it, indulging the flesh or the ego--but it is to say that we rejoice, that we refuse our own petty refusal of joy.
Because, of course, there must be a real Order we are waiting for. If there wasn't, the false sorts of order--the chaos masquerading as structure--wouldn't feel like such a betrayal. It is when the True King shows up, and doffs his carnival disguise, that the false kings are revealed as false--but of course it wouldn't be so satisfying if we didn't already know the old one fell short of what a King was supposed to look like. We would not be distressed by counterfeits if, deep down, we didn't know about the real thing.
This is why the inversions of Twelfth Night precede Epiphany. Revelation is not merely a reversal of Carnivalesque Misrule, but rather its culmination. Christ revealed himself first to those who joined his odd little band of misfits and outcasts. It is in the mess of Twelfth Night, when we are no longer righteous in our own eyes, that God may begin to fill our vision in new ways, to draw us up to the true Feast, of which the best worldly revelry, as well as the best worldly rule, is only a shadow.
So the kings draw closer to the King, and the wise approach Wisdom Himself. They are dethroned and made into fools, but it is only thus that they can enter into their Master's joy.
The Twelfth Night--Epiphany Eve--feast was usually the high point of the Christmas season, and it featured a lot of drinking, eating, and caroling, as well as inversion of the normal order of things. Landowners did menial work (such as turning spits), and anyone who came to the feast could be appointed "Lord of Misrule," directing the night's revels and bossing everyone around for an evening.
Mikhail Bakhtin, a 20th Century Russian critic, developed a theory about how these topsy-turvy feasts worked just before Shakespeare's time, in the Middle Ages. He reasoned that things were so rigidly structured during the medieval period--in terms of hierarchy, class, and dogma--that such festivities acted as a kind of "pressure valve" to keep the common people from rebelling against their lords. They had a "carnivalesque" night of revelry a few times a year, and that kept them compliant for the next few months, as they slaved away for "the Man" or the Church, or Whomever. I know, I know--leave it to a literary critic to turn fun into functional. This is still a pretty popular way to interpret these celebrations.
I'm not convinced by Bakhtin's theory, though, and I'll tell you why. No one really hates order itself. Even in societies far more rigid than medieval England (for instance, Shakespeare's England or Bakhtin's USSR), it is not order and hierarchy we mind, so much as someone else's imperfect order and hierarchy being imposed on us. The fact is that, whether our society is a well-oiled machine or positively anarchic, it is part of a crazy, topsy-turvy world, where we often feel helpless before chaotic forces that we can't control. There certainly is beauty and order in this world, but in nature, in social structures, and in our hearts, there is a lot of disorder too. In a restrictive and hierarchical society, organization itself isn't bad--until it is used to enforce chaotic injustice.
The world, in other words, is always upside-down. It's part of the reason that the play Twelfth Night still resonates with people who have never even heard of the feast it is named after. Yet the feast and the comedies both dramatize the same thing--the fact that the world is already a pretty crazy place, and that all structures have a bit of the chaotic about them, a bit of the arbitrary. Injustice often prevails in this world; bad people are often rich and good people poor; society commends as virtuous the things that are vile and forces its inverted standards upon others; sacrifice and honest achievement are met with ingratitude and envy; and real need is often answered not with charity but glib self-satisfaction. It has always been this way, yet we should mourn our own part in this mess.
In a way, then, to enjoy an upside-down feast (whether this be Twelfth Night or the practice of Twelvetide itself), is not so much releasing pressure so that the peasants don't rise up this year, as it is telling the truth about ourselves and our society. But in a way, it is also wishing for, and delighting in, a new kind of order that may on its face feel like disorder. The Son of Man came both eating and drinking, and the Pharisees, who took themselves as seriously as Shakespeare's Malvolio, said, "Look, a glutton and a drunkard!" Yet this seeming chaos that attended Christ, and his followers who "turned the world upside-down" brought true Order to multitudes, starting with their hearts. That's not to say we give our minds and souls up to the chaos, that we stop fighting it, indulging the flesh or the ego--but it is to say that we rejoice, that we refuse our own petty refusal of joy.
Because, of course, there must be a real Order we are waiting for. If there wasn't, the false sorts of order--the chaos masquerading as structure--wouldn't feel like such a betrayal. It is when the True King shows up, and doffs his carnival disguise, that the false kings are revealed as false--but of course it wouldn't be so satisfying if we didn't already know the old one fell short of what a King was supposed to look like. We would not be distressed by counterfeits if, deep down, we didn't know about the real thing.
This is why the inversions of Twelfth Night precede Epiphany. Revelation is not merely a reversal of Carnivalesque Misrule, but rather its culmination. Christ revealed himself first to those who joined his odd little band of misfits and outcasts. It is in the mess of Twelfth Night, when we are no longer righteous in our own eyes, that God may begin to fill our vision in new ways, to draw us up to the true Feast, of which the best worldly revelry, as well as the best worldly rule, is only a shadow.
So the kings draw closer to the King, and the wise approach Wisdom Himself. They are dethroned and made into fools, but it is only thus that they can enter into their Master's joy.
