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Good morning. Today is the twelfth day of Christmas, and I’ve been thinking of Shakespeare’s play Twelfth Night, an escapist fantasy but with some hard truths. It’s set in Illyria - which for Shakespeare could be anywhere - and it mostly takes place in the palace of the Duke Orsino who is hopelessly in love with Olivia, who falls in love with Orsino’s servant Cesario, who is actually Viola, the sister of …..I won’t go on because the plot all hinges on unrequited passion and mistaken identities. Twelfth Night was written as a Christmas entertainment near the end of the reign of the first Queen Elizabeth. It was a fraught intense time. The Church of England was established by law, Catholics were suspect, Puritans distrusted, the bishops were on the lookout for any dangerous satire that might disturb the status quo. Shakespeare’s romantic comedy has filthy jokes, (left out of the school editions), truly awful puns, and poetry that breaks your heart. There is also a cruel subplot, involving the downfall of the puritanical steward Malvolio. Commenting on the mayhem is a clown, Feste, who sings the songs and gets some of the best lines. It’s a kind of pantomime, but it’s not the rollicking feel-good extravaganza which we expect from pantomime these days. Shakespeare wrote at a time when religious faith was intense and bitterly contested, a brilliant but cruel age when many died young and survival was the best most people could hope for, let alone the personal fulfilment that we tend to think our right. As the drama unfolds Feste the clown sings of desire and hope, of the need to seize the moment, and the way our dearest dreams are mocked by circumstance. So we are led through a maze of wistfulness and grief, of lovers coming close and losing each other again, of drunkenness and lechery and the hypocrisy of the self-righteous. And though it ends happily, with lovers united, it is Feste who is left alone on the stage reminding us of life’s transience: ‘with a hey ho the wind and the rain’. I don’t think Shakespeare was particularly pious – there’s a lot of debate about that - but there was little of the casual unbelief that we take for granted today. And so perhaps it was easier in that age of faith to explore the sadness of life without losing hope, to recognise how close comedy comes to tragedy, and to mock the pretensions of those who claim to have all the answers. As we reluctantly accept our new incarceration perhaps Twelfth Night can remind us that what begins in shipwreck and disaster can still end with lessons learnt, lovers united and a song.