So when is Twelfth Night? The Epiphany – the Christian feast to mark the visit of the three kings (or Magi) to the baby Jesus – is 6 January. If you count from Christmas Day, the 12th night is 5 January – the eve of the Epiphany. But some say you should count the 12 days after Christmas, which takes you to the 6th. People treat either the 5th or 6th as the day to celebrate, and there are equal claims that each is Twelfth Night, so we’ll throw them all in together.
It’s a significant day in many countries, particularly Catholic ones, where Twelfth Night parties and celebrations are commonplace and usually involve the selection of a king, and sometimes a queen and other characters. In France, for example, the galette des rois (“cake of kings”) has a token baked into it; patisseries sell it along with a gold paper crown for the recipient of the token, who becomes the party’s ruler. You may not find these traditions in Britain nowadays – we’ve all gone back to the office by then – but there are a number of Twelfth Night events in literature.
Our first example clears up another question. Samuel Pepys celebrated the feast – always on 6 January, which he says marks the end of Christmas – and in 1663 goes to see Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. The drama is “acted well, though it be but a silly play, and not related at all to the name or day” – which it isn’t, apart from a general air of misrule. Pepys usually has or attends a party, with dancing and merriment, and always a “brave” or “excellent” cake. There are other tokens baked into it: one year he gets the clove, which indicates he is a knave, but he smuggles it into someone else’s slice. In 1669 he mentions a new fashion, which is to draw paper lots for king and queen of the party, rather than finding a bean, so as not to spoil the cake (and perhaps to avoid the cheating just mentioned).
In Charles Dickens’s Christmas Carol, there is a reference to “immense Twelfth-cakes”, and Scrooge and the Ghost of Christmas Present visit a “children’s Twelfth Night party”. Dickens’s letters show that in his household there was a party every year: the date is his son Charley’s birthday, but it’s clear he thinks a Twelfth Night party is quite normal.
In James Joyce’s short story The Dead, from his collection Dubliners (1914), Gabriel Conroy and his wife Gretta go every year to an important party held by the Misses Morkan. There is dinner, dancing and singing, but alongside the festivities we see darkness and contemplation: snow falls over Ireland, and Gabriel looks through it as he thinks about his own shortcomings and about the wife whom he thought he knew. The idea of a character having a metaphorical epiphany, a moment of revelation or realisation, comes directly from Joyce, and each story in Dubliners features one. So although the event is not specified as being on Twelfth Night, it is in the early days of January and is always assumed to be an Epiphany party – an idea is made overt in John Huston’s 1987 film of The Dead.
In Terry Pratchett’s Discworld there are Twelfth Night customs, involving a man who
“finds a special bean in his tucker, oho, everyone says ‘you’re king mate’ and he thinks ‘this is a bit of all right’ only next thing he’s legging it over the snow with a dozen other buggers chasing him with holy sickles so’s the earth’ll come to life again and all this snow will go away.”
This description (from the Folklore of Discworld, which Pratchett wrote in 2008 with Jacqueline Simpson) is gently satirising the imaginative Victorian social anthropologist James Frazer, who describes similar customs in his not-wholly-reliable study of mythology and religion, The Golden Bough.
In Antonia Forest’s strangely compelling YA novels about the Marlow family, the neighbours, the Merricks, hold an elaborate and exciting Twelfth Night party each year, and in two of the books – Peter’s Room (1961) and Runaway Home (1982) – it is a major event. It sounds like a great traditional party, with supper and ices and dancing, and all the local gentry in attendance. Clothes management is very important for the teenage sisters, and goes with changes and swings in their separate relationships with the young Patrick Merrick. Nicola Marlow’s cream silk dress – a last-minute choice, presenting her with “a wholly unfamiliar version of herself” – is, luckily, the perfect outfit for the second party. “Just for a second I thought [you were] Ginty,” Patrick says, to a sharp intake of breath from close readers of the books: is he going to choose the right sister after all, having messed up at the previous party? This is a life-changing moment.
Halfway through Angela Carter’s 1987 Wise Children, the Chance sisters attend a Twelfth Night costume ball at a country house called Lynde Court, involving royalty and riffraff from the worlds of acting and film – as Dora says: “We’d been to some smart parties since we got the star on our door but never one as smart as this.”
There is mischief and mayhem at the party: varied sex and nudity, and a major fire. The reference to the King of Misrule is clear: two brothers fight over a gold crown – only a battered theatrical prop of painted cardboard, “a flimsy bit of make-believe, a nothing”, but a symbol of their enmity.
Margaret Drabble’s The Radiant Way (1987, same year as the Carter) features a Twelfth Night party to celebrate the beginning of 1984 – the book began with a New Year’s party in 1979. This time there is some confusion among people who think the event will be on the 12th January, not the 6th. The party, in Putney, is full of politicians, civil servants, TV presenters, lawyers and academics – nobody productive, as one guest points out. There are three women at the heart of the book: one of them, Alix, laughs and shines, with paste diamonds in her hair: she has never worn them before but has thought “this Twelfth Night, why not?” – it is some kind of tiara, she is Queen of the event. There are changes in the air …
So authors have used Twelfth Night celebrations as the setting for mischief, malice, epiphanies, the taking of power, and life-altering events. There must be more examples out there – let us know in the comments.
