EASTER.
The festival of Easter would generally come before Saint George's day. When Shakespeare was a boy the Reformation had somewhat mitigated the ancient rigor and austerity of Lent, but Easter was none the less a joyous and jubilant anniversary.
"Surely," as Mr. Charles Knight remarks, "there was something exquisitely beautiful in the old custom of going forth into the fields before the sun had risen on Easter-day, to see him mounting over the hills with a tremulous motion, as if it were an animate thing bounding in sympathy with the redeemed of mankind. The young poet [Shakespeare] might have joined his simple neighbors on this cheerful morning, and yet have thought with Sir Thomas Browne, 'We shall not, I hope, disparage the Resurrection of our Redeemer if we say that the sun doth not dance on Easter-day.' But one of the most glorious images of one of his early plays [Romeo and Juliet] has given life and movement to the sun:—
" 'Night's candles are burnt out, and jocund Day
Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain's tops.'
Saw he not the sun dance—heard he not the expression of the undoubting belief that the sun danced—as he went forth into Stratford meadows in the early twilight of Easter-day?"
Sir John Suckling, in his Ballad upon a Wedding, alludes prettily to this old superstition in the description of the bride:—
"But O she dances such a way!
No sun upon an Easter day
Is half so fine a sight."
Perhaps Shakespeare had this bit of folk-lore in mind when he wrote these lines in Coriolanus (v. 4. 52):—
"The trumpets, sackbuts, psalteries and fifes,
Tabors and cymbals and the shouting Romans,
Make the sun dance."
Easter was a favorite time for games of ball and many of the athletic sports described in the preceding pages.