IT IS strange to think of William Shakespeare at a loss for a title for a play. Such allegedly was the case, however, when it came to naming Twelfth Night. The title has nothing to do with the convoluted contents of the play itself, but recalls the fact that it was written for performance at the Twelfth Night revelries, probably those of January, 1601.
Twelfth Night, in case you missed it, was last night. It is the eve of Old Christmas Day, whose significance stems from the old Julian Calendar used in these parts until 1752, and on which Christmas Day fell on the day we now designate January 6th.
Twelfth Night in former times was an occasion for great merry making. Whoever found the bean in the Twelfth Night cake became the Bean King, and set the tone of the festivities. At the end of the party all decorations were taken down, and the holly and ivy carefully stowed away to be used to start the fire on which the pancakes would be made on Shrove Tuesday.
Twelfth Night was also a time when the weather pattern for the coming year was clear. It was believed that the Twelve Days of Christmas were "days of fate", each symbolically governing the character of the month that occupies the corresponding place for the succeeding year.
"What the weather shall be on the sixth and 20th day of December," wrote Gervase Markham - who, coincidentally, was a contemporary of Shakespeare and one of that select band of talented authors who are sometimes accused of having written many of the plays - "the like shall it be in the month of January: what it shall be on the seventh and 20th, the like shall be the following February, and so on until the Twelfth Day, each day's weather foreshowing a month of the year." If this be so, 1997 promises to be a cold and bitter year.
It was also possible to make the assessment scientifically. All one had to do was place 12 onions, each identified with a specific month, upon the window sill on Christmas Day. On each onion was a pinch of salt if the salt on a particular onion had melted by the Twelfth Night, the corresponding month was certain to be wet; if the sale was unaffected, that month could confidently be predicted to be dry.
But, of course, we do not believe in all this nonsense nowadays. As the Bard himself writes in Twelfth Night.
When that I was and a little tiny boy,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
A foolish thing was but a toy, For the rain it raineth every day.