The more elaborate
pageant-tournaments of Elizabethan England …. were a form of display aimed
rather at consolidating local aristocratic support and attracting international
admiration than at placating the crowd. The
city-sponsored and widely advertised shooting matches in Switzerland and
Germany, with their associated public lotteries, were, like trade faires,
designed to bring outsiders’ money into the local economy.
They generated a festival atmosphere was a side issue and, from the point
of view of those who had to maintain law and order, a not particularly welcome
one.
Alongside individual needs for
food or sex or a copious meal, the socialized euphoria of officially sanctioned
holidays reveals the volatility which civility feared, even if some of its
representatives enjoyed its license. Religious
festivals, whether of local saint’s name day or the celebration of some major
event in the calendar – Corpus Christi, Ascension, St. John’s Eve, St.
Bartholomew’s Day – were seized on with a verve that reflected a glee with
which a community both partook in an act of devotion and stage-managed it –
with plays and floats, fireworks and music, food and drink – on its own terms.
A Lutheran pastor in Estonia glumly noted that St. John’s Eve was marked by
“flames of joy over the whole country. Around
these bonfires people danced, sang and leaped with great pleasure, and did not
spare the big bagpipes . . .many loads of beer were bought . . .what disorder,
whoring, fighting and killing and dreadful idolatory took place!”
But disorder was the point of a festival, however carefully its pageantry
was organized.
The themes of the most excited
festival of all, the last days of Carnival preceding Lent, showed, through mimes
and caperings, the joy in turning the world of order upside down for a few days:
women drew ploughs, men were dressed as women and vise versa, masters served
their servants (or revelers dressed as servants) in houses that dared not close
their doors to passer-by, masks and costumes showed the representatives of
authority, clerics, lawyers, magistrates, in ridiculous and humiliating
disguises. “The women too, take their part,” wrote a late sixteenth
century visitor to Barcelona in Carnival time; “throughout the year they are
so severely restricted that they are not allowed to talk to strangers. But at
carnival there are no such shackles and hindrance. They put on masks and run through the streets in complete
freedom . . . . So, for more than one husband, the cuckoo sings before the
spring comes.”
With a favorite costume being
that of a Wild Man, it comes as no surprise that Carnival was the occasion for
the violent settlement of quarrels under the veneer of play, for parading of
phallic ornament and the singing of obscene verses, for unbridled onslaughts on
stalls full of pies and flagons. It
was not only the commonality that broke loose from normal restraints. The aristocrat Cardinal of Aragon was named by Castiglione in
The Courtier as a spectator or participant in the Roman carnival sport of
pelting passer-by (in this case a friar) with eggs. It was well born Protestant travelers who were attracted by
the license of the Venetian Carnival. But
when the world was turned upside down (and prints extended the notion with fish
flying, a town exchanging places with the moon), it was primarily for the
delectation of those who daily experienced the restraints of cash, morality and
social inferiority, and stored up in anticipatio the prospect of temporary
release from them.
From: Sir John Hale, 1993,
The Civilization of Europe in the Renaissance,
Simon and Schuster, New York
