Twelfth Night, or What You Will

[gasterea]

Just in time for the Twelfth Night a history of a very special Twelfth Night Cake. www.atlasobscura.com/articles/baddeley-cake . More on the Twelfth Night celebrations blog.library.si.edu/blog/2013/01/04/twelfth-night-traditions-a-cake-a-bean-and-a-king with a mention of the wonderful Bridget Ann Henisch 'Twelfth Night Cakes and Characters, an English Christmas Tradition' (she had a great article about it in one of the early PPC issues as well). And, of course, Thackeray and his ebullient 'The Ring and the Rose' conceived in Italy as part and parcel of this tradition: 'It happened that the undersigned spent the last Christmas season in a foreign city where there were many English children.In that city, if you wanted to give a child’s party, you could not even get a magic-lantern or buy Twelfth-Night characters-those funny painted pictures of the King, the Queen, the Lover, the Lady, the Dandy, the Captain, and so on-with which our young ones are wont to recreate themselves at this festive time. My friend Miss Bunch, who was governess of a large family that lived in the Piano Nobile of the house inhabited by myself and my young charges (it was the Palazzo Poniatowski at Rome, and Messrs. Spillmann, two of the best pastrycooks in Christendom, have their shop on the ground floor): Miss Bunch, I say, begged me to draw a set of Twelfth-Night characters for the amusement of our young people.'...http://www.gutenberg.org/files/897/897-h/897-h.htm

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www.jstor.org/stable/3780806 Hoeven, Anke A. van Wagenberg-ter (1993). "The Celebration of Twelfth Night in Netherlandish Art". Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art. 22 (1/2): 67