Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 27, 1916.djvu/434

 4o6 The Folklore of Shakespeare.

Moveable Feasts.

Shrove Tuesday, Ash Wednesday, Lent, Good Friday, Easter, Ascension Day and Whitsuntide all find a place in Shakespeare's works.

The Clown in AWs Well (ii. 2. 25) gives among his associated things "a pancake for Shrove Tuesday"; and Silence sings of "Merry Shrove-tide " (2 Henry IV. v. 3. 38).

Ash Wednesday is casually mentioned in the MereluDit of Venice (ii. 5. 26). A " Lenten entertainment " is men- tioned in Hamlet (ii. 2), and a Lenten pie in Romeo and Juliet (ii. 4). Jack-a-Lent was a stuffed puppet, and Mrs. Page addresses Robin, Falstafif's page, as "You little Jack- a-Lent " {Merry Wives, iii. 3. 27). Poins says to Falstaff, "Jack, how agrees the devil and thee about thy soul, that thou soldest him on Good Friday last for cup of Madeira and a cold capon's leg? " (i Henry IV. i. i. 128).

The wearing of new clothes on Easter Sunday, a custom not even now extinct, is alluded to in Romeo and Jidiet (iii. I. 30). Mercutio asks Benvolio if he fell out "with a tailor for wearing his new doublet before Easter."

Easter Monday was known as Black Monday in remembrance of the extreme cold on the 14th April, 1360, when large numbers of Edward III.'s army died before Paris owing to the severe frost, a month before the Peace of Bretigny. Launcelot says, " It was not for nothing that my nose fell a-bleeding on Black Monday last " {Merchant of Ve?iice, ii. 5. 25). There was a superstitious belief that bleeding at the nose foreboded some accident or coming event.

Ascension Day (Holy Thursday), which falls forty days after Easter Sunday, was a day of fear for King John, who asks :

" Is this Ascension Day? Did not the prophet Say that before Ascension Day at noon My crown I would give off?" v. i. 25.