May Day Festivals

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May Day. This was a big holiday for the Elizabethans. It was one of the few old pagan festivals that hadn’t been taken over as a Christian festival. It was considered a time of great fun when young people went into the woods for an all night party, returning to their village the next morning with a huge tree trunk, which would become the maypole. The maypole was decorated and became the focus for dancing, drinking, feasting and games. lots of references in Shakespeare’s plays At the courts of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I, the “ancient” tradition of Morris dance was performed. Shakespeare’s play Henry V would have us believe that Whitsun Morris Dances were sufficiently common that the French royalty knew of them. Morris, performed by a team of men and a team of women, was the central theme of one scene in a play (The Two Noble Kinsmen by Fletcher) which was viewed by Elizabeth I at her house on Drury Lane. The dance varies from village to village, each town doing their own unique rendition of the dance with little in common between them save for a similarity in costumes and props. In some villages, it's an exhibition only with only a handful of dancers. In other villages, it's participatory with literally hundreds of dancers joining in. Traditional costumes include men dressed in white with colorful ribbons on their shoulders and bells on their legs and arms to emphasize the movement of their limbs with the ringing. They would dance with swords and pantomine a battle against men whose faces were blackened with burnt cork, lending some credence to the theory that the dance originally commemorated Charlemagne's battles against the Spanish Moors. Some dancers wore wire frameworks around their waist, decorated to suggest horses. The children's toy hobby-horse of a wooden horse head on the end of stick were patterned after this traditional morris costume. In
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